And the sounds from outside, even though they come in through your physical ears, they're organized in your nose consciousness. Organization is energy. The way a group of perceptions is organized is the way it uses or produces energy. So your nose is actually a kind of way your energy is organized and a source of energy. Being able to reside or abide in your nose consciousness more or less outside of representational thinking or parallel to representational thinking, is one of the ways we begin to be nourished by our world.

[01:30]

Now, just because you're emphasizing nose-field consciousness doesn't mean that you can't also have representational thinking. But it should be also not instead of. So to open up these vijnanas means you open up all these fields of perception and they exist simultaneously in their own field. And like a symphony or piece of music, you can emphasize notes from one more than another, but they're all part of the piece of music. Now as you become more sensitive, you can begin to smell not just your armpits, but the field of your body.

[02:55]

And if you can distinguish that you can begin to smell the field of other people. Now it's not exactly that you can smell a difference between the person to your left or to your right. Although that might be the case. But more that you can sense a qualitative difference to what's happening on the left side of your body and the right side of your body. And you can feel that in your body. If you really move to that feeling in your body, you're moving into the proprioceptive or body channel. Or you can combine the nose and the proprioceptive body channel.

[04:35]

Or if you go back to just the nose field consciousness, you can actually begin to smell your mood or the mood of another person. And people smell differently if they're angry. Or calm or sexual. And animals know this and respond directly, but we almost have lost the ability to notice it. Or I think it's more accurate to say we've made it, we notice it, but the way we form our social and personal identity, we've made it unconscious information.

[05:40]

Or it may be more non-conscious than unconscious. So we could have a meditation just on the nose consciousness. And you can feel the body of the day enter through your nose consciousness. Now allow the feeling of this nose consciousness to come down into the middle of your chest.

[07:25]

And then allow it to spread throughout your body. And then let's take a break. Now what I'd like you to do is to take a break of, say, 15 minutes. And then I'd like you to gather into small groups. So there's about 55 people here, I think. So maybe eight groups of eight or so. And just take the group that's near you. And the group that's near you and so forth.

[08:36]

And I don't want you to do anything special. But it's important that this seminar not be just you and me. And I'd like you to share with each other some experiences of this thing we've been talking about. Or any experience that brought you to practice or to see the self as constructed. Or one of the things we don't have much permission to talk about in our culture, any religious feelings or feelings of bigger dimension to life. So take a break, and whenever you're finished with your break, there doesn't have to be everyone at the same time gathering. You start gathering in these small groups. And I will... At some point, ring the bell three times.

[09:58]

And then we can gather together again. And when I ring the bell three times, there might be 10 or 15 minutes between hits. It depends how you're making me feel. And this sense of a friend in practice. One of the outer chakras is considered to be the friend and the community of practice. So if we're going to practice together in Germany, we need to begin to have a sense of each other practicing, not just you and me. Okay, thank you. I find this teaching so precious. That I can't really resist teaching it to you.

[11:25]

Because it's so... If you really get a sense of it, it's so grounding. And a really completely useful tool. And when you begin to... be able to open up how your consciousness is created. You're actually also re-articulating your consciousness. It's a little bit like changing the wiring on a electrical diagram. So you end up with a different kind of computer. Or a different kind of energy. We could say that the famous phrase, of form is emptiness.

[12:54]

Actually, it could be, let's just make an equation. Form is empty. And emptiness is form. We could say that form is energy is emptiness and emptiness is energy it's a kind of transitional place and so when you change the way you are When you shift the level of your consciousness a little bit, this is how we started out today. That actually you're a whole group of self-organizing systems. And each of those self-organizing systems produces and uses energy.

[14:15]

So when you shift the level of your consciousness a little, you're also shifting the way your energy works. And when you begin to be able to be aware of that, you're acting within what's called the subtle body, not the gross body. Now, it's this sense of being able to unpack something, open something up, and then put it back together allows a lot of things to happen. Now tomorrow, one of the things I'd like to talk about is the unconscious. non-conscious, and the repository consciousness.

