Skanda means heaps. And the Buddha spoke about these five heaps. And the sense here is that everything can be on everything that you see, know, or whatever, what do you do? Anyway, I want to translate. Okay, so everything... that happens to you falls into one of these categories. I see this, I have a consciousness about it.

[01:01]

I like it or I don't like it. I perceive it as a stick. I have a feeling about it. That fear. And it actually has a form. And what's important about this list is it's only five and not six. There's no self. So I can look at this stick or this flower. I can see its form. I can have a feeling about it. I can grasp it as a flower. I can have associations about it. Perhaps Christiana cut it. And then I can have an overall feeling of consciousness that arises from that flower. Now, there's a couple of important things here.

[02:22]

One is that we don't have many words for all this stuff. The word perception here means, the word perception in English means to seize hold of, to grasp. In Buddhism, when you just have a feeling about something, it's not called a perception. But in English, since you have no words for these things, they're all called perceptions. So if you... If you hear a song, for instance, and you just hear the song, it's just something happening in your ear. In Buddhism, that's not called a perception. When you say, oh, that's a song, that's a perception. You should take it home with you. Because you're always hearing, as long as you're alive, there's always things happening.

[03:37]

Those aren't called perceptions until you take hold of them. So perception is downstream of form, to upstream. The other important thing is death. That's not so important. But what is important is that when the word consciousness is used in Buddhism, it means this consciousness. When you have a sense of awareness here at this level, it's not called consciousness. Consciousness is loaded consciousness. Loaded with form, association, connection. No, but in general, when you notice something, say you're doing something,

[05:03]

As at the level at which you first notice it, we call that form. But as soon as you have a feeling about it, then you're into this state. But you might have association right away, not a feeling. So the sequentiality might go from here back to this to this, you know. So there is a kind of sequence, there's a kind of logic to the sequence, but that sequence is... Actually, for most of us, we're never back here. We're always here. Because another important point in this is the point of separating it out like this is to slow down.

[06:16]

First of all, slow down how you proceed. To create territories of perception here, territories of awareness, shall we say. Usually it happens so fast that you're in consciousness. You don't separate out the feeling that led to the association. And central to real stability of consciousness is considered the ability to separate these things out. For example, our education is aimed at these three skandhas.

[07:38]

We don't educate feelings. So you're much more acculturated from this level up. And you're much wilder here. And so, if you get drunk, say, what feelings may come out that haven't been very well educated? So the point I'm making there is that you actually are a different person here than her. And you store memories and associate memories and feelings here that never have been perceived. Und man bewahrt auch sozusagen Erinnerungen auf, auf der Ebene des zweiten Skandals, die niemals wahrgenommen worden sind.

[08:51]

Doesn't the remembrance of things past to prove the whole six volumes unfold from the smell of the Hawthorne? So, for instance, with this lilac, I grew up with lilacs. Is this a lilac? And when I'm sitting here doing zazen, without my grasping it at these levels, at the level of perception, a feeling arises which, if I unfold it, unpack it, many, many thousands of associations. So the point here of this five-standard vision also is that you have you have a different memory level stored at each of these.

[10:05]

Okay. Shall I give you more examples? That's good enough. Anybody have more questions on five skandhas? I would like to tell another example of perception with exacting. Okay, now first let me say that these originally are Sanskrit words. Mm-hmm. which have been translated into Chinese and Japanese.

[11:10]

And then translated into English and now into German. And even when they were trying to work this out in Sanskrit, they were saying, these words don't work very well. So let's put some words on it anyway to give people ideas there, but it's up to them to discover it. So to make this work, you really have to begin to do this with the five skandhas. And if you... do it, or try to work with it, you suddenly locate the territory of this one.

[12:12]

You suddenly locate the territory, say, of perception. Okay, but again, the basic sense is that, let's take the example of a song again. You hear something. You don't know if it's an airplane on the way to Vienna or some kind of hum of the heating system or somebody walking by with a portable radio. At that level it's just form. And then you notice you begin to have a feeling associated with this. You don't even know it's a song yet or an airplane, but you certainly have a feeling that's arising in you.

