Yeah, thank you for your questions. And I'll try to respond to most of them. And if I haven't got it right please clarify your question. If I haven't got the question right or anyway you can add something to, whatever you want, any of you. And I didn't realize when Frank and I chose the title Zen Mind, how difficult it would be to try to say something realist. actual, factual about it. There it sits, two words on the cover of a book, the title of a book.

[01:20]

There it sits on your desk. Just two words on the cover of a book. And yet there's a world of implications and meaning and practice within those two words. So we've, I hope, touched on some. And I think if I were going to sum up as briefly as I could, what is Zen mind. I would say something very obvious, but it took me the seminar to kind of come to this obvious statement.

[02:23]

Zen mind is the practice of mind. Zen mind is not realized except through the practice of mind, mind being capital M. Okay, where shall I start? Well, I might start with my translator. How do I get along without you? I need you. Maybe you can... We have to hook arms together. Very nice. How do we create an intention?

[03:28]

Something like that. How do we actually do it? Wie schaffen wir eine Intention? Maybe I would phrase it, how do we... create a tangible intention? First you have to really believe it or feel it. Intended. If you just take something and try to make it an intention. I like watermelons. And you don't. It's going to be hard to make that a real intention. And the more we feed you watermelons, the less you'll have an intention. So you have to really feel it. But then, how do you actuate it or actualize it? How do you make it a tangible intention?

[04:31]

So, first you have to want it and believe it. And believe it in the sense of believe it's possible. And then, repetition. you find some way to bring it up on every circumstance. No. It's actually a yogic skill to be able to bring something up on each circumstance. Part of the reason for a dharmic topography.

[05:39]

which I try to enter you into with phrases like pause for the particular. It's, first of all, pretty hard to pause for the particular unless you notice the particular. So you have to, in some very mechanical, Pavlovian way, use particulars to start noticing. Sometimes you just sit in a chair and you notice a particular and then you notice a particular. Okay, so that's one thing. And the more you get skillful at noticing the particular, and finding a kind of

[06:47]

pause for the particular. Now, the purpose of the pause for the particular is to physicalize mental noticing. And this physicalizing of noticing, in other words, noticing at the pace of the body, is one of the ways we weave mind and body together. Okay. Wow. I often say also, I mean, in recent two or three years, I've talked about what I've called the yogic shift or something like that. All right, so you pause for the particular. And then you shift to the field. So, when I'm sitting here, what kind of activity do I have?

[08:13]

I'm not really thinking very much. And I don't think ahead or something like that. I mean, I feel a little bit ahead. I mean, I have a feeling for what I'd like to do, but I have no idea how to do it. The ideas of how to do it are secondary to the feeling. That's one of the ways I say what I mean when I say I don't repeat myself. Well, of course I do, and I have to sometimes. But my feeling is, my experience is, in... heading toward the feeling, I almost always, at least in my own experience, find a different way to get there.

[09:19]

Okay. So, if you... All right. So, what I'm doing when I'm sitting here is I have... a sensation of the particular, the particular word I'm saying, or something like that. And there's a kind of field around the word. So I do have this feeling for the particular, and then I shift to the feel of the room. So I might go from Christian's pencil to everyone all at once. And back to your hand, say. And then back to the field. And then, you know, you're blinking and then back to the field.

[10:33]

So it's a kind of mental activity or something like that, somatic activity. But it blocks thinking. But I'm very present to the situation because I feel the particulars, then I feel you all at once, then I feel the particulars, then I feel you all at once. Okay, now this is also a way to try to enter both the field of mind and the particulars of, and the sensorial particulars. They enter the field of mind and the sensorial particulars. At a pace at which brings mind and body together. brings body into mind and weaves mind and body together.

[11:40]

And it's a way of thinking outside the box. As they say. Okay. Now this is simply, I've just given you something to do. If you want to do it. Yeah. So this is not intellectual or philosophical particularly. This is a Zen exercise, a yogic exercise. Okay. So in that kind of process, You make tangible, tactile, a haptic, a intention. And in making the intention haptic,

[12:41]

touchable physical you enter it into the physical world the phenomenal world and not just your mental world and by entering it into the physical world In the physical world, I mean the externalized particulars. You begin to get information back. a knowing through the intention kind of reaching its ungloved hand into the glove of the particulars. It's a way of getting the world to think for you.

