One idea that Jung has is that all heroes and people-seekers are yearning for the archetypal mother. I think someone person even says that this space and you're going through space is a constant coitus with the mother. One psychologist. And perhaps this story, I wonder a lot, but I don't think of it that way. Knowing my mother too, no. But perhaps the story of Psyche and Eros has to do with over, Aphrodite may represent, you know, I haven't studied this, I'm just sort of guessing.

[01:23]

Aphrodite may represent jealousy, comparison, and yearning, unfulfillable yearning. And overcoming that unfulfillable yearning yearning for the undefined, eros and psyche are united and that represents some kind of integration. Well, anyway, my sort of clumsy way of describing the things is only to point out that Buddhism just doesn't think about things this way. There's no personification of the universe and the world in this way. There is a kind of personification of the world as Buddha, but it's different.

[02:28]

Okay, so why am I bringing this up? One, again, to point out some differences. But also to say, we have this yearning, whether you're Asian or American or European, we do have a yearning for something that we can never quite reach. Where do we put this yearning? I can try to give you an idea of what the answer is in Buddhism. And also... Also in Buddhism we don't just ask where do you put the yearning, we ask how does the yearning arise.

[03:50]

What's it made from? And again, the Buddhist sense is not to go back in the past and say this is a basic myth that all of us have to act on. Even if it is a myth from your culture, it also is something made by you. So Buddhism doesn't look so much like where did it come in the past as an archetype or in your culture, but where did you make this from your culture? Are you beginning to feel some difference in the territory? No?

[05:01]

Yes? OK. So the sense in Buddhism is that all this territory here, , thinking dualism, et cetera. is not to find out how to fulfill this story. You do that to the extent that you can function well. But the main point is to get out of the story. And from another location, look back at the story, fulfill it from there. So first of all, you need this sense of an anchor location. Now, one anchor again is this cellular stability.

[06:03]

Or this physical sense of being able to be still inside. And the sense in my performance is to be located in the breath. Wait. Okay. So if you begin to develop the ability to be physically still inside and to be settled in your breath those two things eventually come together in a kind of

[07:09]

The other night I tried to explain it as a kind of smoother, softer, pliant place in you. Now, a few of the things that I talked about the other night in the talk in Vienna, I'm going to have to mention because most of you weren't there. No. The main anchor, though, that you need, the base you need, outside script, right? Get that idea? Is the five skandhas. No. This is a totally essential Buddhist, the five skandhas.

[08:27]

Now, how many people have been in seminars where I taught the five skandhas? You have? Did I teach it last year a bit? Quite a bit or a little bit? Yeah. Just two or three people have, right? More? you don't really get, should I, none of you get the five skandhas down, right? So I'm going to have to teach the five skandhas if I'm going to be able to teach the eight vijnanas. We'll see how and what detail we go according to the needs we feel here. And the five skandhas is a substitute for self. I call it the lifeboat of self. When you get out of the ship of self, you've got to have some place so you don't drown.

[09:45]

You climb into the lifeboat of the five skandhas. Okay, I would like right now to... Just see what you guys have to say. Please tell me something, comment, ask me something. I'd like to hear more about the uncorrected state of mind. Okay, well I'll see what I can do. Can you just loud say it? Okay. I think what I'd like to do is I'll be referring to it the whole time.

[10:46]

It's the basic practice of Zen Buddhism. But I'd like to come back to it, or have you bring me back to it, after I present to you the five skandhas and the eight vijnanas, okay? And don't be intimidated by 13 new things. Five skandhas and eight vijnanas, it's a baker's dozen. It's a baker's dozen. Do you have that expression in German, a baker's dozen? Do you understand what it means? 13 is a baker's dozen. What? Yeah. Yeah. Inhale, inhale.

[12:01]

Conk, you take psychology, they have the idea that information comes, that there's somehow a pre-conscious notion process before information has reached the whole process, which happens in the brain. And I was wondering into this idea that Buddhism, which happens in the brain, has reached the whole process, part of that kind of bulk of information that we're living with, that we're not aware of. Do you want to say that in German? Can you say the main essential thing? In cognitive psychology, there is a pre-conscious culture.

