Does someone want to say anything that they didn't get a chance to say before and maybe from the small groups that haven't been represented? Don't all speak at once. Okay. I like to prolong it as possible because I don't want to say goodbye. But we have to get down to the business of saying goodbye, I guess. That's true. I would like to see if I can give you a general picture of what we've been talking about.

[01:02]

Perhaps conceptual picture. That... Yeah, that gives you a... sense of how you might practice this. How you might bring this into your life. And if... And practice it and see if it makes sense. And then if it does make sense, make it part of your Yeah, maybe it's not so much to practice it even, but to bring it as an awareness of possibility in our life. Okay. Now, one of the things I've been mentioning repeatedly is this no entity.

[02:32]

Buddha nature is not an entity. There are no entities at all unless you want to treat something as an entity knowing it's not. Okay. If it's not an entity, Buddha nature, or a self... If they're not entities, what are they? What kind of actuality do they have? Well, I think we have to work our way into this with some conceptual grasp. And... So let's say we think of it as a field.

[03:39]

But to work with it, we have to think of it as a field with boundaries. It has to have some, you know, the fish out here need the boundaries of the pond and a certain kind of environment to live. So I usually define a mind as homeostatic and own organizing or self-organizing. In other words, we can call something a mind, like an angry mind, when it tends to continue and when it tends to organize other things that come into it in terms of its anger. Okay, so then, so we're not

[04:44]

Not only are we not talking about entities, well, we're talking about self. Let's speak about self. That's more accessible. We're speaking about self as a function. As a variety of ways of functioning. It's not an entity, but it's a way of functioning. And it functions in a field which supports its functioning. Like the fish need the water, The self needs a certain kind of field or water or liquid or something. Okay, now what I've tried to say, and I would like you to... Test me on this and see if it's true for you.

[06:00]

The self is primarily a function within consciousness. Okay. It doesn't function very well in awareness. So we have to have some idea of how is awareness different from consciousness. We're making up some difference here. Now I'm trying to create this conceptual picture. I think it's pretty close to the way things exist, but I would like you to take it on as maybe it's this way.

[07:03]

And see for yourself if you function this way. Okay. So self, if self is a creature of consciousness, and it's not a creature of, or doesn't function well in awareness, the medium of awareness, the more bodily rooted, body rooted knowing, It's maybe a bit like, you know... It's pretty hard to drive your car underwater. The fuel... The fuel of self-reflective thinking and memory doesn't make your car work.

[08:31]

That's probably too strong an example, but you get the idea that self doesn't function very well in awareness. But of course, we don't have a situation of pure awareness and pure consciousness. They're mixed together, they're simultaneous, they're parallel. That's... Yeah, it's good it's that way or we couldn't function in the subtle ways we do. And I think, by the way, it's a mistake when we extrapolate back from our present thinking to the past. When we say, oh, Freud discovered the unconscious, there's always been an unconsciousness, and the Greeks had unconsciousness, and so forth.

[09:52]

Just a... It's a commonplace way to think. I mean, even in Buddhism, people think that way, the Buddha, etc. But some of the ways Buddhists think are not Buddhism. So, Buddhism assumes that the context is always so important. The context is always so important that the context of a different culture creates really a different kind of person, a different kind of self. So I'm sure if I could look really closely at Greek culture, I would say, yes, maybe Sophocles and Oedipus and there's some kind of... But the dynamic is different, I'm sure.

[10:59]

In contemporary culture, we give things authority by saying it's classical. All right. So I have to go back again. We have these two territories of experience, more than these two, but let's say awareness and consciousness. And self doesn't function too well in awareness. But consciousness and awareness are, you know... simultaneous or parallel in many ways.

[12:08]

Now, if to some degree I would say that there's always been some kind of consciousness and awareness, I would say probably what differs a culture, what I would look at first, is the mix. From everything I know from, you know, spending time with Ivan Illich. I would say that probably the 12th century and before in Europe there was much more awareness and less consciousness. The emphasis was more on awareness than consciousness. I'm just saying this to say that We are a product of our own culture.

[13:24]

But we're shaping our culture. My example the other day of the leaves blowing in the wind in the very air which they are creating. We can take as a classic example of non-dualism in Buddhism. The air has a separate existence from the tree. The tree has a separate existence from the air. And yet they have an intertwined existence. They arise together and you can't have one without the other. And that's what non-dualism means. When you feel that not only are you a product of your culture, But you're also actively creating your culture and changing it.

