I gave a little talk the other day in Colorado at the Monastery Practice Center in which I called it jokingly, From New Sphere to Move Sphere. And new sphere is Teilhard de Chardin's idea that the more we develop, the more we become kind of pure spirit. And Christian and Western religious life has even tried to get the soul, the earthy, out of spirit and make it pure spirit. So one of the practices in Zen is this koan mu.

[01:05]

Where you try to take the meaning out of the word mu, which means emptiness. And just say it as a physical quality on everything. Until every mental, physical phenomenon, perception has this mu accompanying it. So in a sense you're physicalizing the mind and mentalizing or voicelizing the body. So I called it from no-sphere to mo-sphere. So I won't say more about it now.

[02:32]

Except that one way to get more of a sense of your heart is to feel it physically. And to see if you can have a sense of location here. To take a big jump, it would be almost like you could feel yourself here. Looking up at your head. But we don't. We look down at our heart. Where are you looking from? What is this sense of location you have?

[03:41]

I mean, that's a very important thing to notice that you have a sense of location that you look down at your heart. And that sense of location is something you've learned. And it's very tied to the eyes as part of your brain and thinking as visual. And that's why I was suggesting to you another way of seeing where you see fields rather than objects. And the more you can see fields rather than objects, the more you can feel things with your body, And feel things with your heart.

[04:52]

Now I'm describing it this way because I don't want to make it sort of magical and religious. But I'm speaking about it as a spiritual craft. Which, as Westerners, it's quite hard for us to do. And actually, in a realized sense, for any culture it's hard to do. But each culture and each person has their own bias And that bias becomes your path. So if you just begin to sense the sense of location you have, and really locate yourself in that location consciously, you can begin then to sense the possibility of other locations.

[06:15]

So if you don't locate yourself where you're located, you don't know other locations are possible. you take your location for granted. Now this sense of location is a very important quality in the sense of ego and self. And when you can begin to see that you have a sense of location. When you begin to see that you have a sense of location, You are really creating the real possibility of being free of self.

[07:25]

And letting that sense of location float. Yes. Okay. Well, if you say your feet are down here, that's a sense of location. Your feet are down there somewhere. Yes. Yes. but where you locate yourself in your body. Yeah, yeah.

[08:29]

I don't know why I keep talking about these strange things. But really it's tremendously basic but very hard to see. The ability to really see it requires probably the yogic ability to sit very still. Now, I'm speaking about this from my own experience. But I think it's helpful to be able to infer it from language. In other words, even if you don't have this experience, if I can make it clear to you that this is a possibility or makes sense,

[09:40]

It makes it much more likely that you can have this experience. To infer it creates the possibility of being it. Infer means to ensure some, to like draw a logical conclusion. Yeah, to the depth. To infer isn't quite as Titus to deduct but it's like if you see smoke you can infer there's a fire I mean to assume to assume somewhere between in assume assume and deduct So you can see I think all of you that you have a sense of your feet being down there and

[10:55]

And you have a sense of the sky being up there. But the sky is right here. Starts here. You're all sitting in the sky. It's just a way of looking at it. But you have to make that little jump. Oh, I'm a sky sitter. So that's one reason we turn our feet up, actually, in Zazen. They're not down there. They appear looking at us. They're looking at us, or we're looking at them. And in meditation practice your feet become soft and warm and friendly.

[12:02]

Maybe I should do a seminar about friendly feet. Get very friendly with your feet. And you know that all your acupuncture points in your body and basic organs in your body are in your feet. So let's accept you have a sense of location. Now, I don't know, I almost need a blackboard.

[13:47]

Do we have a, not for now, but during the day, this afternoon, is it possible to have a blackboard? A chalkboard, what do you call it? Is it possible to get a blackboard to write on? You'll try? Okay, fine. Because maybe I'd like to turn the five skandhas upside down and show them to you upside down. And since we brought up the five skandhas, I'll at least tell you verbally now, though it turns out it's much easier if you can see them. And there's a lot of problem with the translation of English and German and Sanskrit and so forth. But basically they are form, feeling, perceptions, the grasping of things, and associations or impulses, and consciousness.

[15:09]

It's a way of creating a map on a cloud. To give some structure to a cloud. Well, I've heard it in miniature and didn't understand it. So does that mean I shouldn't do it again, right? So Lutgaard thinks I should do it again and you don't think I should. Okay. Okay, so all of you who don't want me sitting on the left and all of you who want it sitting on the right... Now normally we, in addition to having a sense of physical location,

[16:20]

You sense your location in the primary processes of your psychological definitions. So let's take the fireman. His primary process is to put out fires. But he has a secondary process where he likes fires. And his sense of location sometimes goes down toward the liking fires. Do you have the picture? Well, okay, there's this primary process that he puts out fires. There's a secondary process that he likes fires. He wants them to burn for quite a while before he puts them out.

