What do I mean by a distinction between intellectual and philosophical? I would say an intellectual statement is something like, the auto is the opiate of the masses. The automobile. The opiate of the masses. Now, you can't practice that. And to even understand it, you have to know a little bit about Marx. You have to wonder if a car is a form of religion. If religion is the opiate of the masses, is the car the opiate of the masses? And who are the masses anyway? This all requires thinking. That's an intellectual statement.

[01:02]

At one time, Huey Newton, who was the founder of the Black Panthers, was a good friend of mine. And he used to have a tape message on his answering machine when you called him and it said... Power to the people. Hi, this is Huey. And a friend of mine said to Huey once, when you say power to the people, how come I always feel left out? Usually believe in their thinking. That the world can be understood through thinking. Buddhism says the world can't be understood through thinking. And you need... So thinking is used in Buddhism.

[02:05]

But thinking is used to point out thinking, to point out thinking as a construct, and to point out the world which can't be known by thinking. Another kind of truism of Buddhism, if you don't accept that the self is a construct, you can't really practice Buddhism. Or you can practice it, but if you don't realize the self is a construct, at some point you won't practice. You won't be really practicing. Okay. And I'm using self loosely because Jung uses self one way, you know, etc. Okay. Okay. Now, I'm actually going to try to teach you something.

[03:17]

I'm not a very good teacher. So, I'm going to try to do this right, right clearly and things like that. So, that's, I'm sorry to be so simple-minded, that's a line. Or we can say it's a mark. Now the idea of a mark is actually, Buddhism always has to start with the really basic ingredients. Because as I said earlier, you spend a good part of your life asleep. Does it help if we do that? You can sit there. We spend a good part of our life asleep, but we don't study our sleep.

[04:29]

We also live in our consciousness. But we don't understand the ingredients of our consciousness. Because consciousness is also a construct. because consciousness is also a construction. So the basic study of Buddhism, other than meditation, is the study of how consciousness is constructed. And meditation is one of the main tools you use to study how consciousness is constructed. Again, if you were running through a bus, it's hard to study how consciousness is constructed. If you're sitting still enough, you can begin to see the arising of consciousness in tiny little ways.

[05:30]

Now, one of the questions that I'm presenting to you today again is, is in what sense is Buddhism a religion and in what sense is it psychology? And these questions come up also because I spend a great deal of time with Ulrike. And we, she's been We've been together for some years and working together for five years or so. And she translates now for the last few years for me all the time. And suddenly she'll say to me, I don't understand that. I'm not even sure it's true. And I'll say, but you've been translating it for three years and practicing it.

[06:30]

So she says, yeah, I'm just translating it. Now I'm realizing, what have I been saying? So in the background of these questions, like, you know, is this psychology or something like that? Or religion? She'll say to me, Where do you shave your head anyway? So that led to the Sashin lectures of this whole practice of meeting in objects. Okay, and of course Buddhism doesn't have a psyche. And Buddhism also doesn't have the therapist. These are big differences. And this whole way, psyche and And Eros unite, getting rid of the jealousy of Aphrodite.

[07:36]

And Aphrodite represents, I would say, jealousy and yearning. And how you overcome yearning for the undefined by the joining of Eros and Psyche. And Psyche becomes one of the words that's close to soul, spirit, and soul. But But one of the characteristics of this word psyche is that behind it is a story. And Jungian archetypal psychology and Hillman's version of it is all based on the story. Jungian archetypal psychology and also Hillman's version of it are all built on stories.

[08:42]

And how the archetype and the story organize our consciousness. And this is not Buddhism. The story is not important in Buddhism. I mean, recognizing your story is important. Recognizing your script. But Buddhism is all based on getting free of your script and then from the position of that freedom, studying your script. Now, I'm not saying one's better or worse I'm just trying to look at the differences Now, one thing that Buddhism has done... Let me give you a kind of general picture of Buddhism

[09:45]

It's developed a big teaching which describes what the world is. And then it's developed particular versions of that teaching that are Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, and so forth. And then there are, it's like a big umbrella and then smaller umbrellas. And then under those smaller umbrellas of Japanese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism, there are many techniques of how you relate to these umbrellas. Now, different cultures live in different skandhas and different chakras. I would say Chinese people, Japanese people live in a different skandha and a different chakra than we do. So that means they need different methods to relate to these umbrellas.