[14:41]

And to know that allows you to really practice Buddhism fully in this culture. So what is the mix of awareness and consciousness in you, in each of us? And can you change the mix? Of course you can change the mix. Do you want to change the mix? Why not? Life's more of an adventure. Within certain boundaries, you can explore it. Okay. Okay, so let's say that, let's accept for now that self is a, the territory of self is consciousness.

[15:55]

And your self is, and self as a function is also a vehicle for consciousness. creator of and carrier of karma. And karma is, you know, real, the core of karma is intentional acts. And we certainly, um, um, We certainly recognize that as commonplace. An accidental homicide is treated differently than an intentional homicide, for sure. An accidental act of thievery is different than an intentional act.

[16:56]

thievery. And last night from the restaurant I stole a spoon. You know, I'm an American. I like to eat with a spoon, not all this knife and fork stuff. So, you know, they bring, I order soup so I get a spoon. Then no matter how well I hide the spoon somewhere on the table, the waiter finds it and takes it away. So I stuck it in my pocket. Figuring my food would have some sort of sauce and I'd remember to take it out. Well, I didn't. I got home and... I have a spoon in my pocket. Now, I've sometimes stolen spoons because I've bent them. You know, I practiced bending spoons sometimes just for the heck of it.

[18:14]

And I don't want to leave a spoon on the table that's wrapped around or something. But that's rare. So anyway, I got home. I didn't know what to do with it, so I left it downstairs for you. I think it's better to return it to another institution than personally benefit from it. So I don't have too much karma, I think, from taking the spoon. But if it was your favorite silver spoon that your baby was born with, that would be more karma. So karma is carried particularly by the self through intentional acts. Okay, so can you get away from your karma just by being in awareness all the time?

[19:21]

Sounds like a good idea. I mean, certainly in New England they used to send their sons and daughters, usually their sons, to Europe after a failed... a love affair that went wrong or sometimes a love affair that went right. Go to Europe for a year, Baden-Baden, something like that. And your karma will be better when you come back. It always has amused me that the founder of Esalen father summer home was where Esalen is on the Big Sur coast. And there's a hot springs there. So he traveled to Europe to Baden-Baden and Wiesbaden to sort of study spas where you went for a cure.

[20:42]

But it didn't work. But his son founded Esalen, where you go for a cure and to get away from your karma. There's some actually truth to what I'm saying. Esalen is. Esalen has been a way many of us, many people have tried to look at and change their karma. But if Freud is right, if there is an unconscious, or if we do have karma, common sense karma, knows that. I don't think we can simply avoid it by going to Hungary and Budapest and sitting with Ivan.

[21:52]

That's a good idea, though. We have to have some understanding that maybe how is our karma going to, how is our unconscious, which, you know, there's reality to that, how does it function if Yeah, now I think it's useful if you're trying to explore something to ask yourself questions like I'm doing. And I would say that the enfoldedness, as I said earlier, We can take awareness as that way of knowing that leaves things folded up.

[22:52]

The problem is you can't get everything on the surface of consciousness. That's obvious. We dream, and our dreaming shows us that everything that we are isn't on the surface of consciousness. So, awareness, the quality of awareness is it leaves The folded up, folded up.

[24:00]

Yeah, and the folded upness of... Yeah, and there's a folded upness of the world, even if you think of either three dimensions or ten dimensions, eight... Whatever it is, that idea is... There's a truth to it, that the world is also folded up, not only unfolded into three dimensions or four dimensions. This, I mean, you... The world is just too complex to be unfolded. I told you we have this big dog. A great kid named Igor.

[25:12]

Igor. And Igor's a big guy, you know. He comes in the morning, you know, he sleeps out in the snow. He likes it. Comes in the morning and he's this vibrating, warm thing in his... Yeah, really. I mean, I let him come in the door and he gets beside me and I can feel this warmth and vibration and energy and wet hair. Once when I kind of really dropped thought coverings. I was holding a cat and this cat was like a Porsche at full speed with not in gear though. I look at Mark Harvey because he works for Porsche.

[26:17]

Anyway, this cat was just so alive. It was unbelievable in my hands. And sometimes Sophia sits on my lap and... This little body with her ribs and everything, there's just so much going on in there. And I look at her trying to put the templates of how her father and mother wanted to act. It's so simple what she's trying to... the envelope she's trying to put around her. She has to do it. We have to do it to function. But I hope in bringing her up Bringing her up, she's bringing herself up, anyway.

[27:19]

That she can find ways to have access that don't shut off access to her complexity, don't simplify her complexity, but allow her access to her complexity. Something like that. So we unfold somewhat when we dream. We unfold sometimes to music or dancing or... being in love. And I can say that for many of us still sitting, when we really can find still sitting, we also create Wonderful way to unfold. And we unfold into art, creativity, and so forth.

