Sometimes I'm embarrassed by what I say. If you just listen, because I imagine if you listen to my words, these words, At the level of thinking it makes life seem awfully complicated. Particularly if your thinking is like at this one moment I try to understand it. But if I imagine you also feel what I'm talking about,

[01:03]

then the words are just sort of nudged, the feelings, this way and that way. Feeling as a recognition or understanding. When we feel something is true. Now, I don't know really, of course, to the degree to which India had the sense that they clearly did in China, that the meaning was not in the words but in the repetition and holding of the words. I've said this before, so you've got the idea, I'm sure. But maybe I say it myself as a kind of mantra to reintroduce us to this way of thinking.

[02:13]

The most obvious example is the way the Chinese, for instance, give... give titles to sutras or essays or teachings. The title is meant to be practiced and reveal the text without even reading the text. It's as if in the chapters of a book you came to the title of a chapter, a third chapter of a book, say, and you... Before you read the chapter, you took the title and you practiced with it for, you know, a week or so.

[03:53]

And that practice of the title of the third chapter would soften you up for the third chapter or open up the third chapter to you. And to practice this practice with the inscription of this chapter, would this open you up a bit for the content of this chapter? Yes. We just don't think that way usually, not when we make a title. Just separate it from something else and announce the general idea.

[04:59]

Now the title of this seminar, Meditation and Mindfulness, is really just a typical old usual Western title. But I gave a seminar in Boulder when I first went back to the United States. November or something, I don't know. And they wanted me to write some copy for the seminar. And the title of the seminar, if I remember correctly, was something like The Maturing... of the true self, or something like that. So they asked me to write some coffee for the maturing of the true self.

[06:16]

So I wrote, practice the title. So I simply asked everyone for the next few weeks before the seminar, what could it mean, the maturing of the true self? What is the self? What is the true self? How do you mature the self or the true self? So I said, if you all practice this title when I get there, you'll make the seminar much nicer for me. And it was true.

[07:23]

It was good. It was a good seminar. So maybe if we get more in the habit of knowing to practice the title of the seminar before coming, I wouldn't give titles to seminars like meditation and mindfulness. So I don't know to what extent this... was part of the thinking of the early Indian teachings of Buddhism. But it was certainly a big part. Because the five skandhas, for instance, the teaching of the five skandhas is said to hold the five skandhas in view.

[08:34]

So the teaching of the five skandhas is not in the five and what they are and how they relate. But what happens when you hold them in view in the midst of your usual lived life? So that then means the first teaching is mindfulness. Because you can't hold something in view except through developed mindfulness practice. Now, what I've said so far is, you know, and partly on Saturday I like to create problems.

[09:52]

I like to get mixed up and be a little chaotic or very chaotic. And then Sunday I like to try to, you know, make it clear. And sometimes I make it so confused on Saturday, I wonder, Sunday, how am I ever going to survive Sunday? I'm lost. But if I'm lost, then probably you're lost too, and that's a good place to be. Because then we really have to kind of work this out together. So what I've said so far is that you can take mindfulness practice, add specific teachings, and those teachings begin to take, let's call it, photographic consciousness.

[11:00]

And begin to separate, maybe it's like, no, I don't want to make computer images, but you can begin to separate consciousness into... Layers, a topography. And one of the reasons the five skandhas is right at the beginning of the menu of the Heart Sutra. Because one of the first steps in this is to open up the layers that make consciousness. Until you really can see that when you notice something, memories come in. And there's perception. And there's a perception of all the senses or an emphasis on one sense or two. and so forth.

[12:34]

So you can begin, you can see in the midst of consciousness, which just looks like a photograph, you can begin to see how it's put together. And you begin to be a participant then in your own consciousness. You're not a victim of your consciousness. And by seeing how consciousness is put together, you begin to have the ability to transform how it's put together. Now just to review where we're at without trying to make it clear. I'm always talking about awareness and consciousness.

[13:59]

And I'm talking about consciousness usually as I defined it before lunch. That's the way it's the job of consciousness to make things predictable, etc. Awareness I define as a A subtle form of knowing. Maybe today we could define it as non-thinking consciousness. The example I give is you fall down and you catch yourself and you don't get hurt. And you know, if you thought, oh, I'd better put my elbow here or that, you'd be in trouble. You'd just fall and you'd catch yourself. Mm-hmm. Obviously there's perception involved because you see the sidewalk or you see the curb or you see whatever has made you fall.