[17:31]

So his sense of location of liking fires moves down here, away from the primary process. But it's attached by a rubber band to the primary process. And wherever he likes fires too much, the rubber band brings him back to the primary process. Now, if a person loses that rubber band, and their sense of location becomes down here, he becomes an arson. And if you lose your sense of location entirely and go into the unconscious, you can become crazy. So you need to take care of that rubber band.

[18:32]

So the rubber band is one sense of ego as well as the location is a sense of ego. And you need to know how to keep that rubber band attached. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah, she may, that may be one thing he does, right? Yes. Do you mean that the primary process always describes the so-called good motivations and the secondary the bad ones, like extinguishing fire and kind of... No, that's too simple an image.

[19:58]

Often the secondary process is better. So let's take another example. A person is a banker. And they really want to be a poet. And the secondary process is being a poet or a painter. And at some point they simply can't get on the subway any longer or the drive to the bank and this secondary process of being a poet or painter comes up. Now, some people are able to balance those, like there's an American poet named Wallace Stevens, Who was a top insurance executive and at the same time one of the two or three major poets in American English.

[21:07]

So he was able to integrate secondary processes and primary processes. So you can either have one or the other or integrate them. And in all situations, you're in a play among them. Although, since primary and secondary processes are not as controlled by the primary process. Unconscious material or activity, though not bad activity necessarily, but unconscious activity is more likely to appear in secondary processes. Let me just finish this idea before we go to lunch.

[22:34]

The problem is, if you are rigidly located in a primary process, You are probably psychologically very brittle. Brittle means breaks easily. Something that's very hard, but... Spröde. Spröde, okay. So if you are too located in a primary process, which is generally a consensual identity, Now we have a consensual identity.

[23:39]

Do you understand what I mean by that? We all agree that the stairs are there and the elevator is over there and we're going to come back here after lunch. We all agree to keep our clothes on during the seminar and things like that. I remember my little daughter at the airport starting to take her clothes off when she was two or three. And I said, we don't take our clothes off at the airport. She said, doesn't everyone want to? I said, that's a secondary process. Primary process is we keep our clothes on at the airport.

[24:44]

So we have a consensual identity. But if that consensual identity and the primary processes of your psychological needs Are too rigid and too firmly located, you're psychologically fragile. You're much healthier if you have a rubber band and it can stretch and you can move that location. But if you stretch that rubber band too far, you can be in trouble. You've got the picture? Okay. Now, what happens in meditation? Is you begin to have a field consciousness. And you can let that sense of location move quite freely because the rubber band becomes quite strong.

[26:04]

And you can even let go of the rubber band entirely. And you can begin to trust an inner process which takes care of you. But first it's good to sense how location works in your identity. And just become familiar with yourself. Intimate with yourself. So you begin to feel at ease with both the presence of secondary and primary processes. And that's what the first part of meditation practice is for the first few years, is developing this intimacy and at easiness with yourself.

[27:11]

As I said this morning, you begin to feel you're sitting up in a kind of strength. And the more you have that kind of being in a kind of strength, and an intimacy with yourself, you begin to trust yourself more. And you begin to allow more of the territory of who you are to be present in your life. And you're not tied so anxiously to maintaining primary processes and a mind which views yourself as the public criticizing you. So the main quality I'm emphasizing now in meditation is intimacy.

[28:36]

And intimacy is a bigger territory than knowledge. You can come to the limits of your knowledge of yourself and knowledge of the world. But there's no limits to intimacy. Okay, so please let's go have lunch. And don't lose sight of I don't know what. When you come back, let's practice intimacy with ourselves in meditation.

[29:39]

Since it's 1.15, we're going to have either one and a half hours or two hours. What? Three. Yeah. Since we're going to have one and a half hours or two hours, let's have three. Not three hours. We're back at three. All right. So I'll see you all at three o'clock. Is there a window or something we can open to get a little air?

[31:20]

Or are you all... Isn't it a little warm in here? At least for a few moments. Let's see. If it gets too cold, please close the window. Tomorrow morning when we start sitting, if you could sit again as we just did along the walls, and if you could sit more or less in the same places, then I can for sure straighten the postures of the people who I didn't today.

[32:21]

Now before I start on whatever I'm going to start on, would anybody like to say something? Yes. Yes. I started sitting two months ago and since then my right knee is giving me big problems. It's quite painful and sometimes I think it's just one big torture.

[33:23]

So I'd like to hear something about it. six months a year.