[13:17]

And then you say, oh yes, that's such and such a song. Okay, when you notice that it's such and such a song, that's the third time. Then when you say, oh, my mother used to cry when she heard that song. Excuse me, why not call this identification? You can't. If you're raving, It's naming, identification, perception. To me, it means to grab something by my senses. This is your sense. If I identify this is this and this song, this is a process.

[14:19]

It's not a process in my eye, in my ear. And we discussed this last year that it's made better to say to receive a signal where the sense faculties is formed. And when we all put that together to an identification, then we all... Why don't you say that to Jamie? I already said that. If you look at the etymology of perception, It doesn't mean just to hear something through sense impression. It means to grasp hold of something. I think the word common sense, which I've used before as an example, is an example of how we've lost touch with a refinement in perception that we used to have that you can see in language. And I think that was common sense. So common sense nowadays means what everyone thinks.

[15:28]

Originally meant to be able to perceive with a sense common to all six senses. So these words, it's very hard anyway. You have to sort of like figure it out for yourself. But you're doing that by saying identification is right. Yeah, no, I understand. No, no, I agree. We all have to try this out and you can put your own words here.

[16:29]

You don't have to use these words. Okay, then when you recognize, oh, that's a song my mother always used to cry when she heard. A certain consciousness arises, as if you've thrown a pebble into a lake. That influences your consciousness. And then you begin to see, begin to feel, when you work with the power of consciousness, You begin to feel your mind is maybe kind of like a lake or water. And that when I look at that pine tree, it's like a little pebble falling in the water, and I can feel the ripples.

[17:31]

Or something I feel from you that I couldn't identify, but I can feel from this side of my body, it's maybe like an insect skinning across the surface. So then the practice of the five skandhas can be in reverse. I feel in my consciousness a certain red dye number five or something being present on the surface of the lake. Red dye? That's just a joke. This is red and a dye in color. Red dye number one is a food coloring in the states, which is outlawed by the government because it's poisonous. It's a food dye.

[18:33]

Anyway, you notice some kind of effect in your consciousness. And because you can practice one-pointedness, you can bring yourself to the particular ripples that that stone made. Let's go back to the associations, the perceptions, and so forth. So you can say, why am I feeling a little funny? Oh, yes, half an hour ago, such and such happened. And then later on, you recognize it happened. When it happened, you don't have to wait half an hour later. So you become a much more immediate participant in your consciousness. It's like you are the water rather than you keep having water dumped on you.

[20:02]

In order to practice with these things, I would say one of the basics is you have to again be able to bring your consciousness, your attention, your consciousness first in the form of attention to your breath. But then as your breath begins to be kind of where you reside, you begin to have the ability to recognize the five skandhas. Then I think I'd like you to, whoa.

[21:43]

Then I'd like to, I think, have you take another break. But this time I'd like you to take a break by, there's 40 or so of you here, right? By breaking up into five groups of six or seven. And you can go sit on the deck here outside. And I'd like those groups to just talk about this language with each other. And to see if you can make sense of it with each other. And you can ask questions of each other.

[22:44]

And if any of this triggers any kind of sense of, have any connection with things in the past for you. Or you can take, I've talked about the divided and the undivided world. Do you have any sense of intimations of the undivided world which you've had maybe as a child in a church or something? Or in meditation. And the reason I'd like you to talk about it with each other is it is really helpful to find out practically what another person understands about this. And you each have different experiences, so you can feel out something, see if it makes sense. And it's also important because Sangha is so important in Buddhism.

[23:47]

Now, we talked about vow earlier. And vow is the big vow in Buddhism is to take refuge in Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Now, This means to live within the intimacy of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. And in Buddhism this means to live within your mind continuum. And this mind continuum is partly generated by your eye continuum. And your ear continuum and so forth. But we'll talk a little bit more about that later.