[13:07]

And we're not aware of this information reaching us in the conscious process. So we surround the experience with the stuff within. So is Buddhism bringing away some attention to that particular territory, so that we're more physically aware? It's trying. But in all these things, of course, it won't be perfect. Dogen expresses this by saying, arrival hinders arrival. Or sometimes enlightenment is called nirvana with a remnant.

[14:07]

Because as long as you're alive and perceiving, there's going to be some filters, there's going to be some distortion. Okay. The eight vijnanas are exactly what that's the attempt to deal with what you're asking. When I look at you, as soon as I have any kind of image of you, it's already part of my history. I can't see you within the realm of pure experience. Because as soon as I conceptually identify anything about you, it comes from my inventory of colors, people, what your eyes mean, and so forth.

[15:25]

So, now that's a simple idea, because if I have a concept of him, the concept arises from my history. Isn't that clear? So what does the word dustness mean in Buddhism? It's a common word, dustness. Literally means non-conceptual thinking. It means it's possible to think non-conceptual. So that's one, that's not the vijnanas, but that's one element here. And also, by the time I, what is your name? Alexander. By the time I in any way perceive Alexander, it's already in the past.

[16:30]

Okay. So there are practices, and I think I talked about it briefly at Cortona, not only being in the present free of identifying with past and future, But also being in the present of the present. Which means being at the source of thought and emotions, feelings, before they form emotions, feelings and thoughts. And those are practices related to that start out with like tracking a thought or feeling back to its source. Now make that idea a little clearer. Because it's important to get the idea. As if I have a headache, for instance.

[17:48]

I notice the headache when my head starts hurting. But I don't notice the things that caused me ten minutes or two hours ago to lead to the headache. Because I'm only present downstream in the perceptual process. Do you understand that idea? So Buddhist practice is to work your way upstream so you're present at the moment the perceptual process is unfolding not at the results downstream. And the Buddhist practice is to go forward in the moment where this conceptual thinking arises. And one is busy with this emergence and not so much with the result. And that's pretty basic Buddhist practice, and it's the kind of Buddhist practice that's almost impossible to achieve through mindfulness, that's almost only possible to achieve through sitting still meditation practice.

[19:07]

Now, let's take Alexander here as an example if you don't mind. Now, Alexander is not permanent. I hope that isn't disturbing for me to point that out. Alexander won't be around here forever. In fact, right now, he's changing quite a bit all the time. And we usually look at Alexander, another person, in ways which stabilize the picture. But there are ways of looking at him so you see the change more than the continuity and permanence. And So we can say Alexander has no permanent or inherent existence.

[20:45]

So how does he actually exist? He exists in a way that's interdependent with other things. He arises from a whole lot of causes. Breakfast. You know, his parents. How he felt when he got up this morning. These periods of meditation. These are... What is this? Lilacs? The fragrance of the fleeter. The fleeting fragrance of the fleeter. That arises in him. But that's how he exists.

[21:49]

But I can't see that. I can see how you don't exist. But I can't see how you exist. Because my eyes don't allow me to see interpenetration and impermanence. I should have said interpenetration and interdependence. I can know about it, but I can't see it. So we actually have this strange contradiction that I see how you don't exist, which I assume take as existence, but I can't see how you really exist. So this is part of the problem Buddhism decided to face is how do we see how we exist and not just how we don't exist. And relating to David's question, in which the usual way our senses function, they perceive how we don't exist.

[22:59]

The usual way our senses function, they perceive how Alexander doesn't exist. They don't perceive how he actually exists. Some other question? Yeah. I think it's quite interesting because it's a wow question. Because... You want to say that in German? ... So, um, Eternity?

[24:50]

That's a long time. And the second is that I'm not sure if . Anyone else want to say anything about the bow? I usually don't talk about it.

[26:00]

I put this in because I knew it would be somewhat controversial. Yes. But on the other hand, we practice this Yeah. Well, it's best to make a vow that's impossible. Then you don't have the problem of failing, because you're always failing. So you don't vow to realize Buddhahood, for example, with three people. What about the fourth person? Why are you so small-spirited that you limit yourself to three people? You see, with that logic, you can't say three people or 30 people.