[15:14]

So the constituents of a consciousness are involved except you're not thinking. And when you... Yeah, my usual examples, etc. You go to sleep and you wake up at 6.02 a.m., etc., without an alarm clock. So let's call it again non-thinking consciousness. So what goes to sleep when you go to sleep is your thinking. But non-thinking consciousness stays sort of awake. and has a knowing, a field of knowing that somehow bodily and phenomenal that wakes you up.

[16:23]

Now the lucidity of lucid dreaming is, I think we could say, awareness or non-thinking consciousness. When I said the other night, last night, when you bring attention to consciousness, posture and breath, when you use attention in this way, attention is part of consciousness. But it's the part of consciousness Let's call it, again, non-thinking consciousness.

[17:26]

Where intention operates and not thinking. Now, intention is also what holds a teaching in view. So while you're thinking of, while you're, say, holding a teaching in view, a phrase, you're repeating a phrase, you may think about it. But thinking doesn't hold it in view. Intention holds it in view. And intention functions and generates in its functioning non-thinking consciousness, let's call it now. So it's non-thinking consciousness which does the work of opening up the teaching.

[18:27]

And non-thinking consciousness can hold a teaching in view. Or can hold a view... I'm going to wake up at 6.02 a.m. And it's that, so again, you bring attention, attention is brought to posture and breath. And if you can thus inhibit thinking consciousness, for a certain duration, and for the beginner it takes longer, but you hold

[19:32]

thinking consciousness in check and non-thinking consciousness pops open. It's almost a field, almost like wings open up. That's Er ist durch die Wolken hindurchgebrochen. Er hat seine Flügel ausgebreitet und er fliegt. There's no denying his existence now. I'm sorry, they're just part denying it. Some student I had years ago in the 60s wrote that poem, wrote that line. It was quite crazy, but it was a good line. Not crazy, he just was too powerful in his sitting and it unnerved him. He's somebody I had to get to sit less.

[20:46]

He was so powerful in his sitting that he really had to sit less. So this awareness that pops open when we hold thinking consciousness in check, and this non-thinking consciousness pops open, And if you're in sashin and you really stabilize this, for instance, sashin is where you most likely will notice it. And you stabilize this non-thinking consciousness. Sometimes you have it throughout the whole Sesshin.

[21:57]

And it continues at night. Your thinking consciousness has sort of been out of the picture all day. But non-thinking consciousness, what I'm calling it now, has gotten stronger all day. And the whole night then is like a lucid dream. Or sometimes. It can, or sometimes it is. I don't guarantee it. I don't sign a guarantee at the beginning of Sashin we'll have all night long non-lucid consciousness. But it happens. Yeah, fairly often, at least for some people. An experience is your body is asleep and your conscious thinking is asleep. And even with your eyes closed, there's a visual picture of the whole room.

[23:00]

And you can feel somebody comes in late from night sitting or whatever. And if you sleep in a zendo, it's really special. Everyone's there sleeping in a zendo. And this is the same non-conscious awareness, non-thinking consciousness, that we experience in a lucid dream, where we have the experience of dreaming while at the same time it occurs in a field of non-conscious thinking. Non-thinking consciousness. Now, Dogen tried to express this with a phrase like, think non-thinking. Now this is a territory of yogic experience.

[24:25]

It's not philosophy. You can't get there by philosophy. If you get there, you can begin to say, well, jeez, I'd like to be able to talk to my friends about it. What could I call it? Well, Let's call it non-thinking consciousness. Okay. So what I'm saying is you can... bring teachings into the practice of mindfulness mindfulness is a power of consciousness and it also is consciousness itself but it's like you're

[25:28]

Concentrating consciousness or clarifying consciousness. It's not passive consciousness, it's attentional consciousness. Now, attentional consciousness is what's meant by, when a teacher in Zen particularly says, he or she's in samadhi all day. We can understand that to mean that person is in attentional non-thinking consciousness as their initial state of mind. As their initial and underlying state of mind. So this practice of the power of consciousness as mindfulness opens up the potential of consciousness.