[15:29]

Down at the bottom. You know, I can only present this to you, but it only but it only makes sense if you use it. That means that first you have to understand these terms. And as I've often said, originally they're in Sanskrit, and then they were in Chinese, Japanese, and now English and German. So these are actually kind of clouds. in which we stuck a word in the middle of the plied as a kind of target.

[16:32]

But you have to begin to identify these in yourself and come out with the meaning from inside you. But refining the target or talking about the target word is helpful. And finding out how others of us understand the target word is very helpful. In fact, much of this teaching has arisen out of Ulrike asking me questions, either not understanding or misunderstanding a target word. So that makes me realize I'm not clear. So it really actually touches me when you're all talking and you're looking up.

[17:35]

I love it. Because, you know, I know how precious this has been to me and I'd love it to be as precious to you. And then when it's your own, you can do anything you want with it. I'm only here saying, on the mark, get set, sit still. We say, when you start a race, you say, on the mark, get set, go. But I said, on the mark, get set, go. I feel very grateful to have such a good team mate. Team partner? Okay. And I feel you're all my team partners.

[18:42]

So I know it's just six o'clock or so. Oops, after six. But could we sit for just a few minutes before we end? Yes. I have a question from yesterday. Now, when you mentioned yourself as a construct, did you mean yourself as a construct in the sense of like a construct like, let's say, freedom, the word freedom, or the word romantic love, or a construct like rainbow for instance? Like rainbow, I mean, the rainbow means sun and moisture and an observer. That's almost too poetic for me. It's a construct like freedom. Do you want to say that in German?

[19:47]

Yes, I would like to say that we were once called something constructed. For example, the word or concept of freedom, or the concept of love, or the concept of rainbows. Maybe you better write that out as a poem. Maybe you better write that out as a poem. Well, I don't see really... From the point of view of Buddhism, seeing these things as constructs, much difference between them.

[20:56]

From the point of view of Buddhism, seeing these things as constructs, I don't see much difference between them. From the point of view of Buddhism, seeing these things as constructs, I don't see much difference between them. For example, the classic example is someone's walking down a road and they see a snake. And they jump back and approach cautiously the snake. And they get up close to it and they see it's just a piece of rope. And then they look, then they think, oh, the rope was real and the snake wasn't. But then when you look at the rope, it's actually all these fibers in it. The rope itself is a construct.

[21:59]

So not only is the snake a construct of your sensory senses, the rope is a construct of your senses, and the rope itself is a construct. And in a way, all that means is that all the elements are other-dependent. Okay. Well, it looks to me that it's not like a rainbow. Yeah, okay. It's a rainbow snake. But I think romantic love also requires an observer.

[23:07]

Something else? According to this book, the self and the story, and the five standards, ultimately from the form and from the unlogistic being, also go into the case of the story. The must be correction from form to the unlogistic being. The emptiness. I mean, they only tried consciousness to the story, also.

[24:10]

Only from the three parts. Yeah, okay. I'm going to try to work that out a little later. Yes? We had difficulties with the terms loaded consciousness and mind. And mind. Okay, yeah, you mean when you were speaking with your group. Loaded consciousness It's just a term I made up. Another way of looking at it is we have form and feeling. And we have perceptions associated.

[25:49]

And when you concentrate on these two, they lead to awareness. And when you concentrate on these two, they lead to consciousness. So, in a way, you could say that consciousness is down here, and awareness is up here. So when you practice this way, and you add feelings to it and you add perceptions to it and you add associations to your consciousness so it's loaded like a suitcase or a truck when you take them away you end up with awareness or better you end up with emptiness here

[27:01]

However, here I'm to some extent equating emptiness and awareness. Because the Madhyamaka school emphasizes emptiness. The Yogacara school emphasizes awareness as the experience of emptiness. And in Dzogchen teachings, this is Rigpa. So when you more... abide, reside in these skandhas, you tend to produce awareness. When you reside in these, you tend to produce consciousness. Okay, so all I mean by loaded is consciousness is defined in Buddhism as being imposed of feelings, perceptions, and associations.

[28:24]

This is often going on when you get into this stuff. And then The sense of reified consciousness is different than loaded. Because reified, what I mean by reified consciousness, is not just loaded, it's also stuck inside the truck. Can't get out of the suitcase. So it's reified through the story. So I would also put up here maybe script somewhere. Script leads to ego.