[27:01]

You have to say all people. And all people is impossible. But it's a very powerful thing to do. Yeah, there's always a... Anyway, I put it that way just to point out that the sense of vows and right and wrong and punishment and heaven and hell don't exist in Buddhist culture. So the worst you get is a bad habit. You know, or you drink too much, or you do, I don't know what you do, but... Sometimes people go through their life not wanting the life they had.

[28:33]

I think of my father-in-law, my former wife, He never wanted to be a businessman. He wanted to live in the woods and do various things. He had a pretty good life. And what happened, of course, by not doing the life he wanted to, he passed the life that he wanted to do on to his son. So his son lives in the woods and does things, you know. So that's like a kind of fulfillment of the vow. His son fulfilled his vow. But probably it would have been better, if there's better and worse, for him to have vowed to have the life he did have.

[30:00]

When he died, that was the life he had. He didn't have another different life. If he'd recognized that 30 years earlier and said, this is the life I have, I will bring all my intelligence, desire, compassion, feeling to this life. I'll find everything I need right here in this life which I'm going to have. That's a vow. It's a hard thing to make, actually.

[31:01]

Because it means you have to exclude, recognize you're not going to have all these other five lives. And it means you have to recognize that the other five lives you didn't have, you bring what you need from those lives into the life you have. No, that's not exactly a Buddhist vow, but that's the way Buddhism understands vows. Now, Buddhism wants you to take a vow outside your script. But of course, really, all of our thinking is vowing. When I look out these beautiful windows and see these trees, And I say, oh, that's a tree.

[32:06]

That's really a kind of vow. I've made a decision that that's a tree and that I function that way. And if you take psychedelics, you'll see that it's not only a tree. And if you take drugs, you'll see that it's not only a tree. Could you speak more slowly, please? I mean, your English is so good, you have to go slowly for me. Okay. Thank you. What I was wondering was, does it mean that you are supposed to accept the kind of life you find yourself in and not wanting to change it, except bring all those qualities into the life you find yourself in that you wish to find outside it?

[33:08]

Or is it possible, within the life you find yourself in, to try and change it or improve it permanently? I mean, if you don't introduce the evidence that you actually would be there in the lives of them. Of course. Yeah, that's a philosophical question. But it can't really be answered philosophically. And it's a question based on seeing the world as structure.

[34:17]

And Buddhism doesn't really create or isn't interested in psychological structure, it's interested in psychological process. So these vows and so forth don't function as structure, they function as process, part of a process. Hmm. Hmm. So let me go back a minute to this thing, I'm still with you, is to this thing of comparative thinking. And you practice with sometimes not having comparative thinking. You see if you can get out of it. And again, sometimes you compare. We need to compare.

[35:31]

Now, distinguishing things is not the same as comparing things. I can distinguish this flower See it very clearly. And not be comparing it to anything else. There's an implied comparison. I mean, I'm looking at only this. But that's quite a different mind than saying, oh, that flower isn't as pretty as the other one or is just as pretty or something. So in the sense of this idea of a base or anchor you want a base state or initiatory state of mind that is affirmative accepting, non-comparing.

[36:45]

That's the first way, I mean, like when your computer comes on. By Macintosh. It says, welcome, I'm Macintosh. Then it gets down to business. So when you first see something, you see somebody, you kind of just see them. You don't think, oh, nice person, bad person, something like that. It doesn't mean I don't compare if it's necessary. But my energy isn't involved in instantly comparing, do I like, do I want, how do I feel, you know. I have no energy put into distinctions and detail. So my base energy, my base metabolism rests in affirmation and acceptance. Now, developing that base, that affirmative mind, accepting affirmative mind, is considered one of the essentials of Buddhist practice.

[38:05]

That doesn't mean you're always that way. That's just the starting point of each perception. Okay. Underneath it, yes, that's right. And that ability to have that affirmative accepting mind underneath it is what a vow is about too. Does that make sense? These are kind of big categories of Buddhist language that you can get the feeling for. It's a kind of meta-language.

