Yeah, I think I should talk more about the Vijnanas. Because the territory of the self is not just the mind or consciousness or the brain or something like that. The territory of the self is also the present. Yeah, but what is the present? Well, let's say it's the activity of the present. What is the activity of the present? The activity of the present is primarily known through the sense fields. Okay, now, the word vijnana is, I think, best translated and understood as to know separately, together.

[01:04]

Yeah, so this isn't a philosophy, it's an experience, experiential. This is not a philosophy, it is an experience, and it is experienceable. So this, the Vijnanas as a teaching has no intellectual sense really, I mean it makes a certain amount of sense, but it really has no vitality intellectually. It's only if you intentionally develop the experience. Experience it, actualize it. You know, Dogen, again, we work with a few statements of Dogen until we really understand them. Dogen says the continuous practice which actualizes itself is your practice just now.

[02:19]

Just now. When else could it be? It's not like the drinks in an Irish bar which are free tomorrow. Yeah, this is, you can't, oh, I'm going to, actualization will come later. No, it's now, this moment. So you have to kind of like really inscribe that on the old brain. The continuous practice which actualizes itself is your practice just now. Then he further defines now. The now of this continuous practice does not originally belonged to the self.

[03:40]

If the now of your practice belonged to the self, it will not be realisational practice. How do you take the self out of the now? We could say the now of your practice belongs to the self. But Dogen throws us a life preserver, a little help. And says the now of this practice does not originally belong to the self. and says that the now of this practice originally does not belong to the self. But again, what is this now of this original practice?

[04:41]

The Buddhism says that these are mainly the fields of the senses. Now we're talking about not the sense fields as kind of absorbed into a seemingly seamless picture in the brain. But let's... Let's recognize that this present, whatever it is, is divided up into six senses. It's more than the six senses. But we cannot feel really into it. Grok. It's a word from... Robert Heinlein's novel, strange, what's it called?

[05:59]

Famous science fiction novel and it's become a word in the dictionary. Yeah, I remember you said it before and I just translated it as grok, so you have to find what it is. Grok, it means to mind read or to think or to feel what another person's thinking. I don't really like the word too much, but it's actually quite useful. Okay, so to grok what's in between the senses. Think of the present here now as a whole bunch of pieces of pie. By the way, happy birthday. You had a cake already.

[07:01]

Did I get a piece? No. Happy birthday. Okay. There's lots of pieces of pie here, but we only know six of them. And we can only guess at the other pieces of pie. But we're not going to be able to guess, Buddhism thinks, and I have experienced, we can't guess at the pieces of pie that are at the edges or beyond our sense fields. Unless we articulate each sense field separately. I don't know. Ten years ago I went through this quite often.

[08:02]

We even went out kin-hin walking in the fields, smelling the path instead of seeing the path and things like that. But we don't have to do that even though we've got this wonderful garden to do it in. Which is also a world-building art. Much of Europe especially thought of gardens as designing the world. But you can just do it here in the Zender. You've got lust. You haven't got that much to do the next few days. So the meal is being served.

[09:05]

It's a sensorial banquet. So you just concentrate on the olfaction. Olfaction is... She knows everything, almost. Except deuteroginous. I know that now. Yeah, in Buddhism we like pride. It goeth toward Buddha instead of toward a fall. Toward a fall? No. In Western... Thinking going back to Greece, hubris, is pride, goeth before a fall. And this goeth before a Buddha. Okay. So, first comes the gomashio. Hmm. I love the smell of gomasio.

[10:24]

So the room, gomasio starts floating in the room. And then the first bowl. And each time the first bowl is served, there's more smell, odorant of the first bowl. And then there's, yeah, then there's the second bowl. And like that, and the field of odors gets richer and richer. And I think we have a main olfactory system and an accessory olfactory system. And the accessory. What does that mean? The extra addition added on. And the accessory olfactory system smells pheromones and emotions and things like that.

[11:44]

Now you get not only the smell of the food, you get the smell of the servers. And the people around you. And if you really shut down seeing, hearing, etc., this territory of the whole meal is like, whoa, before the food even gets to you and I'm last, so I'm enjoying it up until I'm served. It's a whole territory. And when I visualize it it's like a whole lot of petals in the air or a flock of little smells all flowing around on currents. And if you've noticed, if you read koans and Buddhist poems, the word fragrance occurs a lot, and it means the smell of a particular situation.