[28:29]

But we also fold back up. And most of us remains folded up, but functions in its folded upness. So the question you brought up is really about how do you let this unfoldedness To be unfolded or to be out of sight. Does not mean to be shut off. I like the word... Again, dharma means most simply what holds.

[29:42]

But the root of hold is also hole, what's concealed. So the relationship between concealed and unconcealed is very intimate. Now Hinduism also has the view of everything's changing. And in many ways it's very similar to Buddhism. But Hinduism has the sense that behind everything changing, there's an unchanging, unmoving reality. And it's useful to know that Buddhism does not have this idea. There's no behind.

[30:59]

There's no in front of or in back of. There's only this here present. So we say something like the absolute is the thusness of phenomenal reality. Well, what does that mean? How do we unpack that? Well, first, what's the absolute? Well, the absolute is sometimes a synonym for emptiness. But it's a dangerous word because there's no such thing as absolute in reality. But it means what's pretty close to the absolute. So it doesn't just mean emptiness. It means that the... Maybe something like the fullest experience of the truth.

[32:11]

The whole essential reality. Actuality. Is the thusness of phenomena itself. Now the emphasis on that is reality. particularly Chinese. So the Chinese Buddhists, particularly Zen guys, folks, didn't paint so many pictures of Buddhas. They painted landscapes, persimmons, et cetera. . With the sense that phenomenal reality, however we take that, itself has to be the Buddha.

[33:13]

So Buddha nature is somehow inseparable from phenomenal reality. And I'm using the word reality with all the equivocations or footnotes we've made so far. Okay. So let me just say, go back to this problem of the unconscious and our karma. The unfoldedness of phenomenal reality and oneself, the unfoldedness, the folded upness, of oneself and phenomenal reality, also work together in awareness, and my experience is, my understanding, my experience is, mature your karma.

[34:29]

I think actually more deeply than you mature it in consciousness. Accept, absorb, transform. And you don't have the painful attacks on your self-image. the disruption of your story I mean these things occur of course but leave it to consciousness take it with lots of grains of salt. Do you have that expression? To take something with a grain of salt means don't take it too seriously. Okay. Now the idea of sudden enlightenment is rooted not in the idea that there's a reality behind this that's there waiting for you.

[36:05]

When you think that way, you don't think of it as sudden, you think of it as a progress from this reality to that reality. The idea of suddenness, which is also an emphasis of Chinese Buddhism, is that somehow here present, where there's no behind or in front of or etc., So you can hear it very clearly in Yuan Wu's statement. Realize right where you stand. By entering a mind without before and after. Without here and there. Now this is, Yuan Wu is a great source of accurate pithy Buddhism.

[37:17]

Pithy means at the center of. Realize right where you stand. That's already a koan, a gate phrase. Nowhere else. How come it's so bad if it's nowhere else? Realize right where you stand. Aha, but he's got a trick. Bring yourself to a mind where there's neither before nor after.

[38:20]

Oh, shucks, I thought there, I knew there was more to this than I. And where there's no here nor there. Mm-hmm. I think I'll try another path. A path that goes somewhere. This path just stands in one spot and bounces around. But what perhaps is the mind in which there's neither before nor after nor here nor there? Awareness. Awareness is pretty close to what Yuan Wu is pointing at. So now we are looking at the word thusness.

[39:31]

The absolute, the whole entire being, or something like that. Or the fullest experience you have of being. the truth of existence or truth, is exactly the thusness of phenomenal reality. Okay, so what's the thusness of phenomenal reality? Already it's Awareness, not consciousness. Okay, so what is this thusness awareness? Well, it's approaching or coming near to, I'm always close to this,

[40:34]

A mind with neither before nor after. Now, this is a little aside, I'm going to say. If you think in entities, you think there's a mind with no before and after, and there's a mind with before and after. And then you think, oh, this is impossible. I can't have a mind with no before and after. But if you don't think in entities... then in a way you can say you think in directionality. So if you have a mind that's putting down your suitcases, putting down your luggage, you feel lighter. If you have a mind which is taking on suitcases, you feel heavier. I must be traveling soon. So if you have a mind which is moving toward less sense of before and after, that mind functions as a mind without before and after.

[41:53]

If you have a mind which is less engaged in self-reflective thinking, that's very different than a mind which is more involved with self-reflective thinking. So you don't have to be, you know, like, I still have self-reflection. If you have less, not so important to you. That is already an accomplishment. Okay, so we're trying to look at what is the thusness of thusness. We can call it awareness.

