And this all happened faster than consciousness could think. If you thought, well, I better put this elbow down in this ute, you know. Everything would be gone. So, I call that awareness. Awareness shifted instantly into our actions and protected our nose and skull and vase. So that kind of awareness is present. But even that kind of awareness can be developed. If you're a martial artist or you're Ueshiba, that awareness is unbelievably developed. Ueshiba is the founder of Aikido. So there's a big difference between this potential and developing it as a presence in your life and practice.

[01:27]

And this is the difference between a wisdom practice and an enlightenment practice. So I'll come back to making this distinction between a wisdom practice and enlightenment practice before I stop, if you'd like. Okay. What else? This side is surprisingly silent. Are the therapists on this side? I see some therapists on this side. Yes. I have a therapist question. How would you define the difference between an aware mind from a controlling mind? Deutsch, bitte. My question was about the difference between a pathological spirit and a controlled spirit.

[02:47]

Well, I would say that a conscious mind can be a controlling mind. And you can bring knowing through awareness into your consciousness and into your psychological structure. And then try to control things based on what you sense through awareness. But the conscious mind is the controlling mind, not the awareness. Awareness itself through the way it functions, can only know it can't control. Now let me see if that's true. Perhaps if we're here together, as well as consciousness, awareness is holding us together here as a Sangha body.

[04:32]

But it's essentially voluntary. But I think when a person has charisma, for instance, there's a certain way in which perhaps we could say something like awareness is affecting other people. But without trying to make it more complex, I think that awareness is a way of knowing which you can't interfere with or control exactly. But you can strengthen your awareness. And sometimes we have the experience of knowing what another person feels and thinks. But it requires alignment, it requires sensitivity that doesn't fit into the categories of controlling.

[05:52]

Now, the more a person is only conscious... The more a person who's skilled at hypnotism might be able to control people who are not aware but conscious. What was his name? Erickson? Milton Erickson seemed to be able to hypnotize the whole audience. But I would say that depended on the audience being conscious and not aware. So again, it's a functioning through consciousness, not awareness. Two people are equally aware, can't control each other.

[06:58]

I don't know if it's worth making these distinctions, but maybe it's useful to sort out our thinking about it. Okay. Anything else before us? Is awareness the same as intuition? I think intuition is awareness appearing in the cracks of consciousness. And we call it intuition because we don't have any real continuous experience of this kind of knowing.

[08:08]

Yes? For me the word intuition is quite dangerous because we always believe that intuition is something... which is given to you, it's natural, it's not developed and created. And so for me the sacred was very important what you said yesterday that awareness is something we create and it's a process. And I suddenly felt that I still was kind of unconsciously believing that even certain experience of awareness for me have a specific way to go to it. And sometimes I was wondering why I don't find the way.

[09:15]

And in thinking in this terms, I already included that there's a way, that there's a game, awareness, where I go to, and I was in a deep delusion when I'm in it, and, oh, I can't find the way. Why the heck I don't find the way this time? And it's a very subtle kind of permanence. And suddenly I recognized I just had stopped thinking about, or in my thinking I had diminished permanence. Well, I think there is no permanence. But in this I suddenly recognized, oh well, there's still a kind of unconscious belief in permanence.

[10:17]

And that was really a deep kind of recognition, and I'm quite excited about that because now I feel closer to this point that I really can have awareness in each moment. And I don't need a sashim because I don't need this way of thinking or going and believing in this way. And the other side is that I feel, oh, there's also a kind of responsibility I now have for each moment. It's true. And the trick is with this intuition, because we say, oh, he or she has a good intuition, we always think It's coming from birth.

[11:19]

Some people have it, some people don't have it. And especially women have it. Yeah. That's why I practice Zen. I'm trying to be equal to women. Go ahead. Deutsch, bitte. I like this awareness that we have. Each of us has... responsibility but also the possibility to develop it. Yes. Deutsch, bitte. What I don't like about the word intuitive is that we are all entangled in this thought and that is given to us from birth or from nature, some have it, some don't. And that's why it's a great comparison for me now to awareness, because as Karoshi just described, that this is something that we are developing and that we are working on and that it is only forming at that moment.

