So maybe for this evening I could make a distinction between, to start in on some of this, between awareness and consciousness. Now, I think such a distinction is fundamental to practice. Now, we're lucky... English has a lot of words. Unfortunately, they're mostly nouns, but it has the largest vocabulary of any Western language, so it allows us a lot of opportunities. Even German, which has more verbs than English, has a significantly smaller vocabulary, and for instance, they don't have a word for mind. Geist doesn't quite do it. But still, we can't You can't assume that the words that we use to translate Sanskrit and Pali, Tibetan words, concepts into English, that there is much equivalency.

[01:10]

Now, I'm a person, I don't, I'm trying to teach Buddhism and practice Buddhism entirely in English. Because I don't think that usually, I mean, karma and dharma, that's okay. But in general, it's not too helpful to try to use these terms from other languages, I think, because they... Come on in. There's seats up here if you want. Because they have no coin. You can't spend them in our... They don't have the filaments. They don't connect into our language. They just kind of sit there. So I think it's better to use English words, but we have to realize that we need to use them in ways that we develop them as technical terms.

[02:19]

So I'm defining here consciousness and awareness in a very specific way. Mostly, they are overlapping. Now, we tend to have a very homogenized view of the world, which I think goes back to, I don't know, 17th century or something like that. For example, the word common sense. Common sense means nowadays, I presume in Australia as well as England and United States, it means a sense common to others, right? Originally it meant a sense common to the senses. And we don't have that because we don't have much experience of a sense common to the senses. And we don't make much distinction in English between emotions and feelings. We say, I feel angry, etc.

[03:21]

But in Buddhism there's a big distinction between emotions and feelings. And we have to sort that out or you can't understand the skandhas and vijnanas and so forth. So I'm using these two words that are given to us by English, consciousness and awareness. Now consciousness means, and consciousness fits pretty well what I mean. The SCI part of consciousness means to cut, to separate. And con or com means together. So consciousness means how we separate things together. We all agree this is a microphone, this is a bell, and we have different names, and this is a rug, and that's a ceiling. Those are separations between floor and ceiling that we have agreed upon. And that's what I'm using to mean consciousness.

[04:27]

Awareness, the word awareness, the root is something like to watch, to be wary, etc. It's not as, doesn't as precisely connect, it's not as accurate for how I'm defining it as the word consciousness is. Okay, so consciousness, by consciousness I mean our divided, comparative, conceptual consciousness, which for the most part is shared with others. In fact, we have a threshold if you start, again, if you start to have experiences that other people don't have, we get a little nervous about that. because we want even our own private thinking, we want it to be somehow confirmed or shared or shareable with others. So we have a threshold below which we're hesitant to go.

[05:31]

Which in fact, if you meditate, you have to be willing to have states of mind which you're not sure anyone has ever experienced before or states of mind that it doesn't make sense to share particularly if you are around people who don't also meditate, but they're also unshareable states of mind. Now, if you want to seriously meditate, you've got to be willing to have states of mind that are unfamiliar and you're not sure anyone else has ever had them, and that means you have to have enough faith and practice not to think you're going crazy. But then you might be going crazy, you know. So you have to be able to determine a state of mind that's wholesome or whole enough for you to trust and a state of mind that's divisive in some way that maybe you should be cautious about. No one can make these decisions but you.

[06:35]

So also practice means to come to that point where you can trust yourself very deeply. Okay, what's awareness? When you decide to get up, say, at 6.02, say we're going to meditate at 7.45, so some of you decide you don't have an alarm, you're going to get up at 7.15 or 7.16 or something. Now, some of you, some people do have the capacity to decide to get up at 7.16 and Hi. Come on in, and there's seats here and there. You haven't missed anything, don't worry. So you decide to get up at 7.16, say, and by gum, when you wake up, you look at your watch, and it's 7.16.

[07:48]

Any of you have that experience sometimes? How do you do it? But then you wake up at 6.15, 6.16, 2.16. No, but worry has something to do with it. You were not conscious during the night, but something woke you up. I call that awareness. Or you're walking along with a bunch of packages, say, Christmas time, and you slip on the ice or something, and you fall. You've got 16 packages, and you've got a nose, ears, mouth, elbows, a sidewalk, and two or three people beside you, and usually you're not hurt.

[08:54]

Usually something takes everything into consideration. You may even let the packages down carefully and not hurt yourself. What does that? Consciousness is much too slow to do that. Consciousness can't figure out all those things. That, how fast awareness, that's what I also call awareness, and it's extremely fast. Or so fast we could almost say it stopped. In other words, it is cognizant of what's around you. So cognizant it doesn't need... It's already cognizant. Does that make sense? We don't train... Our culture trains consciousness. We do not train awareness... We do not open our children to awareness except to teach them not to wet the bed at night.

[09:57]

I mean, that's about the only thing I can think of that we use awareness for except for us in sports. That awareness is implicitly present in sports, in tennis and race car driving and so forth. Because you have to act much faster than you can think and in driving. But yogic cultures tend to have a certain amount of the education is of awareness and developing awareness and not just developing consciousness. And the success of our Western culture and also much of its problems are the extreme emphasis we have put on, the primary emphasis we put on, educating consciousness and ignoring awareness. What meditation practice does and mindfulness practice does is very specifically educate awareness. Now, we're not looking at a baby's mind.