[11:02]

Now it may be, if you're a Buddhist and living in the West, the techniques of relating to the umbrella of Western Buddhism which is developing will be psychotherapy as a major means. So unless this umbrella of Western Buddhism will be partly shaped by psychotherapeutic concepts and practices, and Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth are already affecting the way psychotherapy is practiced. So that's kind of the one big picture. Now, another picture that I think is important right now is these Indian guys were really philosophical.

[12:06]

And China is not so philosophical. China emphasized doing things, so doing it. And so it's been the two, India and China have really developed the Buddhism we have today. Now these Indian guys are sitting around thinking. A few thousand years ago. This precedes Buddhism. And they said, you know, as I mentioned, this is Cortona. They said, yeah, waking mind, that's great. But waking mind doesn't know sleeping mind. And so waking mind can't be the whole of reality. It's not a vehicle through which you can know the whole. And sleeping mind, or let's say dreaming sleeping mind, we know also is not a way to know the whole.

[13:12]

I mean, it's a different kind of world. Dream the other... Well, I won't tell you the dream. Oh, maybe I will. I'll tell you a different one. I had these guys come up to... It was a kind of New Age sort of situation where these Westerners dressed as American Indians were chanting. And I thought to myself, I'm so tired of this new age and people aren't Indians pretending they're Indians. And they had different kind of masks on. Some with and without. And they were chanting through the masks and using them.

[14:15]

And it sounded, sometimes it was like opera and sometimes chanting. Sometimes folk singing. I actually became incredibly touched and I was weeping listening to them. And they did two chantings for where I was and the people I was with. And then they moved slightly and began chanting for another group of people. And they were raising money too. And I said, oh, shh. But then I was in Austria and I had this dream. But I thought, but this was so great. And I gave them 50,000 shillings. Then I thought, well, that's an awful lot of money to give them. Then I thought, oh, I should have given them 100. Because they touched me so deeply. And then I went back with this friend of mine.

[15:28]

And we decided that we would go to the city and I could see the city spread way out. And then I realized that these white American Indians were on a spaceship. And the spaceship was floating right off there and I could see it. And I said to somebody, you know, it's right there, but I can't, I could almost throw a stone at it, but it wouldn't reach it because things don't fall in space, they just float. They're so close but I can't touch them. I have to touch them in some other way. And then I went out and I started walking and this friend, we were thinking whether to drive or whether to walk through this great city. And then I realized actually I was inside my body and the spaceship was my heart.

[16:32]

And I could see my heart floating in the space of my body. And when I went out to walk, I was going for a walk across my shoulders, and then down my arm was the road to the city. Okay. Anyway, so... A dream like this is fun and it's not exactly waking consciousness. So although you could spend a lot of time with it and how to feel through that as a Buddhist dream practice is interesting. It's different than waking consciousness. Now, there's a third consciousness, which is deep sleep. Dreamless sleep consciousness.

[17:38]

So these Indian guys identified three main things that we all know. Dreamless sleep, dream sleep, and waking consciousness. Dreamless sleep. deep sleep, dreamless sleep, deep dreamless sleep, dream sleep, and waking consciousness. You can't know the world through any of them, because when you're deep through any one of them, because when you're, for example, in deep dreamless sleep, you may be most connected with the world, but you have no consciousness of it. So the idea of these guys was then we have to develop a fourth kind of consciousness that includes the other three that is not limited to the other three and really thus inner yoga was born.