[29:56]

Now, these are just my uses of the word ego and self and so forth. But in that sense, ego is smaller than self. And part of the basic teaching and realization of Buddhism through meditation is that your existence is bigger than yourself. And so I would say my own impression is, and I read the other day in the Yonge Assembly, it says something equivalent. Look it up. My own impression is that post-industrial or industrialized society produces a more highly defined self. I would say that contemporary society produces a more defined self but has to function in a very effective way.

[31:22]

As a result, more unconsciousness Because less fits into the self. The self is so defined that less fits into the self and you have a lot of unconscious material produced. And if you're particularly defining yourself in these If our culture and education is aimed at these scandals, you're going to produce more unconscious. And I think this partly explains, or you can understand, it's probably been looking at Plato's fear of trance and poetry, so to speak. Plato did the culture before.

[32:35]

Plato was more an oral culture learned through the body. And it couldn't be changed perceptually or morally in an easy way. So he'd be opposed to things like meditation, trance, and so forth. Because they emphasize the way the body knows things, the intelligence of the body. He wanted the intelligence of the mind. And when you have that developed more and more strongly in Western society, And the temporal sequential definition of our identity emphasized.

[33:44]

I think you produce more of a ego unconscious identity where the unconscious works in tandem with the ego. So I would say the story is bigger than the script. And the story includes the whole, you know, the whole story of your culture, not just your personal story. Archetypes and so forth. And the script is your personal script. Now, why should, and I want to, well, I said earlier yesterday I wanted to talk about the unconscious and the non-conscious and so forth.

[34:52]

Now, why should that be important to any of you? Of course, for those of you who are psychotherapists, it may be of some interest to you to see how Buddhism maps the territory and how your own tradition maps the territory. But for all of you, even if you're not psychotherapists, Just as I think it's rather useful to know that you have lungs and stomach and so forth. You live in your consciousness and unconsciousness just as much as you live in your lungs and stomach. So it's good to have a general picture, I think, of what's happening.

[36:03]

But I wouldn't accept the picture. I'd use the picture. I came here when I first was taught in college, I believe, as a freshman. The id, ego and superego. That was the level at which Freud was taught when I was in college. And my mother had told me about the Oedipus complex when I was about six or seven, I guess warning me. I took the warning. But I can remember thinking, this isn't the way I function, in ego and superego. I tried to map myself onto the territory knowing Freud was a very smart guy.

[37:20]

And it certainly affected my understanding of myself, but I began to feel the map was smaller than how I was existing. So I'm suggesting you try on these maps. The last thing the historical Buddha said before he died supposedly is put no head over your own. So don't put Freud's head or Buddha's head. You have to find these things out yourself from inside you.

[38:28]

But I can remember when Tsukiyoshi in the early 60s started drawing some of these things on blackboards. Very much like this. And I wrote them down. I still have written down notebooks, printed, you know. Mostly I didn't really know what he was talking about. I started practicing it so that I could feel, I got a feel of the territory. And it's amazing, years later I could find that sensing the energy and direction of the patterns affected how I began to put my understanding of Zen and Buddhism together. So in this seminar I'm trying to lay out this stuff, not just as information, but how it works as a kind of electrical diagram.

[39:32]

And as I've said often, it's not really intellectual anymore than saying this is a wire. This is a windshield wiper. This is your eye consciousness. This is your eye consciousness. This is your eye consciousness. And then the question is how you put those things together to make a car, to make yourself, whatever. Yeah. OK. You had something back there?

[40:43]

Yeah. What is bigger than the self, the story or the history? Well, history... Well, in English, at least, history is just dead and stories alive. Actually, my main academic training is in history.

[41:44]

So the historian's job is to try to make the history that he or she uncovers part of the story. By the way, seeing your face reminds me that there's a sitting group here in Heidelberg that meets every Tuesday evening here. So I'll come this Tuesday, if I can. What do you usually sit, two periods? Maybe we could sit one period for 40 minutes or something and then I could ask, just joining you, talk about something.