[25:07]

Okay. So your Buddhadharma and Sangha is a way to name or point out the three major streams of your mind continuum. And Sangha means everyone who has ever entered your mind continuum. A face you saw in a crowd four years ago in a city might be maturing your mind continually. So sangha is to open your mind. mind continuum to how people exist within you.

[26:30]

And the importance of this threefold vow or refuge of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is that they're equal. Buddha is not more important than Sangha. So your friend in practice is as important as your teacher. And how people exist in you is part of our practice. So a seminar like this shouldn't be only just you to me. It should also be you to each other. There should be some way to recognize this.

[27:34]

So I know that this sort of breaking into groups, when I'm somewhere and they say, let's break up into groups, I think, yeah. It's not my thing. But then when I stop and say, God, look at these beautiful worlds around me called people, and I can open myself in that way, then, you know, I mean, people are really better than trees. And trees are great. Okay. Well, I'd like to go back to the five skandhas for a minute and the first three of the six dharmas. Now, what is your name? Walter. Walter? Walter. Walter, okay.

[28:40]

I'm learning how to pronounce W. My German's improving. So, Walter said earlier, he thinks of form as a circle, a square, an object. Yeah, but that's form understood conceptually. Das ist jetzt Form, die konzeptuell verstanden wird. Das ist ein Verständnis von Form irgendwo da draußen. Das könnte ein Preis sein. But if I push it against Eureka, I have to resist it. I push it against Eureka, she just has a signal. She just does something that she feels against her arm. Aber wenn ich das jetzt gegen Eureka drücke, dann nimmt sie im Grunde nur ein Signal, warf und etwas, das gegen ihren Arm drückt. So Buddhism isn't interested in form out there. Or form as triangles and cubes and things.

[29:47]

And if you have to do geometry, fine, think of it that way. But since Buddhism is just totally process-oriented, form is first of all real, only in the sense that it pushes against you. So as soon as you feel something, that's form. Okay. Now, you had another question? Yeah, anything. Yes. Anything. I mean, belonging to the skandhas, the impulse association. Can you say something about that? Because it looks like two different things. Yeah, I mentioned earlier that that's there. Another thing I noticed is that in my process of proceeding, very often association and I had trained myself doing meditation before just not to go to association, stay here.

[30:55]

And then the force seems kind of skipped, the association part. Seems skipped in your own process. In my own process. But with impulse it's a different story. So I wanted you to say that. Okay. Do you want to say that in German? Ich habe gefragt, ich möchte gerne erfahren über den Unterschied zwischen Impulsen und Assoziationen, weil das klingt sehr verschieden betreffend für Sie, die auf verschiedene Sachen betroffen. Und zweitens habe ich festgestellt, dass ich In my own process, I often skip this fourth point, which is the associations. That I have taught myself not to lose associations in the past, but to stay here. And that I actually have very few associations in my process of awareness. So if I slow down the noise, then it's already there. Of course, when I open the bed, there are associations. Okay.

[32:04]

Love these questions. I'm not sure I'm going to answer them all, but I love them. Because it means you're actually kind of like grappling with this. And the basic practice, one of the basic practices of Buddhism, probably one of the three or four most important, is keeping the five skandhas in view. And this was literally how it was stated, to keep the five skandhas in view. It means in the midst of all your perceiving, you keep in the background of that perceiving in view the five skandhas. Now this is the big distinction between Buddhism and Hinduism.

[33:09]

And what I'm telling you this afternoon took centuries, I mean I'm not kidding you, centuries to work out. I mean thousands of people discussed this. Over centuries. And it's in Buddha's first sermon, I believe, he said there are these five streams, five strands of personality. What he meant by that was disgust over centuries. Und was er damit gemeint hat, wurde jahrhundertelang diskutiert. It's the Buddhist response to the Indian idea of Atman, of self, of a big identity. Und ist die Antwort auf diese hinduistische Vorstellung von Atman, dem Selbst.