[18:39]

Because yoga is basically a technique to sit down and go to sleep and stay awake. All right. So those are two pictures of Buddhism. All right. Now that's a mark. Now if I take four marks, I have more than a dollar. Okay, so that's a mark too. Sorry, I'm just trying to get the job. But now when you have this mark, it's not very separated from this white board. It barely exists. It's sort of like Do you see what I mean?

[19:55]

It's the... the cartilage of this. This begins to close in a space. Das fängt an, einen Raum abzugrenzen. And then you begin to think this is different from this. Man fängt an zu denken, dass der Raum innerhalb der Markierung anders ist als das Brett. And this begins to reify this. Und das verstärkt jetzt dieses Viereck. And you begin to have this. Und man fängt an, das zu haben, was drinnen ist. And then you're in trouble. Dann fällt das Problem an. So Buddhism says, oh yeah, we can't avoid this. This is the way we exist as human beings. But let's do this. Let's separate the parts. So we can remember that this and this are the same. So all Buddhist practices are to study this and do this.

[21:00]

Now, is this too intellectual or too philosophical? And then Buddhism says, aha, now you've got them like that. Let's do this with them. And then let's also just get rid of them. Now that's the basic teaching of the Heart Sutra. The Heart Sutra says we have this And let's understand that it's really like this. And then understand that's really like this. And then throw it all away. Now, the idea of emptiness, is that it's not reified.

[22:18]

So we teach the emptiness of emptiness. It means emptiness has no mark by which it can be known. If emptiness had a mark, it wouldn't be emptiness. Mit Markierungen wäre, wäre nicht lehren. But because it has no mark, it can't be known. Ohne Markierungen kann es aber nicht kennengelernt werden. In einem normalen Art, wie man sich gewöhnt ist, etwas kennenzulernen. Okay. Can I erase that one? So again, the Heart Sutra says, here's all these things, teachings, which free you from self. Now those teachings themselves are empty. See emptiness. Emptiness. Buddhism also, this is by the way, a small version of the Buddhist robe.

[23:46]

And when I teach, I'm supposed to wear something. Just to show you where this comes from. Okay. We could say that the way Buddhism views the world ultimately is that it's a mystery. So we could say it's a mystery. A mysterium. I like that better. Mysterium. Sounds like the name of a scary movie. Now, this mystery takes form for us. So, we'll put form here. All right, so the mystery takes form.

[24:53]

But because it's inherently a mystery, it always partakes of the mystery. Because the form is still inherently a mystery, it still partakes of the mystery. Okay, so we put emptiness here. And emptiness is a way of saying we may not be able to know the mystery. But we can say that it isn't form. Or it's not reified form. Now, Because form is also simultaneously emptiness. Okay, now you have two meanings of emptiness here.

[26:02]

One is, this is also understood as emptiness. Am I writing clearly enough just to give you a sense of what's happening? Okay, so... Yeah, they all are not very dark. The blue is even worse. And the yellow... Hey, that's pretty good, huh? No? Yellow's not good? Okay. We'll stick with the red. Okay. Um... Okay, now form leads to consciousness. Because you don't know form unless you can be conscious of it. So consciousness arises from form.

[27:03]

And there's always a quality of, of. You're conscious of something. So you're conscious of form, so consciousness arises. So one of the practices is to take of away. All right, now emptiness leads to, we can put it over here, awareness. Achtsamkeit. Now I'm making a distinction between consciousness and awareness that most of you know my distinction. And some people don't, right? So I'll try to explain simply. I think the handiest example of this is when you go to sleep at night, and you decide to wake up at 6.02, and you wake up at 6.02, consciousness didn't do that.

[28:24]

Awareness did that. So awareness is something that was going on while you were asleep, knew what time it is and woke you up, but it's not representational thinking. Now, if I throw something to you, consciousness didn't catch it, awareness did. So awareness is always present. Consciousness is quite slow. If I fall down and I catch myself, it's awareness that consciousness can't think about. So awareness is always present, but we don't live there.