[43:14]

We can call it being engaged in the context in which you are. Without much self-reflective thinking. And we can say it's a mind which gathers experience. It's a mind that dwells in And we can say this isn't just Buddhism, Husserl, the philosopher Husserl, is that how you pronounce it? Husserl? Husserl. Husserl, yeah. Husserl. Husserl. Thanks. Hi, thanks. Anyway, he said, let's get back to things. He's saying something similar to what we're talking about.

[44:15]

Husserl said, let's get back to things. What is a mind that gathers phenomena? Again, this bell is not an entity. It's not a thing, really. We can say it has thingness which gathers. It gathers, you have to notice it's a bell. You have to notice it's a bell. You have to notice it's a bell. When I was young, they didn't have bells like this. Bells had little handles on them and... When I was a kid, I wouldn't have known this was a bell. I said, what the heck is that thing?

[45:16]

So the fact that it's a bell has to gather. And its use as a bell has to gather. So the thingness of it, you experience the thingness gathering. So thusness also means to let things gather. Awareness is something because awareness is enfolded. There's a pause or pace to the gathering. One of the kind of great book is Paul Reps' book, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.

[46:19]

Which... Has in the back of it a hundred, I think a hundred little exercises. And they're all exercises, most of them or many of them, about stopping. Where you inhale and stop at the top. and allow a moment of absorption. When you exhale, you stop at the bottom and allow a moment of absorption. And in many ways, this little stopping or pausing and letting another kind of reality just kind of seep in. So essential to this dynamic of thusness and awareness is this stopping or pausing

[47:31]

Or letting things gather. Because if things are an interrelationship and the idea again of interdependence In practice, it shouldn't be just an idea. Feel the forces on things. It's not just that if things aren't an entity, they're actually always subject to the context. Being subject to the context means everything in the context affects the context. Yes, it's simple things like if you're with somebody, you change your posture slightly, etc.

[49:22]

You affect the way the person is just by changing your posture. You affect the other people. I affect you if I change my posture. And the way you're all sitting affect my posture and affect what I'm saying. So thusness means to feel the contextual dynamics of what we call interdependence. So thusness is a way to be, Corey, inside this, inside thusness. Or to feel the kind of power of Igor's aliveness.

[50:30]

And again, in the context of not know before and after Pre-reflective knowing, we could say, something like that. So it's a kind of, what could I say, an adaptive equilibrium. Yes, going back to this simple idea of a mind as homeostatic and self or own organizing. You're not just a victim of that mind.

[51:46]

You're participating in its own organizing. And you're participating in the... participating... sustaining awareness or consciousness. And the more you emphasize feeling first and then think, or the more you emphasize the feeling of awareness rooted in the body, the more you'll find the background Being is rooted in awareness. One roar rooted in feeling. And not rooted in self-reflective thinking. Doesn't mean your story is gone. Just means you're not always just living through your personal story. You're closer to living in the world as it actually exists.

[53:08]

And that, as again Yuan Wu says, is the womb of sagehood. So in that kind, we could say in awareness very simply, Buddha nature matures. Buddha nature is not an entity. It's something that as self perhaps matures, at least functions in consciousness. Buddha nature matures automatically. in awareness. Buddha nature matures in awareness. And samadhi, mind concentrated on itself, Doesn't mean mind free of any thinking.

[54:14]

Means mind in which all the thinking is enfolded. Perhaps we could say samadhi is that knowing Which knows what can't be thought. Something like that. So samadhi, which is also what is meant by the eighth... of the eightfold path, concentration. And samadhi then is what gathers. It's not thinking in the usual sense, but it's a mind which gathers. So the more you can develop or come into the practice of thusness as I'm talking about it, the more you don't just have some fruits of this.

[55:28]

but this actually matures your, what we call, Buddha nature. Okay, that's enough. I feel really that I've oversimplified it and I'm very sorry. And I don't mean if I went on it would be more complex. It might be simpler but not oversimplified. But it's still wonderful for me to feel the possibility of doing this with you. And I guarantee you if it was an empty room I wouldn't be doing this. Inside myself or, excuse me, you're all, nobody's here and I'm up here talking away.

[56:36]

So let's sit for a few minutes. And then we get, I think I heard cake. Yeah. Through practice we not only mature our Buddha nature, we mature the Buddha nature of others.

[58:28]

And we make possible the maturing of the Buddha nature of others because the enfolded world of each of us is always enfolding with each other and with phenomena. The whole entire essential being appears before you and nowhere else. How soft it is.

[59:28]

The air we live in.

[59:45]

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