[13:57]

And that engagement in the phenomenal activity of the world, enlists the world, like enlisting the army or something, enlists the world in fulfilling your intention. Okay. Now, that again is an example of the practice of mind. It's not just that you're born with a mind, you've got this mind, and there it sits. The depth and plasticity, etc., of the mind develops through its engagement.

[15:08]

And through a particular kind of engagement. Not an engagement of longing and wishing and so forth. but an engagement in the particulars. Now, your longing and wishing may become fulfilled if they become a tactile experience. which engages the particulars. Now, one of the important ideas, this is a little bit aside from your questions, is how do we make authentic our life? How do we make authentic the world we live in?

[16:14]

How do we determine the authenticity of ourself and the world? Now, that's usually done through consciousness. You may dream all kinds of things at night, but when you wake up, It's through consciousness you say, oh, that was just a dream, so-called just a dream. But this is what is really authentic. The world is presented to me through consciousness. Now of course we have to function with others primarily through consciousness. Yeah. And maybe you'll come to realize how fragile the normalcy of consciousness can be if you have a thyroid problem or a drug problem or a psychological problem.

[17:31]

The normality of consciousness. The normalcy of consciousness. How fragile. And we need to function through the normalcy of consciousness. We have to function. What is that? Normal. Okay, then it's good. If I say normal consciousness, it means the usual. The normalcy of consciousness in English means things as we all agree they are. Thanks for asking. But in Buddhism, You don't authenticate your world through consciousness.

[18:42]

The world is authenticated through Zen mind. It's Zen mind which tells us what the world and we really are. Now the dynamic of that is a subject for another seminar. Yeah, and I've arranged for all of you to have the week off. My fleet of secretaries have been working at it. Maybe someday we'll be together again. All right. Now, how do you make the shift between minds? For the most kind of like... tangible way is every mental, every mind, every mental state or mode of mind has a physical component.

[20:00]

And it's almost like a dial. You go to that physical component Feel it, maybe here, maybe here, maybe in your shoulders, maybe in your torso somewhere. You go to that feeling, maybe in your breath, and that mind is generated. Es ist fast so wie eine Wildscheibe. Jeder Bereich hat sein eigenes Gefühl und man geht also jetzt sozusagen entgegen. Part of the experiential definition of the Han and the Densho going before Zazen, the Han is the wooden bell. When you hear the Han or you hear the Densho bell, at the beginning of the three rounds, it begins to cue to the physical component of zazen.

[21:15]

If you're used to this, consciousness, sort of discursive consciousness, starts to subside as soon as you hear the bell. In this case the physical component of zazen mind is switched on physically through the bell. But in your breath and in the feeling of breath you begin to have an inventory of modes of mind. Or in the spine. So when I come in here, I may, I don't know what, just wander down the stairs, etc.

[22:29]

But when I come in here, breath and spine... give me this mind which goes from the particular to the field, particular to the field. But this physical... component as if it were a kind of dial or switch. Is not much different or separate from an intention. You have an intention, and that intention then becomes breath, mind, etc. Now, all of this, if you hear me speaking, is inseparable from a kind of mental, physical tangibility. And just to give it some big-time credibility, somebody asked Einstein how he thinks he sits through the body.

[23:48]

Our favorite genius. He said he'd get a feeling somewhere in his body and he paid attention to that feeling and let the feeling develop. from a physical feeling and he would have an image or metaphor that would lead him to his physics and his mathematics. So some unusual people just discover this. Maybe they so want to think, they so enjoy their thinking, they find out it's more, and they believe in their thinking, they find out it's more powerful and effective. when it's physicalized.

[24:49]

Buddhism says, oh, we've discovered this Through meditation, really, it's very clear in meditation that that's the case. Let's pass it on to generations. But you can't really do this unless you give up in some home lever, in some essential way. Your identification with your psychological identity. Your identification with the personal history which leads you where you want to be or where you think you're not yet or something.