[34:35]

In the beginning you just have a lot of discomfort, so it's better to try to sit for short periods of time and increase them slowly. But the ego is going to try to stop you from sitting. That had not occurred to you at lunch. In fact, such Duty to humankind didn't occur at lunch at all. It only occurs when you started meditating. And if the ego can't embarrass you through your duty to humankind, it'll tell you your knee is about to die. And as long as the ego can get away with this, it will threaten you with anything that threatens the ego will threaten you very deeply.

[35:46]

But once you realize this is very basic Buddhism at such a fundamental level, it's the activity of meditation. But when you can sit through whatever comes up, you have a tremendous ego strength as a result of it. It's very strange. If you can Not let your ego push you around, you make the ego stronger. Stronger in a good sense.

[36:59]

Not stronger in a sense, I'm the only guy around. But I don't care if there's lots of you guys around, I'm comfortable. and we have you know as I've often said we have no puberty rights we have nothing that shows us that life is more difficult than our parents thought it was So I think it's good myself to have this difficulty which isn't hurting you. It's just hurting. Or maybe it's hurting you. The you of you is hurting.

[38:09]

In any case, in the end you either want to sit or you don't. And you find it's a useful way to explore yourself or you don't. But if you think that your sitting is doing actual physical damage to you, then sit in some way that it's not. Okay, one more maybe or something, then we'll... Yes. Yes. I'm also sitting since two months, and just since about a week I have difficulties that I start falling asleep during sitting, and I'm experiencing this right now through the seminar too, so it's quite an obstacle right now, so what can I do?

[39:36]

It means your zazen is working. Really? So the ego says, ooh, I'm really getting exposed now. Go to sleep. So this very difficulty is where your zazen's at right now. It's good. It's good. Have you ever noticed when you're trying to read a book, particularly if you're a bit sleepy, a book that's demanding? So you're reading away. And you notice you've fallen asleep. So you wake back up and you try to read again. And you read the page and you're perfectly clear and then next thing you know you're asleep.

[40:38]

So you wake up and then you read again and then you fall asleep again. Did you ever notice that you fall asleep on almost exactly the same word? Uh-huh. This word is asking something of you. So two things happen. One is, your ego says, go to sleep. You don't want to face whatever you might think of if you really saw what that sentence meant. Your primary process says, go to sleep. But your secondary process says, yes, go to sleep. And we can sneak it in past the ego. So actually two things happen at once.

[41:44]

Going to sleep allows you to understand something you can't through consciousness. It opens you to something. And going to sleep also protects the ego. So, this is quite good. And that's what zazen is all about. To try to find that territory where you can find out what happens when you're asleep, but allow things to happen which don't happen when you're conscious. So this is part of becoming intimate with yourself. Now, you also have an old habit that as soon as certain processes start, secondary or unconscious, you tend to go to sleep.

[42:57]

Because we have two forms of consciousness that are part of our life and our culture. waking and sleeping and we divide what like dream and imaginal consciousness mostly occurs in sleeping now meditation practice awakens dreaming and imaginal type consciousness So you're used to sleeping when that happens, so you go to sleep. So if you're going to find out this third state of consciousness, which is neither waking nor sleeping, you've got to get past the sleep trigger.

[44:04]

You've got to be able to let things happen which trigger sleep, but you don't go to sleep. Now there's two ways to do that. One is to get a lot of sleep so that you're not so sleepy when you meditate. Another is to really develop a subtlety that can move in this territory without falling asleep. And the very reason the most important time to do sadhana in the morning is because you're sleeping. Your dispersed body, your dispersed dream body, is all over the place, like the memory of a computer on a hard disk. And when you wake up, you're trying to get yourself to reappear on the screen. So you're scattered all over the disk, all over the planet.

[45:42]

And the alarm clock goes off. And you go, boom, and you try to bring yourself onto the screen. So you wake up and you say, oh, I know who you are. But you want to actually do zazen when this process is not complete. Now, a third way to attempt to do it is before you go to zazen. Thank God she's here. A third way to try to not fall asleep in Zazen is to have two cups of strong coffee. It doesn't work. Because it locks you into cognitive processes. So you can stay awake during zazen, but real zazen doesn't happen if you have a lot of coffee or caffeine in you.

[47:09]

So if you're like me and sometimes you get two or three hours sleep, and there's a bunch of new students who are in the zendo, And they don't want to see the Zen Master sound asleep on his cushion. You have two cups of strong coffee. You have. I have. So at least you look good for the new students. Your backbone is rigid with coffee. But it's more honest to just go in and say, listen... Okay, are you all okay?

[48:21]

Pretty good? Yeah? Okay. Well, I'm sorry, here we go. I don't know if I can do this, but we'll see. There's probably a picture of me on the other side now.

[48:36]

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