[11:01]

A baby's mind is... A baby's quite aware, but a baby is not... has not matured either consciousness or awareness. So we're not trying to return to a baby's kind of awareness. We're trying to develop, just as consciousness can be developed, Awareness can be developed. So let me, I think I should stop in a moment. So let me look at this transition which we go through every day, twice a day of waking up, going from sleep to waking and going from waking to sleep.

[12:02]

Now what you're doing is you're going from an emphasis on consciousness to an emphasis on awareness. And you know for yourself, if you're particularly anxious or something's bothering you, it's very hard to fall asleep because energetically you are in consciousness. Consciousness is not sleep, isn't sleeping. I mean, this whole joke of, you know, you count sheep or something like that, it's not so different from counting your breath. It's a repetitious activity that moves you out of consciousness and a visual activity which moves you out of consciousness into awareness. So what does that tell us about awareness? Awareness is a conduit or a medium for images and intention, but not a conduit or medium for concepts and language. So worry, as a feeling, can be transmitted in awareness

[13:11]

So we have to have a metaphor now. And I think that it's best to imagine mind as a kind of liquid with viscosity, temperature, density, etc. So when you fall asleep, let's say you're waking up. You're waking up and you've been dreaming. You wake up and you try to remember your dream and you can't remember your dream. Why can't you remember your dream? It's not because your memory is poor. It's because the dream occurred in another kind of mind. It occurred in another kind of liquid. Now, if you want to remember the dream, you probably have discovered that if you kind of pay attention to your breathing or a certain feeling in your body or you can catch a whiff or feeling or image from the dream,

[14:20]

you can go right back into the dream and even continue the dream. So that tells us that to the extent that dreaming mind is an example, one example of awareness of a mind that's more awareness than consciousness, you can see that awareness has a kind of mental activity But it's a mental activity that is primarily intentional and imaginal. So imaginal mind and intentional mind are possible in awareness and they don't function so well in consciousness. The conceptual, comparative, language-based mind is energetically different And you can begin to feel that difference yourself in waking and sleeping.

[15:27]

Now, when you want to go to sleep tonight, if you're familiar with this, you have a feeling for awareness, you can go to sleep just like that, basically. You just shift out of consciousness into awareness and you'll be asleep in a moment. But for most people, it's a transition of 10, 20 minutes to kind of let your thinking subside and go and let awareness up. It's almost like there's a shift. Awareness comes up and when awareness is more, let's call it sleeping mind or dreaming mind, is more present, then it pulls you out of consciousness and you start to do what we call sleep. Now what meditation is trying to do is give you an erect posture in which there's physical alertness, but you let go of consciousness and move into awareness. This is the first stage of meditation, is to begin to go, be able to go quite freely from consciousness to awareness and back and forth.

[16:40]

So for a couple practices that we can start out with, one is to see if you can notice tonight this difference in feeling between not just waking and sleeping, but consciousness and awareness, and think of them or feel of them as two different liquids, two different kinds of mind or two different kinds of soup stalks. Maybe a chicken soup stock and a broccoli soup stock or something like that. Well, there's lots of minds. There's lots of minds. And perceptual mind can be conceptual and it can be... a mind that's primarily awareness. But maybe we can come to that more tomorrow.

[17:56]

Right now, I'm just trying to make a very basic distinction between awareness and consciousness, between a mind which divides things and a mind which joins things. And awareness tends to discover and act through connectedness and Consciousness tends to act and present the world to us as separation. Now, so let me give you another practice, though, is that you get a feeling for space connecting. And you can just take a phrase like space connects. And between now and tomorrow, you can walk around thinking space connects, space connects. And sometimes if you repeat it to yourself enough or you have it in the background of your mind, there's a critical mass shift and you actually begin to feel it, almost like you were in an aquarium.

[18:57]

And we're all seaweed, you know. And you can feel this, you know, connectedness, you know. Or you can take a phrase. You all have a phrase already in your mind now which is already separated. When I look at... What is your name? Annie? Hi. When I look at Annie, as a Westerner, I have a view established in me that Annie and I are already separated. Now, Our language is so strong. If I say, Annie and I are already connected, this is already something a little strange because connected means something to us. I've never taken you out on a date. I don't know you. We're not already connected. But I can hardly say those words because connected doesn't mean this connectedness. It means some kind of specific relationship.

[20:00]

But I can look at this candle or these flowers. Let's take the flowers. And I can feel, I can look at them and I can have a view that is established. I can have a view that's established that says, already separated. And I think, hi. And I can think, already separated. Without even thinking, my assumption is, is that we're already separated. And I think, oh, that's a nice flower and probably smells nice. And I make an effort to establish a connection. I like it, I write a poem about it or something like that, you know. The flower in my hand, etc. But if I assume I'm already connected to the flower, I don't have to make an effort to establish connection.

[21:09]

Energetically, I'm in a different world. So you can start with a phrase, another second practice you can have, is take a phrase like already connected, and when you look at something, say to yourself, you know, like as a kind of implicit view, and you start out with reminding yourself, already connected. So I look at you and I think, already connected. I look at you and I think, Elizabeth, and I feel already connected. And I do. Not only because you're my daughter's name. And I had a cold like yours, so I feel already connected. So here I am in Australia feeling already connected. So maybe we, I haven't given you any Zazen instruction or anything, but maybe we sit for a few minutes and then we'll stop and I hope have a good night's sleep.

[22:29]

Now, my habit is to ring the bell three times to start and once to end. And ideally, of course, you have no thought about when the bell might ring. But if you do, that's OK, too.

[22:54]

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