[42:49]

And then you said there was some people sitting in Mannheim too? On Monday night? From 6.40? Two periods. And that's what, three or four people? Oh, four or five. Well, if I can, I'll come to that too, to see what's happening in Mannheim. Viertel nach sechs. I don't know how to find you in Mannheim, but you can help me. Anyway, I'd love to join you if you're sitting. It's fun for me. I could sit in Mannheim on Monday and Heidelberg on Tuesday and Frankfurt on Wednesday.

[43:53]

Kind of like an old itinerant preacher on a donkey going from place to place. Okay. Please, some other... I'd like it if you'd tell me something. I hope we have to pass the stick to get everyone to talk. Yes. Yes. Sealing and armoring, yeah. Everyone likes that idea. A lot of people like it. Well, you get some sealing wax. It's a major thing to try to talk about because, in a way, it covers the whole territory of practice.

[45:18]

But, I mean, the key to it is, first of all, as I always say when I'm at this, is to notice when you're leaking. If you can't notice when you're leaking, you can't do anything about it. You can't distinguish between sealing and armoring. Now, the first time I noticed that real distinctly was after my first sashins.

[46:35]

The word sashin literally means to gather the mind. But it in fact means gathering the mind energy. Or I should say, in practice, gathering the mind energy. So, because in the sâshin, in order to hear the teaching, or in order to have heightened awareness, requires more energy. And that's really what we're doing here in this room, too. We're not sitting that much. But we're sitting and we're also here together in this room.

[47:52]

And being together in this room increases the energy a lot. And so this is a sort of strange example. Once I bent a spoon. You know, I mean, concentrating on it and just pushing, and it bent, and then bent sideways. And one thing that seems, I have this film, by the way, if you want to see it. But, because before I did it, I thought, this is nonsense, you know. But what I discovered is you can't believe it's impossible in order to do it. But you need the presence of another person who is sort of believing too. Whatever the energy is that makes it happen is increased if you have several people together, all concentrating up.

[49:21]

Okay, so you're building up in a sashin a certain kind of energy. And in this seminar, in a... concentrated away, we're building up a kind of energy. Okay, and this, so after Sashin I found that this energy I'd built up was depleted almost immediately as I started talking to people. Now, anybody who tries to write something or do an architectural drawing or anything finds they can't talk about it often because they talk about it, the energy needed to do it is depleted. And that's no big deal.

[50:27]

I'm just using a commonplace example. But when practiced, we study commonplace examples. Like just before you go to sleep, that feeling. So I noticed that after Sashin, whatever the Sashin had been for me, if I tried to describe it to somebody or talk about it, I lost the energy. So I began to try to find out how could I talk about it. I didn't decide not to talk about it. That was my first reaction, to decide not to talk about it. And so I had to decide, but so my second decision was to decide how to talk about whatever without losing the energy.

[51:40]

And that effort taught me how not to leak. And you could say right speech in Buddhist terms, and that right means complete. Complete speech means speech in which you don't leap. And conduct in which you don't leave. But you can't get, you know, this can't just be an idea. You have to have some actual feel of it first. So you have to notice in your own life when you have the sensation of leaking and not leaking.

[52:57]

It's very important to get to know that feeling. It's like a painter knows when a painting is done. And I think a painter, an artist has to observe that. Well, you keep painting and you can add more things and paint. At some point you feel it's finished even though you could do more. So when I'm teaching right now, that sense of leaking and not leaking that I began to study and learn about after Sashin, Guides me in what I'm teaching you right now.

[53:58]

Because there's a lot of things that are traditional to teach and a lot of things that are not traditional to teach. And the things that are not so traditional to teach or to teach in some new way, if I feel like I'm leaking, I don't do it. If I feel like I'm being nourished by what I'm doing, I do it. So I'm always feeling a line in what I'm doing where I feel like I'm not leaking in what I'm doing or when I'm being depleted by what I'm doing. I almost always, 99% of the time, stay on the non-depleted side of the line.