[29:27]

So Buddhist practice is how to get you to live in awareness and manifest as consciousness. And when you practice zazen and you make a shift from the I representational thinking into the sound field. What you're doing is making a shift more into awareness out of consciousness. Okay. Now, the next question is, not only are we conscious, but we have experience. Now, how does experience arise from consciousness?

[30:38]

And how does experience feed back into consciousness? And how does experience contaminate you? And how does experience purify you? Now, those are the questions that people worked on for hundreds of years to try to answer. Okay, that's enough. Now, there's form right there. Here is form. And here's consciousness. Now I'm going to try to show you what's in between those two. How form turns into consciousness. And then I'll also try to show you how consciousness turns into awareness. and show you how awareness, consciousness actually arises from emptiness as well as from form.

[31:46]

And this is not something we're culturally taught to notice. So much of the contents of consciousness that arise from here, we don't know how to access. Because we can access things that are in our script or in our unconscious script. But we can't access things which are outside our script, conscious or unconscious. And the sense... That's... Okay, that's another general picture, okay? Alright. The second is the preciousness of human life. And the third is the impermanence of everything.

[32:47]

And it's thought to be beneficial to always, never be separated from this sense of mystery? It's thought to be beneficial to not be separated from this sense of mystery? An awareness of the preciousness of existence? and an awareness of the impermanence of existence. Even just being aware of this mystery can change your life. Read and hate allusion are not so good.

[35:38]

If you see the forms of your life in the context of mystery and emptiness, what looked like greed, hate, delusion take on a different life when they're rooted here as well as here? OK, so representational thinking that reifies itself. And then we begin to have a lot of problems within that. So there's two approaches. One approach is to try to solve those problems of representational thinking within representational thinking. Or within a larger picture of representational thinking. The Buddhist teaching is Stop the reification of representational thinking.

[37:01]

And the more you do that, you stop increasing your problems as you're trying to solve your problems. And then you can start working on your problems better. Now, one of the characteristics of early Buddhism is it emphasizes karma and sequential causation. But A leads to B. Also that the image perhaps is more like the moon in early Buddhism. Enlightenment is like the moon and it has clouds across it. And then the idea of emptiness is a principle of exclusivity.

[38:13]

And the idea is you want to get rid of those clouds, you want to exclude those clouds. So then sunyata becomes, or emptiness becomes an idea of getting rid of impurities. Unreinheiten fertig zu werden. Okay, now later Buddhism emphasizes Dharma more than karma. Spätbuddhismus betont eher Dharma als Karma. Now some of these things I'll explain more or give you more feeling for if you ask me. Sachen werde ich mehr ausführen, wenn ihr mich fragt. Okay, so the idea of Dharma is more the image might be better of the sun. Dharma ist besser als Bild der Sonne. Because the sun isn't blocked by the clouds. Die Sonne ist nicht bedeckt durch die Wolken. Even if there's clouds there, the clouds arise because of the heat of the sun. And the sun penetrates through the clouds and still is affecting the plants. So the later image of of principle of emptiness is a principle of inclusivity.

[39:26]

So how do greed, hate and delusion or your problems, how do they work in a picture of wholeness rather than a picture of getting rid of them? I responded partly, Luigi, to your question. There's a relationship between wholeness and emptiness. And also, the more you cut off the process of reification, but not the process of trying to get rid of things. In other words, the more you move toward that, Rather than that and that and that.

[40:29]

In here you get lost. Because you think, then you think this might be real. So the more you move toward this, then you're closer to emptiness. Okay. Any other comments? Non-representational thinking, by definition, is thinking which can't be reified. Nichtrepräsentives Denken wird definiert durch das, was nicht verstärkt werden kann.