[34:11]

Of the individual identity in the sense of Brahma as identity. Und diese individuelle Identität im Zusammenhang mit Brahma, dieser großen Identität. And Buddhism says there ain't such a thing. Okay, then how do we function? How do we live if we don't have a self? Now, this is a real problem. You tell people there's no God, there's no ground of being, and you've got no self. Well, what do you do? Well, you figure out a lot of dodges and euphemisms. Dodges? A way to get around something. You start talking about the flame of life or something. Some phrase that doesn't exactly sound like self, but actually you mean self. Okay, so... Why impulses and associations are connected?

[35:24]

Why impulses and associations are connected? Is because you have to deal with the question of one, you have many associations. Two, you make decisions to do things. And you have a will or intention to do something. So if this exists, And I decide to do something with it, it's coming from outside. This itself doesn't do anything. One of the truisms of Buddhism is one does not produce one. Truisms? One of the vahidens of the visioners is, no, one of the truisms of Buddhism is one does not produce one.

[36:30]

You know, these sound like stupid things. One does not produce one. But it's another way of saying there's no God. When you really take things to a simple statement, to its extremity, or take a complex thing and reduce it, you have statements like one does not produce one. Or as we say in Zen, one produces one. one has many kinds. Two is not a duality. So one doesn't produce one. So something for Alexander to be alive, it didn't take one parent, it took two parents. It's the law of cause and effect. So since this can't do anything to itself, it has to have an outside agent.

[37:48]

And that's an impulse. And that moves it, or you decide to turn it upside down or something, and that's very similar to associations. So associations and impulses are also linked because they are the seed, twin seed of the Alaya Vishnuaya. And the Alaya Vishnuaya is the eighth consciousness or the storehouse consciousness. Consciousness. The repository of all impressions. Now some people want to connect that with Jung's collective, what's it called? Collective unconscious, but that's not really the same. But, you know, I think it's... So I'll try to show you tomorrow what the Alaya Vishnaya is.

[39:05]

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, or will or intention or... Or from inside. Okay. In other words, a state of consciousness arises. And then something happens out of that state of consciousness. That's the territory of this skanda. When something happens. Okay. So, when I... Touch you like that, that's form. You may later see it's a stick, but when you see it's a stick, it's a conception or a perception.

[40:10]

Now there's a kind of strange magic to the plastic. When you say form, it just sounds like something scientific or something, you know, graphic. But form is the primary gate of the undivided world. Mm-hmm. But you don't see that unless you understand the five skandhas and then work backwards through them. So it's a way of turning the mundane into the spiritual. And the five skandhas is also an attempt by Buddhist teachers To deal with the fact that, one, we don't have a self, a permanent self.

[41:25]

Two, we do have a way of functioning. And three, there's a profound and intimate relationship between being and non-being. And between the physical non-sentient phenomenal world and the sentient world. And five skandhas tries to put you somewhere in the midst of that. Because when I say, I like that you're getting farther and farther away, This is part of what I might call self, or how I function. The fragrance of these flowers is not outside myself, and it functions in the five skandhas powerfully. So where's my boundary?

[42:32]

From some ways, my boundary is here. And one of the problems with the way the Western people put themselves together and Buddhist people put themselves together Is we don't create much interior space. We create private space. Like you can't know my thoughts. I can think this and you don't know. Of course you do, but you don't know at the usual representational thinking. You only think people don't know. But if you'd stop thinking, you might know they know. And we tend to define interior space as private and as different from the outside. But one thing Zazen practice does is create interior space.

[43:55]

A bigger and bigger interior space. That you know the topography of. And it's more elaborate than Vienna. And the outside tends to arise from interior space more than the inside arises from exterior space. So our culture tends to emphasize the way that exterior space defines us. And that's partly because we think that something's out there. And we Buddhists think there's nothing out there.

[44:56]

I don't mean that doesn't exist. It just doesn't exist the way you think. It exists outside the realm of thinking. It exists outside the level of our thinking. And Buddhism also differentiates itself from Hinduism by the fact that Buddhism assumes that there was once this huge bang, this big bang, and that the world was created, that there was creation, and that this golden eye suddenly opened and the world was there. I thought that would be hard to translate. You just went through it. Okay.