[54:59]

And if I go over the line, which occasionally I do, Then I have to really study what I did. Okay. So first of all, you have to have some territory like this where you distinguish between leaking and non-leak. And then there are specific ways in which you Take your mind out of representational thinking, into your body, and then with heat and breath seal yourself. For example, some of this gets more esoteric. For instance, if I create a channel with my breath, so I feel my breath going down, up my back, through the crown chakra and back down, I'm almost impregnable.

[56:21]

Not pregnant? I'm pregnant. I am impregnated. I'd like to be pregnant or something. How does it go together with the rhythm of the breath? How does it go together with the rhythm of the breath? Don't be so curious. You'll find out. The main problem, though, for us, which is part of this practice, which I have been tending in the direction of talking about, but haven't yet,

[57:42]

It's the importance of creating interior space. Again, I have to create some basic definitions here. We tend to think of interior space as that private part of ourselves where we can think something and no one knows what we're thinking. This is a very fragile, vulnerable, and artificial space. First of all, we only think that people don't know what we're thinking. And we get away with most people not knowing what we're thinking because most people don't pay attention to the fact that they know it.

[58:52]

Certainly the larger pattern, the larger The feeling we get from a person includes everything that's going on with a person. And what another person is thinking is not harmful to us particularly any more than all the television stations in this room are harmful to us. I didn't say radio. I didn't say television. I'm sorry. That's all right. I don't know, in America... In here, there's what, about four or five or six channels in the room? In America, there's 40 or 60 or... There are two.

[59:53]

Yeah? So the room's full of stuff. I think radio waves are technical tone. Oh, okay. Not only coming from the radio. My scientist translation. Okay. But we tend to create an interior space which is a private space. We have to protect from influences. You go, I mean, if you're an extreme example, like, or if you're going to the hospital or you go to a mental hospital, it can be quite disturbing. But if you develop, and what practice does is develop interior space, you can go crazy with someone and not lose your own sanity. Interior, private space is by definition armored.

[61:12]

Interior space is not, doesn't have to be armored. Because what I mean by interior space is the outside is defined from the interior. An interior space is rooted in me. It's not rooted outside somewhere. So private space is defined in contrast to exterior space. Through practice, exterior space is defined from interior space. Through practice, exterior space is defined from interior space.

[62:13]

And through practice, the outer space is defined by the inner space. And through practice, this is a... I mean, isn't it boring to you, this whole set? No, no, no. I mean, it's absolutely... It's really... What can I say? It's central to practice and a different kind of person. If you put... It's central to practice and a different kind of person. You practice the steel consciousness. This is a way of beginning to realize, one way of developing interior space. Because this interior space is not attached to, this interior space of the sense field is not attached to the story.

[63:16]

So, as we were doing yesterday, we were concentrating on the nose field. And the nose field, as you noticed, arises from outside and inside. Now, if I was a... knew more about acupuncture and Chinese medicine, I could probably say that when you concentrate on the nose feel, it activates certain organs in the body and so forth. But I've never studied that and I don't know enough about it.

[64:17]

But when you say nose consciousness, you don't just mean smell. You mean when you concentrate on this field, everything that happens, that's part of concentrating on that field. And there's always an inside-outside thing going on where it's actually one field. That's why we don't... emphasize the subject or object of perception, but the field. So when you develop and recognize, I think it's helpful to recognize that you're developing interior space. And whether it's a snake or a rope or someone trying to climb in the window or closing an automobile door, It all arises from inside you.

[65:27]

So it's not susceptible to outside stuff. It arises from outside but through inside you. So when I look at you, you all look like you're inside me. I know you're separate. Each one of you is a whole cosmos. But at the same time, you are inside my eye perception, and I couldn't see you. You are inside my proprioceptive field, or I couldn't feel your presence. And so forth. So you, from my experience, you arise from inside me. So what you do doesn't disturb me because it occurs inside me.

[66:47]

It's not coming from outside. I disturb myself. I disturb myself. And of course I'm arising in your field. And if I sense that, if I begin to know how you arise in my field and I can feel that, then I can begin to feel myself arising in your field. And I have to be sensitive to that in order to teach. And when I'm sensitive to it, I can feel whether what I'm saying is going into you or not going into you. Or you're very armored and there's all kinds of maze-like configurations.