[25:55]

This is expressed in this crucial point of the genuine or true person. Is the one who is not concerned With the failure of others to understand, to appreciate their merits. His merits. Their merits. His merits, all right. You can say it in English either way. Their own merits. Their own merits, yeah. It doesn't mean you don't care at all what other people think. It means your psychological identity, what you identify with, is not through what other people think.

[27:14]

Your core identity, I don't know, some word, let's call it that, your core identity is not... established through others. That means your core identity can't be established through consciousness. Because if it's established through consciousness, it's established through others. So it has to be established through some experience. experiential, through some experience, that we'd call non-conceptual and non-comparative.

[28:28]

That, again, is something like what we mean by Zen mind. Because if you don't find this core experience of non-comparative identity, You can't fully intend to do this practice. Because this practice is not based on fulfilling our psychological identity. It's based on... Freeing ourselves from our psychological identity and the suffering that arises through that

[29:32]

And the pressures. And then your psychological identity becomes a kind of playfulness, a way you function in the world. A playfulness and not an identity. They say a... Sukriya used to say that the last thing you work on through Zen practice is the perfection of the personality. And the personality, which is everyone, is individual, is then a playful identity. You're not hurt by whether people like you or don't like you. I mean... And you can have more than one identity, and you can play with that, can't you? Are you a multiple? Of course. Of course.

[30:33]

Now I just discovered, no wonder you... Will you translate the other me? I transcend. Okay. All right. So are we running out of time? No, we're doing okay. Maybe when the time gets long. Okay. Now, this sense of a, again, to be, enter into the world through particulars.

[31:38]

Or now, let me say, through appearances. Okay. That things... You don't see objects... Hard to make words get around these things. You don't see objects as objects. As objective outside you. Or rather first of all as objects. You see them first of all as appearances. Maybe it's like looking at the surface of water. And let's imagine there's a whole bunch of different corks underneath the water.

[32:44]

There's red ones and green ones. Some are shaped like dolphins and some are shaped like frogs. Some are shaped like legs. And they start popping up. And it's not so important whether that's a cork shaped like a frog or a cork shaped like a lizard. It's more, there's another appearance. Oh, there's another appearance. Then the second question is, what is it that appears? But first of all, it's an appearance. But it's more like, it's another appearance, another appearance. So I feel you as a bunch of appearances. And then I notice, oh, that's a female appearance, and that's a male appearance.

[33:47]

But first, it's just an appearance, and it's kind of great. Because the appearance in my experience, has a power greater than its particularity. When I feel your appearance, there's a field of presence and energy and history that's there. And it's more than your conscious experience of yourself. And it's more than my conscious experience of you. So I can feel this appearance and then I have to kind of concentrated so you become a particular person who I know so I can relate to that particularity but simultaneously I can feel this aura or field of presence.

[35:03]

You have to concentrate first, so to speak, as if you are being suffocated. But simultaneously I feel this kind of fate or aura or something like that. Now, the usefulness in having everything appear as appearance, it gives you more of a feeling for emptiness. There's somewhere empty and these things appear. And they appear in your senses and in your mind. So now what I'm giving you is another yogic practice, Zen practice, is to see things, to know things as appearance.

[36:13]

So now I'm responding to the question of how do you observe mind. Oh, there's lots of ways, but here's the most basic. Yes. On every appearance, you feel the mind appearing and the object appearing. Now, first of all, this is just knowledge. Everyone knows, any psychological sophistication at all, that... What I'm seeing is my own mind seeing you. And I'm not only seeing, of course, the present appearance. I'm seeing all the memory signs, what I call mem signs. that identify you as a particular kind of person.

[37:20]

So I know you're a person, not a giraffe. Yeah. It would be great if it was a giraffe. Cut a hole in the roof. How exciting. Okay. But, so there's lots of information that appears with appearance that tells me, you know, tells me that's a door and not a window, etc. But as you can notice the presence of mem signs and as I used to say, try to breathe a pause between the mem signs and the observation.

[38:28]

Now, again, what I'm saying is you're involved in the tapestry of the moment, the weave of the moment. If you're not there, it's hard to do any of this stuff. The word tantra means to weave. And tantra is the practice of seeing the world in the act of weaving itself. And to see the world in the act of weaving itself is Zen mind. So first you bring knowledge to perception. Perception and cognition. So you know that when you see something or hear something, etc., not only is the object appearing, but the mind is appearing.