[12:55]

The breeze that passes through a particular garden, for example, would be obvious. Now, in addition, we talked about yesterday how The sense organ and the brain are kind of like Siamese twins. I guess nowadays we say conjoined twins in English. I don't know what we would call it in German. Do you say Siamese twins in German? In English it's more technically conjoined twins. But the brain and the sense organs are like talking to each other out there, floating around.

[14:13]

And they're educating each other. And the molecular chemical signals And the molecular-chemical signals are being transduced into electrical signals. And this is all going on while the gomasio is being poured. And these two twins are educating each other. If you're more engaged and more fully engaged in the ayatanas of the olfactory system, your degree of engagement, your degree of attention begins educating the brain part of the Siamese, of the conjoined twins. then the extent of your going in there, the extent of your attention will inform or train the brain part of these Siamese twins.

[15:27]

Yes. Okay, let's just take the image of this field of the three bowls and the gomasio and the servers and your neighbors. It makes a field we call an ayatana. An ayatana is the field which arises from the sense object and the field which arises from the mind. I'm not making this up, you know. This is old-fashioned Buddhism. So there are 12 Ayatanas. And the Ayatana that arises from the sense object And this takes the olfaction, the odorance, and from the mind that notices it.

[16:47]

The mind and the sense organ. And you can bring your attention more to the sense organ or more to the sense object. And if you don't actively engage with the Vijnana this way, you hardly notice the olfactory field of the meal. So I amuse myself. I don't look at what's being served. And despite the size of my nose, it doesn't work very well. Some people can smell right into food and tell you what ingredients. I can't do that. What's the first boil going to be? And then sometimes I'm surprised.

[17:48]

Sometimes when they serve it, oh, I know. Lentil soup. It wasn't tomato soup. This now does not originally belong to the self. If you're really engaged in the ayatanas of the sense, the odorant and the sense, the smelling, Wenn du dich wirklich in diese Ayatanas hineingibst, dem Sinn des Riechens und dem Sinnesfeld, dann gibt es da nicht viel auf selbstbezogene Denken, das vonstatten geht.

[18:53]

Das sich hineingeben in jedes der Vijnanas, das reduziert das auf selbstbezogene Denken dramatisch. Isn't that wonderful? It's a little trick, a simple trick. I'm smelling selflessness. Of course there's memory going on because your nostril, your sense organ Nasenschleimhaut, is it that? Nasenlöcher. Nasenlöcher, ach ja, Nasenlöcher, ein Sinnesorgan. Ja, man muss ja sagen, welche Konzentration, welche Intensität der Geruch hat. Und man muss das vor dem Hintergrund anderer Gerüche herausstellen.

[19:56]

And it has to relate it to memories, your memory of what those smells are. So memory is part of smelling. But in this case, memory, I think it's pretty clear, it's not the self. Yes, self can call forth, I mean smells can call forth many past experiences. But just the functioning of memory in like olfaction is not necessarily the self. It's rooted in your experience. Where you lived, what you've done, etc. But it's not... No reason to call it self. So this olfactory field reduces self-referential thinking. And in chanting, during the service, you can play the same game.

[21:24]

You can really listen, excuse me for sounding so vulgar, you can really listen into the mouths of each person. You feel their tongues flopping around saying the chanting, you know? I'm sorry to tell you these terrible things. But you can really feel the mouth of a person chanting. It's like a bunch of fish in the air all of a sudden. The image I have that I'm sitting in an inner tube. Inner tube? An inner tube is like the inside of a tire that you can float on. Just need to find the German word now. Yeah, an inner tube. Anyway, like you're sitting on an inner tube and there's a lot of water around you, and you can feel, and the water is all the sound going, and you're floating in the sound.

[22:38]

Mm-hmm. Again, you're in the ayatana, in this case, of the sound and the hearing. And sound is especially a good sense to work with because there isn't the sense of distance that you have in the visual ayatana. And as I've often spoken about hearing, hearing and the bliss of hearing, hearing and that you can move in this field of these two ayatanas of the let's say the sound, the bird, if that's the case, and you're hearing.

[23:56]

And when you're hearing, hearing, you're in the field between the bird and your ear. In the field of the mind of hearing. So you're hearing your own hearing of the burden. Now you can move that feeling along so that the bird feels like the bird is right inside you. Or you can move more toward just feeling the mind hearing the bird. Okay.