[39:29]

And then you can begin to find yourself talking to yourself and to the world with the world in this meta-language. And then slowly that will change your more particular language. So Yeah, I want to finish a little bit this. So I can't really answer your question philosophically. But of course you can change your life. But where does that change arise from? I think that the base state is you keep accepting your actual situation If you have this process of finding just now enough, like just now, everything you need is here. In the divided world, everything you need is not here. But in the undivided world, everything you need is here.

[40:57]

So if you keep having this kind of mantra going through you, just now is enough, it becomes a gate to the undivided world. But in the divided world, just now is not enough. We have to have lunch soon and things like that. So just now is enough doesn't mean you force this to be enough in the divided sense. So you actually have a dialogue between the simplest way is like in your posture. You're sitting with a sense of the ideal posture of a Buddha. Simultaneously you're accepting the posture you actually have.

[42:06]

And those are not contradictory. You can completely feel and be informed by the posture of Buddha and totally accept your posture without putting yourself down. Now if you develop that as a process and you have this vow to accept as we were talking about and then change arises from that rises more from the undivided world You accept that change as familiar and of course. Yeah, that's the best I can do. You sort of have faith in the change coming to you that you've lost. I don't know. I don't know who's more Christian than me. No, faith, the word faith, daishinkan in Buddhism means faith rooted in experience and intelligence maybe.

[43:37]

Great rooted faith. So it's not faith in the... So yes, you have a kind of faith, but it's... maybe trust and you're not forcing it and you're not waiting you're listening and acting and you feel them as one activity And when you feel listening and activity is one thing, you can trust what comes up.

[44:41]

When there are two different things, then you may force things or, you know, et cetera. Okay, one more. I'm feeling it at length. Yeah, that's why koans look so funny. Yes. OK. One of the pyrodermas, or six dermas, I've changed it to six dermas. So there are six dermas. There were originally only five.

[45:45]

Naming and appearance. The other four. What? Oh, you want all the others? I'll give them to you later. I mean, there's no need to put them on now. Good, you guys are way ahead of me. Yeah? Georgian? All right, sure. And I'll come back to you. Okay, go ahead. It seems to be the basis for creation.

[47:11]

The people who have been particularly creative, they mostly suffer from this inattention. This concept is very different from the East where creation is sort of a repetition. As I said before, And what I'm interested in now is whether the concept, the type of the tourist district is compatible with Western thinking, where things should be put into practice.

[48:25]

That is the big difference between East and West in general. Can actually the acceptance of the Buddhist way of thinking be combined with our wisdom? Well, do you want volume one or volume two of the answer? Yes, I think that the Western way can be combined with Buddhist way of doing things.

[49:42]

Now, when an artist is painting and he turns on the radio so he can concentrate better on the painting, isn't that a common thing painters do? Anyway, it is. At least every painter I know practically does that. Painters particularly do. Okay, maybe Austrian painters, I don't know what they do. But it's anyway a fairly common thing to do. The point is when the person does that, what is he doing? He or she is trying to occupy representational thinking with the radio while they do the painting outside of representational thinking.

[51:03]

Somebody peered in the keyhole at Gogol, the Russian writer. How do you pronounce his name? Gogol. And they looked him in the thing and he was sitting writing like this. What a Buddhist would say is that both Gogol and the painter turning the radio are attempting to reach a more undivided state. They're trying to make a shift. They find they're more creative in certain states of mind than other states of mind. So if you have this state of mind and this state of mind and this state of mind, Right?

[52:20]

And this state of mind is more creative than this state of mind. What you basically get there is an undivided state of mind which connects all three. So Buddhism says, yes, shift to this state of mind if it's more creative. But it's even more creative to shift to the undivided mind and then move into any of the three. So I don't think that's so different than our creativity. And if you think, and this could be forever, but I'll try to make it real short. If you think that Asian cultures are less creative, It might be so.