[67:59]

But all of us here together are creating intentionally or unintentionally a kind of field underneath the forms. But don't think that, oh, that's enough, that we don't have to say anything. Because that field needs to be reinforced and constantly needs energy. And it gets energy from the interplay between form and emptiness. Or form and consciousness. Awareness and consciousness. And so when we get together in the smaller groups and speak together, you're actually deepening, maturing that silence.

[69:13]

Ah, okay. I kind of don't like it when people ask me about sealing. Because... I mean, in some ways I'm grateful that you see the problem. But it's hard to answer the question. And I have to start saying things sometimes which almost bring me to the point of leaking. Like I stopped talking about the circulation thing because I could feel that I would start to leak if I talked about it in more definition. Okay, so we should probably take a break pretty soon. But if somebody wants to say one or two more things, that's all right. Not promise alone, yes.

[70:31]

That's enough to absorb or seal or armory. Yes. Fragile. Fragile and at the same time we say we don't have to protect it all. Oh, the interior private space is fragile. Interior space is not fragile.

[71:35]

Now, this is just a distinction I'm making between private and interior, but I'm struggling the way the Chinese guys did in the early centuries of this era, trying to find words in Chinese from Daoism things to fit what was happening in Buddhism. So I'm making up a special language for those of you who study with me regularly, making distinction in awareness and consciousness, interior and private. And I have to keep redefining them because there's always new people. Now, let me say something again. I'm sorry to keep bugging you about participating and asking questions. And I know that different European countries and America, too, has a different way of relating to questioning, depending on what happened in school and style and so forth.

[72:56]

But the tradition of dialogue and questioning fundamental to Buddhist practice, particularly Zen. And in Tibetan Buddhism it is too, and that you're forced to get up into this dialogue combat type thing. And in Japan, for instance, if this was in the monastery, Everyone would be expected to have a question always, just like that. You're thought not to be paying attention if you don't always have something rising in yourself about it.

[74:02]

And if somebody even hesitates, all the other monks grab the person, put them in the front and center of the Roshi, and maybe there's 200 monks, and they all stand, and you have to say something. And you have to say it in a certain voice with a certain energy. You don't have to speak just like that. You have to say it with a certain voice and energy. And you ask your question. And the teacher with energy says something. And then you say, Thank you very much. Maybe we should have to learn that in Germany. But every sutra, every sutra of the Buddha never starts teaching until someone asks a question. The sutra starts, the Buddha went begging and then he sat down and he had a little lunch.

[75:22]

And he cleaned his bowls. And then someone came up and bared their shoulder. and said, Buddha, what do you think about such and such? And then the whole sutra proceeds from the answer. So in any case, the tradition is that you, ideally you ask a question that's intimately for you and also for everyone else. Then you ask a question that has a physical force to it, not just something that's on the top of your head. You feel physically something comes up and you... And usually, ideally, you're asking, as you heard me say before, second or third generation questions.

[76:38]

And the question comes up and you're holding it in your body. And you start answering it inside you. Then it turns into another question. That's the second generation. And the koans are usually fifth and tenth generation questions being asked to So I don't require any of you to say, thank you or anything. But I'd like to have each of you, not the same people, Say something. I have to beg you all the time. Sometimes I get a little annoyed and I think, I'm just going to leave. And then I think, you're all such nice guys, I can't do that. So let's take a 20-minute break. You had a question?

[78:00]

If you leak, does that happen if you talk about something that's too private? It happens in the way you talk about something that's too private. It's not that we understood in a way that you give away too much. What is there to give away? Information. Why not share all the information? So leaking is not involved with this.

[79:23]

Leaking is not so much about the subject, but about the way it's spoken about. And there's some subjects within our culture that are so defined that you almost can't speak about them without leaving. Or feeling too vulnerable. But in general, it's not a matter of the information. I mean, it's not a matter that I shouldn't teach certain things, but I have to sense how to teach them. But for instance, you don't talk about sexuality to... in much detail to children who are five or six years old.