[12:24]

And through this description it became clear to me how much I was still restricted in it, where I had formed such a subtle belief in permanence, in which I knew, okay, I don't believe in God, I believe in no longer a permanent self, but that it was something more thought-through than something that had already ended in me. Because, for example, when I have experienced moments of being, Sometimes, when it was not so easy for me to get there, I still had a picture of a way, a goal, and why, once again, do I not find the way there in this situation? So it is a completely different consciousness than when you say, I create it for myself at any moment. And that was a deep impression for me, what pleases me on the one hand, because now I really have the feeling, I don't need to reach this awareness, or certain situations, but I can really do it at any moment.

[13:41]

And the other side of it is, suddenly a commitment arises to create it at any moment. Yeah, good. Yeah, so zazen starts out as being the discovery of awareness. And then later Zazen becomes the filling station of awareness. So that every day if you sit you tend to fill up your awareness tanks. Yes. Yes, please.

[14:51]

My son is now seven years old. Yes. He said to me, if he says to me, Mama, so he thinks that I know just in the moment what he wants. Yeah. I used to think that, too. He said to me a few days ago that if he said the word mama, he would immediately know from me that I know what he wants. And then I thought about it and realized that if I think about it, then it can't be. And I think that's something that's a bit like Werner's or intuition. I think it's more intuition than to know, because I know that I don't want to control him all the time. Thank you. Well, let me riff a bit, okay?

[16:01]

Before we end this part of the seminar. First of all, although I think it may be tiresome to be, you know, like meticulously trying to define awareness and consciousness, I mean, it can also be a little tiring, this minutious defining of consciousness and reality. At the same time, I think it's absolutely extraordinary in this society that we have this many people who can sit here and discuss this. You could go almost nowhere else and gather a group of people and have this discussion. So it means we have... We have an understanding rooted in actual experience.

[17:05]

Because we could not really talk about this unless a lot of us had actual experience of what we're talking about. Okay. So, let me... between enlightenment practice and wisdom practice. Because I've discovered over the years, at least from my experience, if I emphasize enlightenment experience, it excludes a lot of people. If I emphasize wisdom practice, more people continue practice and then begin enlightenment practice.

[18:07]

And if I emphasize enlightenment practice, for a very large number of people it becomes an ego game. Not only does enlightenment become something part of our ego needs, but people who don't have the experience right away feel inferior, a failure, etc., And I get really tired of hanging around in a sangha where 80 or 90 percent were thinking, why haven't I had enlightenment yet? It's a real drag. I mean, all these people feeling like The enlightenment bus never came to their stop.

[19:32]

Yeah, okay. So I want to emphasize enlightenment practice more subtly. So you have a chance to choose to do it. If you don't, you don't feel like a failure. Okay. So what is the difference between wisdom practice and enlightenment practice? If you take a particular phrase, like, just now is enough. Just now is not enough.

[20:37]

Because you're hungry. Or you're in love or I don't know what. But at the same time, in fact, you have to know that just now is enough. Because just now is always, only what you have is what you have. So can you have a mind of just now is enough? In the middle of our usual mind, full of desires, etc., where just now is not enough. Okay, now if you practice with a phrase like just now is enough, and you really bring your energy to it, and you have that kind of gung-ho mentality, And you keep bringing your energy to each moment.

[21:39]

Maybe you're crazy enough to do it. Or you have to be suffering a lot. I know I suffered a lot, so I really tried. And it means if you're going to do it, millions of moments a year. This isn't just, you know, every now and then. I think there's 86,400 seconds in a day. That's a beginning. So when you take a phrase and you bring your energy into it moment after moment, or we spoke earlier, what is it?