[53:34]

That's not my experience. I mean, having lived in Japan in depth in the culture, it's just unbelievably creative. But it's just creative in different categories than we consider important. And those categories are culturally determined, that's true. But it is true that the basic overall framework of Asian cultures Asian culture. Emphasizing social stability and interaction more than we do. Emphasizing interdependence more than we do. That view isn't just Buddhist in Asian cultures, but Buddhism has been influenced by and influenced the culture too.

[54:47]

So there's some big meta-influence. But at the level of which Buddhism is coming into our culture, I think it's going to change the way we're created. It's true. And one of the differences would be like Allen Ginsberg's poems says, I've seen the best minds of my generation destroyed and blah, blah, blah. And Rambo took on the kind of alteration of his senses in his life. Yeah, alteration of senses. Changing. Altering. And this image of the artist is not very strong in Asia. Your first act of creativity is your life.

[56:02]

And you don't sacrifice your life for the sake of a painting or a poem. This is a certain limitation and you get a different kind of poetry. But the poetry may come out of suffering. But it doesn't come out of making yourself suffer in order to write a poem. I want to stop in a minute. But I want to come back to what you said. Yes, language belongs in there. But language exists on different levels. And we don't have time, but we could discuss and you can begin to notice quite different places from which you speak.

[57:11]

And in fact, one of the teachings of chakras, which I'm going to talk about in Vienna next week, Tuesday, one of the teachings is how you speak from different chakras. And that can make language less representational. Okay, so a dharma means to experience something in a wholeness and particularity. Means like if I lift this up, I lift it up with a feeling of completeness. When I put it back down, I feel like I'm completing something. So if I ring this bell, I feel picking this up.

[58:15]

That's a dharma. That's a dharma. I feel the coolness of the wood. That's a dharma. Each of those things is a little pause. I'm going to hit the bell. My mind and body and the tension is in this feeling of completeness. And I let the stick sort of hit the bell. That way of doing things is called Dharma practice. Okay. So if I hold these flowers up for you and you just name it and you can all do this you just say flower flower

[59:18]

And you're making no comparisons. Just the name flower. That changes your state of mind. You've used language to change your state of mind. Then you can peel the name off that. you're still using language to change your state of mind. You're still using language to change your state of mind by peeling the name off it. So you just have the appearance. You don't have any sense of anything other than the appearance of it as it hits your body. Und so habt ihr einfach nur die Erscheinung und die Erfahrung dieser Erscheinung, wenn sie euren Körper trifft. Und benennt sie noch nicht einmal. Aber ich sage euch jetzt auf der Ebene der Sprache, was ihr tun sollt.

[60:41]

Und ihr benutzt jetzt die Erscheinung, um alle Assoziationen zu entfernen. So that's also a dharma. So we have to use language. And we try to find another way to use language. Which recognizes how we exist. And also which can help us enter into how we exist. But always be able to peel the language off things. So I think we need a break. And lunch is at one. So without taking zazen posture, I'd like you to just be still for a moment.

[61:58]

I'm going to write on the board. I'll write more clearly. Does she say what I said? And my feeling is you get bored while I'm writing on the board, so I kind of do it quickly. I don't know if this works, but should I continue and try to write a little more clearly? What do you think? Yes, continue. More clearly, okay. Now this system that I'm presenting to you, this perceptual system, in monastic-type communities, is learned when you're a kid, practically. It's just around and it's familiar to people.

[63:10]

And it's... Much of this is in the Lankavatara Sutra. Which the... supposedly Bodhidharma brought to China and taught from. Bodhidharma is considered the first patriarch of Zen in China. Now the way this is taught though usually is in the interactions between the monks living in the community. It's taught in lots of tiny little ways. And you know, the word text in English means to weave. And this way of looking at things presupposes that your life is a kind of text.

[64:34]

And if you weave practice in, in just small units, it enters the whole weave. So you can just do small things like picking something up completely with a feeling of completeness. And putting it down that way. And that, if you do that, if you don't do that 100% of the time, but now and then, it actually begins to weave into your text and influence everything you do. So these are actually taught in lots of little ways. But here as lay people, we have to find some way to teach it to you, just in these two or three days.