[45:58]

And what Buddhism said is, no, that creation didn't occur back there in the past. It's happening all the time at this moment. Buddhism went back and pulled the act of creation out of the past and brought it into the present. And said this is a continuous moment of creation. And it's all happening simultaneously. So you went from a shift from an emphasis on karma and causation, sequential causation, to in later Buddhism, an emphasis on dharma, and simultaneous creation.

[47:03]

So interpenetration more than sequential causation. When you really look at the multitude of causes, they're interpenetrating simultaneously all the time. You can't know that with sequential thinking. So you have to kind of move out of sequential thinking into suchness, which is non-sequential thinking. So that's nice to say that, but how do you get there? Buddhism spent centuries trying to figure that out, and I will tell you tomorrow afternoon. And then you can spend centuries trying to... Okay.

[48:30]

What? Yes, it's... If you can work simultaneously, your practice will proceed rapidly. And that's exactly what, again, these vijnanas are meant to do, to allow you to work simultaneously rather than sequentially. Now let me give you the example I've given before. just to make it sort of in the realm of possibility for you, is when somebody has a near-death experience, sometimes they see their whole life flash in front of them. And this The few people I've talked to have had this experience.

[49:38]

They say it's not eight or ten events. It's like everything is there. If you think sequentially, that's not possible. But it means that simultaneous thinking is possible. And that's where this wholeness and that's where the laya vijnaya comes in again too. Okay. The sutra puts this an adept can know all the raindrops falling from the sky dragon simultaneously. Doesn't really mean you can do it, but it means it's another kind of thinking in which it all happens at once.

[50:41]

I mean, after a few minutes, you lose track of some of the raindrops. Okay, so going back to the five skandhas. I'm really not teaching the five skandhas here. This is just a preparatory thing. But I want to say what I meant by form as spiritual, the spiritual dimension. Okay, here you have loaded consciousness. And you practice going back to impulses and so forth. If you unload the consciousness, then form equals emptiness.

[51:53]

So, when you... take consciousness and unload it, and then you still have the field of consciousness unloaded, the way it perceived form, you're very close to the undivided world. Now, again, let me say again, depends on your recognizing that self is a construct. If you think self is real, permanent, etc., and so forth, you can't really practice this stuff.

[52:58]

Or you can practice it in a limited way. But when you recognize that self is a construct, then you recognize that self is made, and you're bigger than that. That your existence is bigger than yourself. If your existence is bigger than yourself, it means you don't always have to live in yourself. But probably, so that you keep your bearings, you've got to have a strong rubber band attached to self. If you get out there too far, you can haul yourself back in.

[54:07]

So you need a real strong sense of self in your story, in your identity. But you don't always have to live there. What you do have to be able to keep in touch with it. And, I mean, if you don't, you can get confused, crazy, and so on. Probably in practicing Zen, you can't get so disassociated or so disconnected that it's a real problem, but... It is important to learn how to keep in touch. . [...] We could put in here personnel if we should.

[55:28]

What? Well, you see, these are English and European words. And I didn't put ego. Ego has to be... I don't think anyone really knows how these things all relate. Ego, psyche, soul, personality, identity. No one's ever worked that all out as far as I know. You don't have to translate. Yeah. This emptiness is not material. No. Form is exactly emptiness. No one says that there's only emptiness.

[56:51]

There's form and emptiness. You look at it one way and it's form. You look at it another way, it's emptiness. Now you could say that early Buddhism emphasized form and karma. And later Buddhism emphasizes emptiness and dharma. And I guess, Christian, you mentioned that emptiness is also one of the dharmas. Is emptiness itself empty? Christine, not Christian.

[57:52]

Oh, Christine. Is emptiness itself empty? Yes. So there's, I don't want to get into this too much, but there's form is form, there's emptiness is emptiness, there's emptiness is form, and there's form is emptiness. And these are all, what? And there's all of this is empty. And this is basically what the Heart Sutra's about. The Heart Sutra says, there's all these things, and then it says, and they're all empty. No, what? Emptiness is, from the point of view of later, see, early Buddhism, emptiness was a principle of exclusion. you cleared your mind, you got rid of things. You, as I said the other night, it's like the clouds across the moon, you get the clouds away.