[39:50]

Okay, now by knowing that, you try to find ways to remind and re-body yourself of that. Until you feel, you don't just know that mind is appearing, you feel that mind is appearing. And if you're too involved again in who you are, and not what you are, you can't feel mind appearing when you're identified with who and not what. So it's what is appearing, including you as what. What is appearing. Now, As you develop the ability to feel appearance, the appearance of the mind and the object simultaneously, again, you feel the object and mind appearing simultaneously, because that's what perception is.

[41:14]

Now you don't just know it, you feel it. But the ability to feel it means that life has to be not at the pace of mentation, but the pace of mind and body. We discover a kind of topography of pace and pause in which mind and body are functioning together at the same pace. Interrelated pace. And once you discover this, it's extraordinarily nourishing. You feel refreshed and renewed by everything you do. And once you know that, it's what makes a practitioner practice, and they don't care whether they've got money or a house or anything.

[42:51]

This is so satisfying practice. Nothing else can compare to it. That's my experience. Did I answer most of the questions? Except suffering, I didn't go into detail, but you're going to be here this week, so we'll come back. Oh, it's not difficult. It's just right now not so important. Stay for the week and then you will suffer. I once did a whole seminar called Suffering and no one came. So I suffered alone. All right. Okay, so now I'd like to use one example.

[43:56]

See if I can use one example. In the next seven minutes. We have non-dreaming deep sleep, dreaming mind, and waking mind. And non-dreaming deep sleep is conceptually identified with a mind in which all mental activity is ceased. And dreaming mind is understood not as something that happens while you sleep, but it's a field of everything that happens It's a field of what has happened and what could happen.

[44:59]

And it's a very essential part of our functioning and thinking. but because it creates a background of what has happened and what could happen. And it's mostly visible to us in many forms at night, visible to some extent. But for an adept practitioner it's present all the time as a background to waking mind. And waking mind is not the same as consciousness. If we need metaphors to try to grok this, let's say that each of these minds is a container.

[46:03]

A waking mind is a container. And consciousness States of mind are liquids. So waking mind is filled by the liquid of consciousness. But you may find... Like when you wake up in the morning. Very often, particularly if you don't sleep enough, etc., you're awakened by consciousness. And we identify waking mind and consciousness. Okay. So you have to do things, you have to go to work or whatever, you have to make breakfast.

[47:14]

All of that's consciousness. But sometimes you may wake up, you've slept enough, and you wake up and there's just this space. And you can feel after a few minutes, consciousness starts to come in. And if you're not an anxious type person or something, sometimes you can just kind of stop consciousness from coming in. Now, in Buddhism we don't call this waking mind that's not yet filled with consciousness, we don't call it consciousness. We call it awareness. Or open awareness. Okay. Now, This is not just an arbitrary distinction or distinction

[48:32]

simply because it allows us to understand certain things. But it's an experienced distinction of consciousness being a different kind of liquid or a different kind of space than waking mind without consciousness. Now, the more you experience appearance, that everything just appears, and appears usually through some kind of consciousness. But you're not identifying now with the contents of consciousness. You're not identifying with the appearances of consciousness.

[49:39]

You've shifted your identity to the field of mind or the space of waking mind. So appearance just doesn't appear naturally. in the senses and in cognition, appearance appears in the space of appearance, An appearance appears in the space of mind in a very simple way, like a word appears on the page. But the page appears too, as well as the word.

[50:41]

The word makes the page appear. So appearance makes the space of mind appear as well as the sensorial and cognitive activity. And when you begin to have that kind of feeling, that within waking mind, The contents appear, but you don't identify with them. Because you're identified with the space of mind and the space of appearance, then the contents of mind, the world, shimmers. The world appears shimmering as light in the space of mind, in the space of appearance.

[52:01]

And this is also called Zen mind. Well, I'm a minute and a half late. I'm a minute and a half late. I try to keep these things on schedule for the tenzo with the priest's feet over there. Is that good enough? I hope it's good enough because it's the best I can do now. Anyway, it's so much fun to be here. And suffering. Not much suffering. Thank you very much. Thanks so much for translating. You were great. I mean, you're always great. Thank you.

[52:51]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.24