[65:46]

Hmm. There's a koan, a phrase from a koan I liked is, what world are you going to put your body and mind into? This assumes you have a choice. Or something to say about what happens. And this dharma practice is a little bit like you were trying to paint something. And a good painter came up to you.

[66:48]

And said, well, don't do it this way. Do little strokes. You can do the whole painting in little strokes, the same little stroke all the way through the painting. And when you did that, you began to see that the whole painting came alive more. So what this practice is, is not to get you to change the world so much like making some big change. But you change it at the level of little strokes. One of the important ideas in Buddhism Maybe if I do it down here, that's fine.

[68:06]

Is that we have an eyeball? And there's an object that you see. Now that's, shall we say, fairly obvious, right? Okay. Okay. But what's not so obvious is that we also have here a field of perception. And this, the eye, is quite important. It's not just kind of seeing this object. So So we see something like I see this.

[69:12]

And I take it away and so what? And I see something else and then I see something else. But the sense of it is that this object has some sort of continuity. But my eye consciousness has a kind of continuity too. And if I look at this in a certain way, I don't just see it, I also mature my eye consciousness. And if I look at this in a certain way, I also mature my eye consciousness. I mature the eye continuum. Okay. And that also has something to do with how this object exists. Now, you also have not only the eye, you have three things.

[70:15]

One, two, three. Or maybe we should say one, two, three. Is this clearer? Oh, much better. I need a little appreciation every now and then. Anyway, so the I is something we take for granted. And then we see the object. And we think the object just exists out there. It was there before we were born and in some way will be there afterwards. But actually the feeling of goodness is the kind of partnership between this and this. You can see Giorgio matures his eye continuum and then he's able to make a building like this.

[71:28]

So each object is actually an opportunity to mature your eye continuum. Because your eye continuum is one of the places you live. Now this is also a practice of not being caught by objects and letting objects drain you of energy. Because normally we go through the day and you see too many things, you do many things, you feel kind of drained. So part of the practice of this kind of practice is to notice when you're nourished by the way you see things. Now, not only do you, when I look at something, do I nourish my eye continuum, but I also create a field of eye awareness by looking at something.

[72:54]

All right. What do I say next? Now my standard example of this that you've heard before is if I hold this object up here and you concentrate on it. And you can concentrate on it to the exclusion of everything else. Now that's related to the practice I gave you up here of naming appearance.

[73:54]

So, and this is one version of the practice of one-pointedness. And the skill of one-pointedness, the practice of one-pointedness is also an essential ingredient in being able to practice Buddhism. So you're concentrating on this. And now that you're concentrated on it, we can take it away. And can you maintain the concentration without the object of concentration? When you've done that, you've created a field of concentration that doesn't depend on an object.

[74:59]

Do you understand? It's actually again a physical sensation when you reach a field perception rather than an object perception. Then you begin to have the physical feeling that allows you to maintain the field concentration and bring the object back up into the field. Then you see the object differently. So the object which created the field concentration is then seen differently from the field of concentration.

[76:16]

Do you understand? Yes, no. No, okay, please. Well, you can understand this and this, right? But can you understand there's something in between? That's all there is to it. Oh, I see. Well, this is a challenge. Okay. This idea of a field consciousness is an essential idea in Buddhist practice.

[77:17]

So I'd like to somehow give you a sense of it. Extremely important. So I'll go through it just once more. You have the eye, the actual physical object of the eye. Okay. Eagle. Eagle. I remember. Okay, so you have the continuum of the object and you have the I and the continuum of the I consciousness. And the maturing of the eye consciousness or the eye continuum by the way you look at something.

[78:34]

And you have the establishment of a field of eye consciousness which is not dependent on the object of perception. Okay. Now, this may not be exactly true, but it is fundamentally true. And it fits, it's part of a whole way of being. which I'll try to make clear. Another example of it, again, this is a common practice that I've given you in standard Zen, is that you...