[22:42]

This is enlightenment practice. Now, what are you doing when you do this? Basically, you're thrusting or tapping thought coverings. Okay. Now... And it's not always thrusting, like into thought coverings, it's tapping sometimes. If you have a lacquer bowl, like some of the oriokis are real lacquer, and the person serving you every now and then taps their serving thing against your lacquer bowl,

[23:48]

Eventually your lacquer cracks off. Just because light taps eventually break the surface. So A tapping also, a repeated tapping, second moment after moment also, opens up the thought coverings. Now, if you study this process as a teacher, and you look at what kind of phrases, what kind of Focuses are used in enlightenment practice. They're always aimed at other mental formations.

[25:03]

They're aimed at our mental habits. They're not actually aimed at original mind. You don't say original mind, original mind, original mind. But what happens when this cracks open? If you crack open your thought coverings, something like original mind appears. Or some joyful, blissful experience. Or some wide feeling of connectedness. Or the air becomes bouncy and springy. Things like that. And then you think, oh, the original mind was there and it surfaced. That's actually a pedagogical mistake. Because the original mind wasn't there waiting to be opened, when you break thought covering, something happens that we can call original mind.

[26:38]

Now, I think in very much Zen teaching, very traditional Zen teaching is taught as if original mind was there waiting to be discovered. It works. It's a kind of teaching that isn't harmful, usually. But it creates the idea that once you've opened this up, then there's nothing more to do. And I think of this quite beautiful book. I mean, lots of Zen teachers feel this. Lots of Zen teachers feel this. And I think of this beautiful book about this young Irish girl who had an enlightened experience and was authorized as a teacher and so forth.

[27:52]

And then she was killed in a plane crash, car accident or something? Bus accident. I don't doubt her enlightenment experience. She was 19 or 20 or something like that. But then to say, oh, you've had enlightenment experience, you're a teacher, this is total nonsense. She had nowhere has the maturity to be a teacher. Nor has she matured herself. So if you posit a Zen teaching on once you've had this experience, then this is just a belief in a kind of God. Now, it works particularly with average people. It works pretty well as a way to practice with people.

[28:54]

But the opening of such people in a Buddhist culture, where they're monks or nuns or something, and there's hundreds of people practicing around them, is a very different thing than this experience in the West. Because there's an immensely corrective supportive culture going on around them. It's like some Tibetans are announcing certain people are Tukuls. And they're, you know, sometimes a Westerner sent to the West and then they're kind of lost.

[30:23]

I'm a Tukul, but they're not in the culture which supports the evolvement of a person. Mm-hmm. So my feeling that in the West we have to more consciously support enlightenment practice by wisdom practice. So wisdom practice makes enlightenment practice more possible. And makes enlightenment practice an enlightenment evolved in a field of wisdom. Just our effort to build a Sangha is to develop a Buddha field, a wisdom field. Now, say that you are asking, as we've been talking about this in Creston, you're asking this what?

[31:36]

What's going on when you're repeatedly asking this question? Because you're focusing on asking this question. But there's things that happen because you're focusing in that way. One thing is you're simply evolving the present. You're changing what you experience as the present. You're widening the present. You're making the present into a receptacle. And even if there's no enlightenment experience, you're widening the present. Okay. Now what happens when you widen the present?

[33:12]

What happens when you keep bringing yourself back to... I don't care whether it's just now or not or what or whatever it is. What happens when you keep bringing yourself back to... You're creating the habit of... of embedding yourself in the present. Knowing that is a wisdom practice. Do you see the difference? If we just do an enlightenment practice, we're just focusing on the repetition. A wisdom practice is to also see that we're evolving the present. So we can also have practices which evolve the present. And the more you're embedded in the present, the more you're embedded in the physicality of phenomena and your own physicality, it

[34:25]

it dramatically changes the way you function. For example, you will probably be very little anxious again. What's anxiety about? It's almost always about what might happen. It's very rarely about what is happening. Even if you're in an airplane crashing. Most of the time it's not crashing. Den größten Teil der Zeit zerschellt es ja gar nicht. There's smoke coming out of the engines and things, but you know, you're sitting there and you've still got your orange juice, you know. Ich meine, es kommt Rauch aus den Triebwerken, aber ihr sitzt immer noch da und ihr habt euren Orangensaft.