[24:58]

Now, you don't do this all the time. It'll happen in zazen sometimes. But the idea of the craft of the vijnana practice is every now and then go through the vijnanas and see if you can find the feeling for each one. And if you do it now and then, pretty soon the habit is present in the sort of natural way you hear and see and smell. And when I've spoken about sight centering attention, meaning you

[26:01]

center your attention in the site, the situation you're in. And you stabilize your attention and you stabilize yourself in this, in the site of each moment, S-I-T-E. And in Japan they have a couple of words that aim at this. One is ma. And ma you can translate as interval maybe. And interval, that's easier to translate than pace, isn't it?

[27:21]

Yeah. Yeah, so we could talk about intervals instead of pace. Okay, but ma doesn't just mean an interval, it means the moment in which connectedness can be Something like maximum connectedness can be felt. It would mean, if let's say you have the, sometimes you have the feeling of a field present. Maybe dancing or something like that. And you feel the field of people dancing. And if you dance over towards somebody who's a good dancer, you can feel... It's good dancing passing to you and you get a little better.

[28:26]

I always find the best dancer and dance next to him or her. I'm just kidding. Okay, so if you have a, if you feel this field, like in dancing, and you moved that field, you didn't lose that field when you did things, that would be staying with the ma point. Where the field can be felt at each moment of connectedness. And there's another word used in Shintoism, imanaka. And it means the sense that each moment is layered with past and future moments.

[29:28]

So the feeling that each moment is all time layered, multidimensionally layered. Yeah, now this kind of territorial practice appears when the now doesn't originally belong to the self. When the now belongs to the self, mostly you just feel your past kind of looking at things and it's all boring and predictable. When you start feeling the uniqueness of each moment, the vitality of each moment, Wenn du beginnst, die Einzigartigkeit und die Vitalität eines jeden Moments zu spüren, dann hast du diese Art von Feld, die wir das Feld des Alaya Vijnana nennen können.

[30:44]

Das auf gewisse Weise selbst auch multidimensional geschichtete Zeit ist. No, I'm saying these kind of, I don't know, kind of funny ideas. But if you get a feel for them, you begin to, it begins to affect how you notice the world. You begin to find yourself in a rich topography of the moment And you begin to find yourself in a rich topography of the moment. Where self-referential thinking doesn't have much to hold on to. So Dogen says to cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things.

[31:47]

Okay. If you say so. Yeah, it's not perfect. We've translated this before. I know. Half of you should have it memorized. Authenticate. Authenticate? Authentician. That's what I said. Did I say that right? Almost. Almost. Thanks. You're so kind. Okay. To cultivate and authenticate that there's 10,000 things in this room right now. So it means many, but it also means, you know, Actual things. Not a generalization. To authenticate means to make it real. Hey, this is where I live.

[33:07]

This is real. And to cultivate means you can change, develop. There's neuroplasticity, etc., So to cultivate and authenticate the 10,000 things, by conveying the self to them, I'm sorry to tell you, is delusion. That's the bad news. Now for the good news. To let the 10,000 things come forward and cultivate and authenticate the big self. He doesn't say the big self, but that's what he means. The self which covers everything. which doesn't possess the now, is realization or is enlightenment.

[34:16]

To let the 10,000 things come forward What do you think he's talking about? The ayatanas. When you feel these ayatanas, the five or physical senses and the mental sense, the six sense fields, When you let them come forward and cultivate and authenticate you and the now, this is the territory of Buddha's activity. Now it's fairly easy to go through the visual olfactory and hearing.

[35:30]

It's a little more difficult for taste and touch. But I think what you want to do when you're working with taste is notice how your tongue functions in your balance and in your state of mind. And the difference, for example, when you're sitting, when the tongue is at the roof of the mouth and when it's not. And how your emotions affect your mouth being dry or wet, etc. And working with touch. I think what you want to sense is the word we've been using, proprioception.

[36:43]

Which I mean in this case a spatial sense. How you feel spatially in space. So proprioception, proportion, which is also ma and so forth. And texture. Yeah, like everything has a kind of texture. Even the air. Okay, so that's the Vijnanas for now. Yeah. The territory of the now that is not originally possessed by the self. Where all things can come forward and cultivate selflessness. May God bless you.

[38:01]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.82