[79:35]

You hear yourself hearing. You don't just hear the object of the hearing. Now, in fact, when you practice zazen, most people within the first 10 minutes will shift out of the eye channel, representational thinking, and into the ear channel. And you suddenly begin to hear sounds differently. The birds will appear to you differently. And you didn't notice it before, but suddenly you start hearing the birds very clearly, almost as if they were inside you, and they are. Now, that's a kind of example, because you've gone from being caught in representational thinking,

[80:48]

And the zazen posture and paying attention to your breathing makes a shift to the ear channel. Bring jetzt einen Wechsel zustande zu dem Hörkanal. Or the field of hearing. Oder dem Hörfeld. And then you start hearing things, but not because the bird made you hear it, but because you shifted to the field of hearing and that made you hear the bird. Und dann hört man anders, nicht weil der Vogel einem jetzt dazu gebracht hat, anders zu hören, sondern weil man jetzt zu dem Feld des Hörens gewechselt hat und es gestattet ist, einem jetzt den Vogel zu hören. Does that make sense to you? Gibt das einen Sinn? Like, when you hear the bird from the representational thinking way, you hear it differently than when the field of sound, field of hearing arises, and then you hear the bird.

[82:04]

Okay. trying to write more food. We have the six dharmas. In the Lankavatara Sutra there are five. Wow! And no kundalini ease. But there's no ease there, so I passed that test yet. Okay, the first is name.

[83:06]

Das erste ist benennen. Okay. The second is appearance. Das zweite sind die Erscheinungen. Das dritte sind Sinneseindrücke. And the third one is... No, third. That's the question part of the pyramid. And the third one is association. And the fourth one is wholeness. And the fifth one, emptiness.

[84:31]

And the last one is suchness. Now, if there was a person in the school system here watching me when I pass. That's the same. For now, it's the same. Okay. Now, the... Why did the Buddhists do all this stuff? Because probably, basically, they were stuck without a God.

[85:38]

So they had nothing better to do. I mean, they had to figure out how do we exist here when no one's going to help us. Or not just that they didn't have a God, they also had no sense that there's anything outside this. There's no mind ground out there. There's no continuum or other out there. And this way of viewing the world was supported in China by the Taoist Confucian way of looking at the world. So just as a way to, just as an aside to show you something, the difference between Tibetan Buddhism and Zen Buddhism,

[86:42]

When Buddhism came into China, it ended a highly literate, urban, sophisticated way of life. In which there was one virtually 100% commitment to this everyday life is the scene of life. This is where you're going to live, die, suffer, etc., And in Tibet, there was not such a developed way of life. These were mountain people living up in remote places. So Buddhism became a system added to the Tibetan way of life.

[87:51]

And in China, Buddhism became absorbed into the daily life, into the everyday life. So there's advantages to us Westerners to study both Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. We have a way of life more like the Chinese than the Tibetans. But Buddhism has been so absorbed into the Chinese life that it's almost invisible. And many, even Buddhists, have lost sight of what's Buddhism, what's Chinese, and what's Japanese, and so forth. So in Tibet we can see the Buddhism more clearly, and in China you can see how it can be part of our daily life.

[89:06]

And Buddhism consciously disguised itself as everyday life in China. And then it developed a kind of meta-language about that that's in the koans, so you could sort of see it if you knew how to speak the meta-language. Okay, so the Buddhists are saying, how do we actually exist? So they start very simply at the level of, you know, a more primitive level than brushing your teeth. Or simple level. Here's this flower. And the Zen tradition starts from the Buddha holding up a flower. And Mahakashapa smiled.

[90:21]

This supposedly is the first, you know, of the beginning of the lineage of Zen. So this is a wonderful flower pot with lotuses on it and everything. It's great. So when you see this flower, what's happening? How does that become part of your consciousness? How do you remember it a month from now or years from now? This is the kind of question they asked and which they tried to work out with this kind of system. Okay, so they... Maybe I'll put on the same board the five skandhas, okay? Okay, first is form.

[91:53]

Perception. Perception. Impulses or associations. Associations. Now, you'll see later, you get that far, why associations are associated with impulse.

[93:16]

Now, the six vijnanas, which I haven't told you, eight vijnanas, which I haven't told you yet, which appear out of this one, appearances and sense impressions. And the articulation of this one.

[93:45]

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