[80:29]

Because it's not something they can experience or have a feel for. But what they can have a feel for, I think you talked to them about. And the same is true with Buddhism. I don't talk about things that separate us, and I talk about things that join us. And there are a lot of things that I don't talk about, not because you don't share them with me, I don't talk about them because you can't learn them through talk. And there's some things, like the example I used recently in a lecture in Vienna. Zen has decided that the chakras are learned through the chakras, not through an exterior system.

[81:43]

And while some schools of teaching and even some Buddhism teach them as a system that then you learn, But anyway, in Zen, certainly chakras are part of practice, but you teach them through the chakras rather than through some kind of mental description. So, anyway. Now, most of you believe or have a mental curiosity is you believe that everything can be learned mentally.

[82:53]

Or you believe you want to learn it mentally before you take a chance in learning it some other way. So in some practitioners, a kind of greediness comes out to find out about things way ahead of their ability to experience them. And such a practitioner almost always will stop after a while. Because they can't go, they're too impatient to go at the pace at which practice really happens. So the ideal practitioner often feels they don't need to know anything more because they already know more than they can do. And then the teacher has to say, yeah, but it'd be good if you knew a little of this stuff. Something else?

[84:15]

Yeah. I saw yesterday the exercise for the nasal trachea very helpful. It really helped me a lot. And I can also imagine a little bit how it could be with the ear or tongue or body. But I have no idea how I could practice my nasal trachea. That's the question. I found the exercise very helpful yesterday, but the nose feels consciousness, and I can kind of somehow figure out how to practice the other consciousness, but not the mind feels consciousness. Okay. And we might, we could do all of them, go up by the river and do all of them, but I don't know if we will. We could go to the river and practice all of them. I don't know if we will do that. But that's a good point, that mind consciousness is a little... Maybe we'll do some of it.

[85:21]

Yes? Yes, I am interested in asking questions and I notice that I understand little of what Vashti is saying. I have such an understanding of it. And I think that in order to ask questions, I have to go through my awareness in order to become aware that I can say it. i thought about asking questions and i realized that mine just mentally i don't understand what you're talking about and i feel this really has to go through my body someone's my body awareness before i can let it into my mental i'm to my mind then ask a question yeah good okay good thank you We're running out of paper here. We have more paper in the car, or we could just turn it, uh, why don't it upside down?

[86:21]

You know, life is a little bit like that, right? And when you practise, you try to get here. The problem is there's also a lot of stuff underneath here. So you can practice in any culture here. But what's going on underneath is different in each culture. So you can get through all this stuff and just practice here. And if this is a Judeo-Christian culture, you'll be basically practicing a kind of Christianity.

[87:52]

So just getting through all of this stuff isn't sufficient. You also have to understand the basis. And what I've been teaching today is And yesterday is the turning around of the bases. So, in one sense, the faces is your physical body. And by bringing your consciousness more into your body, you turn around. And the actual experience of enlightenment is a physical turning around inside you. And you should know this stuff is really quite physical. Can I ask you a question? How many of you, when you practice or occasionally, feel some tingling or heat or energy here? Any of you?

[89:15]

Okay. When that occurs, which is a fairly common experience when you practice, if you have no anticipation of it, it's sort of funny, why am I going to ditch on top of my head? But when there's one Buddha statue which has an eye in the middle of the head and no eye in the face. And that means that Buddha is in the midst of non-duality. But this sense of a divided world and an undivided world or an undivided way of seeing is as physical a reality as I'm seeing with my eyes right now.

[90:18]

And when you start to, when you feel that feeling there, If you happen to, it means that your body is more non-dual. You're beginning to perceive in a more non-dualistic way. And that's why in all the statues of the Buddha, they stick this big number on top of his head. Because it's not just the latest hairstyle for Bodhisattvas. You know how some people comb their hair over their bald spot? The Buddha puts his hair up over this eruption of non-duality. You're all very intelligent people, I can tell.

[91:18]

But still I know, and some of you have mentioned to me in this seminar, and it happens in other seminars, that what I'm teaching is too complicated. Well, first of all, I don't think it's complicated. I think it's complex. But you're complex. I mean, you're sitting there with all these stuff going, I mean, lungs, heart. You can't really expect Buddhism to be simpler than you are. So, but the practice is simple.

[92:04]

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