[41:35]

Nichtrepräsentives Denken im Buddhismus wird über den Begriff etwas locker angewendet im Buddhismus. Das ist Lustness. Lustness specifically means a way of thinking that's non-conceptual. Das bedeutet ganz explizit eine Art des Denkens ohne Konzepte. or a way of thinking in which emptiness and form simultaneously arise. Now, by Sunday afternoon tomorrow, I'll try to have made that a lot clearer. Because that's actual experience. And I think if it's a nice day tomorrow, we might go outside and do some meditation practices. It would be better to do outside together. Any other comments on this or anything else? You said that hate and greed and so are bad, but actually these are only one aspect of, for instance, hate and love are very close.

[42:42]

So each aspect has another pull. Yeah, but we have to see more the center, the middle. Yeah, you see, you have, as soon as you move, as soon as you say, hey, there's another pole. Love. Then this also has a pole. So then love is also a problem. So emptiness and form is also the same. It's a little bit different idea. Love and hate both fall into this. So love and hate is one dimension. This is a dualism. But love and hate also have this which is empty.

[43:46]

So the movement in practice is to see that hate is also love. And then to see together they're also empty. Okay. But as soon as you move hate to love, you're increasing the context. Keep increasing the context till there's no boundaries. And then perceive in a boundaryless way. And that perceiving in a boundless way Boundaryless way is thusness. Okay. Now, greed, hate, and delusion are the just code word for attachment.

[44:48]

So greed means, or attachment means, I think I can possess something. Now in the divided world, I can possess something. In the undivided world, I can't possess anything. My teacher once said, he was giving a talk like this, and he said, these are your glasses. And he said, but you know about my tired old eyes, so you let me use your glasses. And in that sense, what he was trying to express, of course, is that I don't even own my own glasses. That these exist in a way that we, often glasses are just something we share. And hate or aversion means you think you can push something away.

[46:03]

So the practice in Buddhism is to recognize, yes, there's some things we like and some things we don't like. but the deeper practice is to identify with both what you like and don't like and to actually identify the experience of not liking or aversion or pain or suffering And enter into the middle of that. And even be willing to live that way the rest of your life. And then expand yourself within that. And if you do that, you find out it starts including all these other things. Okay. Something else? Delusion means that you don't see.

[47:17]

Grief, hate, delusion. Delusion means you don't see this. Emptiness or weirdness. Okay. I'd like to show you one last thing before we stop. I'll just put them on this board. Can I erase this? It seems to have an infinite capacity to absorb. We can call it the Thagatagarbha eraser. The storehouse eraser. Okay, I'm going to put on the five skandhas. It will take us some time to talk about them.

[48:21]

Now, remember we had the mystery and then form. and then form turns into consciousness. Now the five skandhas are teaching about how form turns into consciousness in the temporal dimension of identity. Temporal time dimension of identity. Now, again, what I'm pointing out is really as simple as saying this car has a windshield. And it has a steering wheel. And windshield wipers. And this is not intellectual. Okay. And so I'm pointing out that you have feelings.

[49:43]

That you have eyes and ears and so forth. But that's not intellectual. Now, the five skandhas existed before Buddhism. But what's important is how they're put together. So Buddhism takes ingredients from Hinduism and they put them together a little bit differently. So again Buddhism is trying to get down to the basic ingredients of where you live. The ingredients of consciousness. So it's again and it starts out like if you had a a wire. Here's a wire. And this is another wire. And here's these different wires. These were Hindu wires.

[50:46]

But we're going to connect them here. And when you connect them, suddenly you have a Buddhist computer. You don't have a Hindu computer anymore. So you create, you just have wires and links, but you've got a little electron chip there now. So the dynamic of how it works is important. The ingredients are very simple. All right, now, part of the teaching of the five skandhas arose from a question of Ulrike. As Ulrike said, okay, I've begun to see more and more clearly that the self is a construct. But I live in this self. How am I going to repair it or change it? Hmm. So I said, well, you need the lifeboat of the five skandhas.

[51:55]

So you can get out of the ship of self and sit in the lifeboat of the five skandhas and repair the self. And then climb back in the ship. Or sometimes get into the water. Okay, in that sense, you have the self. Or the ship. And then you have the inner two. Oh, five skandhas. An inner tube like kids go floating in a swimming pool in a tire from a tire? What do you call it?