[58:54]

The image in later Buddhism, like in the Lotus Sutra, is more of the sun than the moon. And the sun produces the clouds. And the sun penetrates through the clouds into all the plants even though there's clouds across. So the image in later Buddhism is of emptiness as inclusion rather than exclusion. And so the concept of samadhi changes. And so hat sich auch der Begriff von Samadhi verändert.

[59:56]

Oh, boy, you guys are really doing it for me. That's me. That's me. That's me. Yeah. Yeah. This is what I wrote first. What? In Buddhism? Yeah. Oh, yes, definitely. You should have done that. development in it. Okay, I want to stop in a moment, so I'd like to kind of do something. I don't know what. Okay, do you get the idea, I don't know if I can make it clear, that there's that language perception and so forth, comparison, are part of the divided world.

[60:58]

Maybe we can use, what's that guy's name, who came up with the implicate order and the explicate order? David Bohm, I think it wasn't him originally. Okay, okay. Okay, so in any case, at a molecular level, the world is distinguished. At an atomic level, the world is one stream of atoms. In that sense, you have the divided world and the undivided world.

[62:03]

And from Buddhist experience, discovered through meditation and other practices, this is a fact. The world exists simultaneously at the divided world and an undivided world. And that's the teaching of emptiness. And again, the teaching of teaching, this is your little church. De lera, de lera. I know, I know, I know. Sometimes I get these jokes, you know. Okay. Thank you.

[63:05]

Well, that's my problem, isn't it? Okay. So again, a good example of this from a Zen story I gave the other day is Dung Shan is asked, what body of the Buddha does not fall into any categories? And Dungsan said, I'm always close to this. So it's a practice you can try to find. You can't actually live in the undivided world, although you're living there. And if you said, oh, I live in the undivided world, you'd be dead. Because saying it is in the divided world.

[64:21]

So he says, I'm always close to this. So all this practice is to give you a way to being close to this. Mm-hmm. So if the self is a construct, and you can live, sometimes abide, reside outside the self, where are you going to reside? One of the answers to this is the five skandhas.

[65:27]

And also the answer is, because when you're living in the... Okay, then that's also the thing is, how do you live closer to the undivided world? If you live in the object of perception, you're living in the divided world. If you live in the field of perception, you're living closer to the undivided world. So, for example, I used the term Was it the other day when I used the glass as the example? If I hold up this cup, this cup has light on it. Now, I can shift to residing in the light. Now, while I'm talking to you, I can reside in my voice.

[66:50]

Not the sound of my voice. I mean, not the words, but the sound of my voice. And I can take or I can reside in the sound of Ulrike's voice. The best example I can think of that I used the other night is you go sunbathing. From a technical Buddhist point of view, when you go sunbathing, you're not just trying to look more beautiful. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, we can go rain bathing. Anyway, when you go sunbathing, what you really want to do is to reside in the light continuum.

[67:57]

And you don't have the skill to do it all the time, so you do it by the sun or a sun lamp on your body. And your eyelids start to glow red and you feel this light. And then usually you then shift into the sound continuum. And you begin to hear the sounds on the beach and people talking and seagulls and stuff. In a different way. So these are two basic practices of Buddhism to shift where you locate yourself into either the light continuum or the sound continuum.

[69:01]

And I think what people are doing when they go sunbathing is often they're using the sun in that situation to actually practice a certain kind of meditation. But one of the practices in Buddhism is to at any moment take your residence in the light continuum. You don't have to go to the beach. You can almost have exactly the same feeling as if you were sunbathing. And at any time in your job, in Vienna, in working, whatever, you can be working at your desk, You can either just by looking at your desk or maybe it's easier to look up and look out the window.

[70:06]

And you just don't look. You shift where you reside to the light continuance. Another similar practice is to shift yourself so you're identified with the sky. You immediately feel quite big. Or you don't know where your boundaries are. So you do that for a moment and you actually weave that into the text of your life. And then you go back to working.