[35:44]

And really, I tell you, a person who's embedded in the present will probably mostly just sit there. Und ich sage euch wirklich, ein Mensch... The air is getting bad in here. And it's not any kind of big thinking. It's just that you... You're located in the present. You're not located in anticipation. So to evolve an embedded present is a wisdom practice. And I can teach you how to evolve an embedded present. And I want to teach you how to do that as well as teach you how to do an enlightenment practice.

[36:58]

Okay. Now, somebody asked me again to speak about trust. And going back to what several people have spoke about thinking. The more your thinking is embedded in the present and your body, the more you can trust it. It's strange. After a while you get so whatever you think is possible. You simply don't have thoughts which aren't possible. Because your thinking is so embedded in the present, nourished by the present and your own thoughts. present as body, that thinking begins to have a

[38:10]

A new creativity that's embedded in a kind of practicality. I won't try to fully explain this, even if I could. But you begin to notice in practice at some point that you only have thoughts that are possible. They may not seem possible, but you begin to find out if you had it, it probably is possible. Okay. Now let me say what way-seeking mind is. And we can define, you know, original mind, way-seeking mind, etc.

[39:32]

And I think, whoa, whoa, whoa, I think it's useful to... Maybe it's not useful at this moment. It's getting late. Yeah. Well, I'd like to define way-seeking mind because it's... One of the things we do is also evolve a way-seeking mind. Based on a deep experience of doubt, As Nagarjuna says, on seeing into transiency, Nagarjuna basically says, when you really see that everything's changing, you can't depend on it.

[40:42]

That's the thought of enlightenment. Whether you call it that or not, it's the thought of enlightenment. And when you stay with that mind which generated the thought of enlightenment, you find a way to keep coming it back, that's enlightenment practice. And it's also the source of this bodhisattva vow. Because this way-seeking mind is also to land lightly but thoroughly on each moment. Because this way-seeking mind knowing interdependence, which means knowing the particular is the universal, and in this interdependence to act

[41:48]

compassionately without any idea of reward. So you pick up glass on the street, not, you know, just because paper or glass is on the street. But that kind of effort is way-seeking mind. Rooted in this vow, altruistic vow to realize enlightenment if it's the only way you can help people. rooted in this altruistic vow to realize Buddhahood only if it's the only way to help people. So it's always second to your desire to just serve people. Again, this is a generated mind. It's not there beforehand. I gave you the example of my daughter Sally, who is now 35, living in Lisbon.

[43:12]

And she, when she was about four, saw Virginia and myself, her mother, looking through photographs of burning napalmed children and stuff in Life magazine from the Vietnam War. And Virginia was crying. And we were quite involved, very involved in the anti-Vietnam movement. anti-Vietnam War movement. And Sally came over and turned the pages to another story.

[44:16]

So she didn't want us to suffer. So she tried to show us the next story, which was more cheerful or something. And my reaction was, this is her first taste of the vow, the Bodhisattva vow. So I responded to her in a way, without saying it, you just took the bodhisattva vow. To end the suffering in the world. As I said, it would be nice if everybody didn't suffer. That's the first stage. And the second stage is you say, okay, I will free people from suffering. It's not about whether you can do it or not. It's necessary for your own development or humanity to take this vow.

[45:30]

Until you take this vow, you're always living separate from others. You only open yourself up to our real connectedness then you take this vow. Okay, yeah, it would be nice if people suffered less. But I will myself do everything I can To free people from suffering and to free people from the causes of suffering. And as this gets deeper, you finally say, I'll do it alone by myself if necessary.

[46:31]

And I'll realize And if the best way to do this is to realize Buddhahood, I'll do that. That's why it's called the altruistic vow to realize enlightenment. And that's also the vision that it requires the power of everybody for this vow to be fulfilled. So, when Sally did this, I remember feeling, yes, how can... So at that moment and many other moments, you begin to create a person who also has the sense of a Buddha body as well as the usual samsara body.

[47:47]

And that's what we're doing here. We're simply recognizing each other's Buddha body as well as our usual body. It's a good thing to do. I think so. So why don't we sit a minute and we can end.

[48:25]

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