[52:55]

Life ring or something? Like a life ring, yeah. This thing is getting dimmer and dimmer. Can you see that? You can't see it over here. I need some neurons. Okay, so the basic picture is this. Now what's characteristic of the five skandhas is there's no idea of self, there's no idea of self there. Now, self, as it's normally constituted, denies emptiness. And it's based on the idea of possessing and so on. But five skandhas sits in between form and emptiness. Okay.

[54:04]

And so once you get in the five skandhas, you can sometimes get in the water, and sometimes you get in the self. Okay. So you definitely need a self to work in the world. Now, Buddhism, again, this is a mistake Westerners make. Buddhism is the teaching of no self. First of all, that is not correct. Buddhism is a teaching of non-self, not the absence of self. So it's a teaching of non-self, sometimes the experience of no self, and the teaching of multiple selves, and the ability to move around among those multiple selves. And the early translators just didn't get it right. They got it mixed up with Berkeley and things like that.

[55:08]

The early translators didn't get it right. They got it mixed up with Calvin and Berkeley. Okay, so what I'm showing you here is the inner tube, the five skandals. Or the lifeboat. Okay. And in each culture, this self will be somewhat different. But in every culture, this will be about the same. The first of the five skandhas is form. And that might be best understood sort of as signal. The next is feelings. Emotionen. The next is perceptions.

[56:11]

Hoping is last. And okay. Next is usually translated impulses. Impulses. Last is consciousness. Sorry, I have to use the yellow. Perhaps there are some more decoders. Well, we can get some more somewhere. I'll ask, but Mary, use it. I can buy some at lunchtime. Okay. Let me see how the books are back there.

[57:12]

Well, you can't see the yellow, can you? It's emptiness. All right. And impulses, you can come up. It's also perhaps associations. Now, it's thought that everything in the world, the first rule of the five skandhas, Everything in the world falls into those categories. There's nothing that doesn't fall into those categories. So it means you have to define these and experience them so everything in the world falls into those categories. Okay. This is the Buddhist definition of self. But self is process. And Buddhism... is not a prescriptive teaching, it's a descriptive teaching.

[58:24]

Like a prescriptive teaching was to say, have faith and such and such will happen. Buddhism just says, this is the way it is, now what are you going to do about it? It describes how it is. So this is a description. And it's important to remember that these terms are originally Sanskrit. And then they were translated into Chinese and then Japanese. And then English and now German. They are loosely connected to what they mean. They're targets. In fact, these are actually considered to be kind of like clouds.

[59:26]

Overlapping clouds. And these words sort of give you the sense of, oh, there's a cloud there or here. So you have to discover these things yourself. Now, this is also a technical definition of consciousness. Consciousness is the inclusion of these things. So it's consciousness that has arisen from feelings, impulses. So to give you one example of this, is say that you hear a song. And you actually don't, it's not a song at first, you just hear something.

[60:38]

Maybe it's a bird or a car. And then you are sitting there and you're not paying attention, but suddenly you realize that somebody took a block away with a radio. Now, since Sanskrit spent a lot of time on this, they have lots of different words for these things. We have a translation problem because we don't have many words for these things. For example, as soon as you hear that radio, you think you've perceived something. In Buddhist terms you have it. The root of the word in English, perception means to grasp hold of, to grasp hold of. But since we don't make this kind of distinction, that's why I put the word signal there.

[61:49]

At the point you just hear the sound, it's just a signal. You haven't grasped it yet. So we don't call it perception in Buddhism. But since we don't have so many words in English for these things, we said that this was downstream, this is downstream, this is upstream. This is a downstream word. When you say you hear something, it's used to describe an upstream phenomenon. Okay, now normally we just have consciousness. Yeah, we're conscious. We don't separate out form.

[62:40]

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