[71:09]

But some of you still stays in the light continuum and you're feeling much more at ease. And you're being nourished then by light. This kind of practice arises out of the five skandhas. Or the other one is to reside in the sound continuum. Which in the Suram Gama Sutra says this is the primary mode to realize enlightenment for a Buddha. You have to go. Okay. Okay, so just to finish this, when you go back and reside in the form continuum, at the level of signal, because you've unloaded consciousness, you're very close to the undivided world.

[72:19]

Now, the, what? I have a question. Yeah. The sound. [...] I had this experience of light. Well, when we often say, hear with your eyes and see with your ears, that means when you begin to reside in, when you can take your residence out of representational thinking, and you begin to reside in a perceptual continuum, you can get, I guess, we could call it a channel switch to begin to hear with your eyes.

[73:53]

And this is part of the practice of the eight vijnanas, which I'm hoping to do with you tomorrow. Someone said to me, they like this new way I'm teaching because there seems to be a direction where you can tell where I'm going. But we might be sitting on a turtle with a carrot at the end of a stick. We might not get to the carrot till next year. This building might be a turtle. Okay. The last thing I want to do is this practice of naming. I'm going to try to be quick here, just give you the suggestion.

[75:01]

Now, it's also the practice of when they say in the breath practice, when you have a long breath, you say, ah, a long breath. When you have a long breath, you say, ah, a long breath. When you have a short breath, you say, oh, a short breath. Now, I remember when I first practiced it, I thought, I've got a short breath, a long breath. Who cares whether it's short or long? I'm not going to pay attention to that. Why add a name to my breathing? I'm trying to practice Zen. I'm trying to get away from naming it. So I didn't practice that. I just paid attention to my breathing. Then at some point I named my breath. And I found as soon as you did it, you had a channel shift. You have to shift to another kind of mind that doesn't function the way it does if you just are there.

[76:22]

So naming is a dharma because it's doing something in a complete unit. So every day, if you want to bring Zen practice into your daily life, you do something that seems very stupid. You look up at the wall of your office and you say, wall. Now again, if you take LSD and look at the wall, you'll see something quite unusual. Maybe you'll see that the plaster has great things in it, you have noticed. But the practice of naming can put you in the same space. What?

[77:33]

Yeah. So that's the practice of naming, flower. Then the next practice, the next argument is just the sense impression, the appearance. Without names, without associations. And this is almost more physical. You just look up at your, I'm just putting it all in the office, you look up at your office and you just kind of let the whole, the appearance of the whole thing be there without any idea about it. You do that now and then. And the third one is associations. I look at the flower. I separate myself from naming. I separate myself from the appearance. And I create a state of mind where there are just associations.

[78:59]

Now this may be names, it may be appearance, etc. But it's a little different kind of mind. You're open to everything this makes you think of. But you don't glue any of those associations together in a pattern or a story. You just let associations arise. Now that's very much like uncorrected state of mind. So uncorrected state of mind is closely related to the dharma practice of associations. And the ability to be in the dharma of associations without putting in a script or a story Is the gate to the next dharma of wholeness.

[80:08]

But I'll show you that tomorrow. Good morning. Good morning. It's nice to see you again. Now, some of you yesterday felt quite good about yesterday afternoon. And some of you thought yesterday was difficult. And too intellectual and someone else too philosophical and so forth.

[81:13]

Probably all of you felt something like that, one way or the other. And it's funny, sometimes the people who like the morning don't like the afternoon, the people who like the morning, etc., And I'm actually interested in those comments. I mean, it doesn't bother me one way or the other what you say. I mean, I don't mean I don't care. It's just that what I'm doing I'm not entirely in control of. So I look at it like the tree. It's a good tree or bad tree, I don't know. At the same time, I want to be a good teacher. So I need to learn from you what to do and how it works for you.

[82:34]

So maybe I could say something to you about how you listen to teaching. How are you this morning? Good. I regret that I didn't have breakfast. Just before I asked you and you said, oh, you weren't hungry, but now you're hungry. So why don't you enter the light continuum and get some light food. Now this may sound strange, but this is all what I'll say.

[83:48]

A little bit like this woman in the back. What is your name? Marion? Elizabeth. Elizabeth said, in a way you listen with your eyes. And you look with your ears. And you watch, in Buddhism, you should probably watch the teacher as if your stomach had eyes. In a way, that's nothing more than saying don't try to figure out what's going on. Don't try to puzzle it out. Of course, also just listen any way you want to. But sometimes in Buddhism and practicing and practicing with a teacher, if for one second or two or three minutes in a week you feel something, that's enough.

[85:15]

It's a little bit, I remember Picasso said, you know, he starts painting something. He was writing about painting. And you paint this and that and so forth. And finally, near the end, you paint a tiny red barn in the distance. And you didn't realize till you got there that that's really what you were painting. Okay, also the question of whether this is intellectual or not. This interests me, so I want to... I'm not responding so much to the two or three comments I got about it.

[86:35]

It's to my thinking about whether it really is intellectual or not and how I could make it work better for you. See, for me, this is not intellectual at all. I mean, for example, if we had an automobile here, and I said, this is the steering wheel, These are the windshield wipers. This is the hood. To me, that's not intellectual. If I said, the auto is the opiate of the masses, Now that would strike me as an intellectual comment.

[87:48]

Because you'd have to think about the Otto, is it a kind of religion? And how does that relate to Marx? And who are the masses anyway? The founder of the Black Panthers, Huey Newton, was a friend of mine. The founder of the Black Panther Union, Newton, was a friend of mine. And on his phone message, you know, you'd call him up and on his answering machine it said, power to the people, hi, this is Huey. And when you called him, his answer was the following message, so hello, this is the power of the people and here is Huey. So a friend of mine said to Huey, why when you say power to the people do I always feel left out? So that kind of who are the masses, that's all kind of intellectual to me. But to say

[88:48]

This is the windshield. It doesn't seem intellectual. So I'm not even saying windshield. I'm saying these are your eyes. These are your feelings. So Buddhism is really descriptive, not prescriptive. A prescription would be more like a medical prescription. If you have faith, something will happen. But Buddhism is more, it describes how you exist. Or how you might exist. And then it's up to you. Now, in a way, this teaching is also a little bit like an electrical diagram. We talked about this a little bit last night at wherever we were last night having a beer.

[90:18]

Which is, you know, you say, this is a wire. This is another wire. And you connect them here. And then suddenly you have a computer. But what happens when you attach the wire together is something else. So in a way, I'm showing you the electrical diagram where the wires go. Und gewissermaßen zeige ich euch hier den Schaltplan und zeige euch, wie die Leitung verläuft. It's up to you to turn on the switch. Und es liegt an euch, jetzt den Schalter anzumachen. So, in that sense, I'm just describing something, and then you have to turn on the power. Und in diesem Sinne beschreibe ich einfach das, und ihr müsst jetzt einfach den Schalter anmachen.

[91:24]

So it rained last night instead of yesterday afternoon instead of on Sunday. So it looks like we have a nice day today. Now these six dharmas and five skandhas They just happen to be on the same page. There's not much relationship between them. And the five skandhas are also understood to be more characterized by formlessness or space than by some way you can measure them.

[92:37]

So they're a bit like five clouds. And this relates to your question the other day about, yesterday, about exactly what the words mean and so forth. The words are somewhere in the middle of these clouds. And actually, the differentiation between these clouds has a lot to do with your imagination. Whether this is a feeling or a perception has a lot to do with your energy. So in a way, we can say this whole thing is imaginary. Because it's your impulse, your imagination, your intention, which gives it form. Now I'm just trying to give you, tie up the background of this a little bit before I teach you, show you the eight vijnanas.

[94:05]

These dharmas, these dharmas, these dharmas, these dharmas, I feel like I'm speaking bad English, these dharmas, What do you mean? So it sounds like English. These are dharmas. These books.

[94:40]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_67.12