[27:17]

So now we're talking not just about consciousness that's whose job is to make the world predictable. Let's call that Practical consciousness. Because we have to be practical. Traditionally, it's in Buddhism, it's called relative consciousness. Okay. I think in English and maybe in German it's more accessible to us to call it practical consciousness. When you believe in it, it's deluded consciousness. When you believe the world is predictable, this is delusion.

[28:18]

Wenn ihr wirklich glaubt, dass die Welt vorhersagbar sei, das ist Täuschung. Wenn ihr aber wisst, dass die Welt nicht vorhersagbar ist, aber wenn ihr dann unter Umständen, wo das angemessen ist, dennoch so handelt, als sei sie vorhersagbar, Yeah, you know, I want to stop in a minute and I'm getting myself in deep water here. Where's the surface here? I hate teachings which are only ankle deep. You can't get wet, you can't swim. But when they're teaching, it's hundreds of feet to the surface.

[29:32]

This isn't so good either. Yeah. So there's deluded consciousness. Practical consciousness. But it's not just enough to say that works, this two-fold knowing. two-fold truth works when we know that everything's changing. Knowing isn't sufficient. Relative consciousness has to be rooted in the expectation of change.

[30:35]

So we can see the three marks of existence as a catalyst or agent for transforming consciousness. It's not just a teaching that there's suffering and there's change and there's no self. The practice and holding of these three marks in non-thinking consciousness is a transformative catalyst which can change, in this particular case, consciousness from consciousness that expects permanence to a consciousness that expects change, fluidity.

[31:42]

So relative consciousness, in Yogacara it's imagined or deluded consciousness, That consciousness is constructed in the anticipation of permanence. Practical consciousness sees the world the same way. But the way it's put together is to expect impermanence, fluidity, change. Okay. Maybe I'll just give you Kei-Chu's cart.

[33:01]

Kei-Chu, K-E-I-C-H-U, is the Japanese pronunciation of a mythical cart maker in China. Okay? Right, yeah. Kei-Chu is the picture of a mystical... A cart, you know. A cart before the horse. Now I'm just throwing in a monkey wrench here or a fly or something like that. Do you have expression, a monkey wrench? No. You don't. To throw a monkey wrench is... I'm not talking because I'm a monk, sort of. A monkey wrench is a wrench that you turn a bolt with.

[34:10]

And it probably comes from the days, I don't know exactly, when people, the unions tried to disturb the industrial production of Ford motor or something like that. And they would go on strike and also drop a few wrenches into the machinery. So now there's an expression. To throw a monkey wrench means to kind of confuse things. I don't really know the real history of where the phrase comes from. I should see if I can find out. Do you know? It's also a grease monkey is somebody who does work like that. Yeah, that's right. That's true, too. A car mechanic is sometimes called a grease monkey.

[35:12]

An oily ape? All right. So the story of Kei Chu's cart in Japan and China is related to this mythical car maker, a cart maker. Made the first cart in China. But I actually think its source is much earlier in the questions to King Melinda. Which was a Buddhist text written to convert the Greeks in northern India. Anyway, the question is basically the same. In the koan, Getan Zenka says Kei Chu made a cart with a hundred spokes wheels with a hundred spokes but when you take away the spokes

[36:48]

And you take away the front end of the cart. And you take away the back end of the cart. And you take away the axle. What do you have? So that's a famous colon from the Mumon colon. It's number eight. Now the point of a fiscon is not that you perceive the cart as interdependent, dependent on the spokes and the axle and things. Although that's a version of this second mark of existence. That everything is changing and transient means everything is interdependent. And interpenetrating, now that's a new nuance, interpenetrating. And empty.

[38:04]

Okay, so Kei Chu's card is that you perceive things as changing, yes, but also as simultaneously empty, not there. So there's a perception of the object of perception and simultaneously there's a perception of its not-there-ness. Now, let's not say is that true. But what happens when you perceive simultaneously there-ness and not there-ness? Now we're getting much more into the depths of Buddhism when we talk this way, into the shamanic, you know,

[39:07]

Accomplished Zen practice. People rarely actually get there. It's too scary or too impractical. Too different from our usual life. But remarkably, I think we have a feeling for it. How do we practice this too? Yeah. So now we should take a break. And as you know, I love to talk with you. And I was planning to give a little 10-minute little sort of introduction and then listen to Paul's question.

[40:24]

And I don't know what happened. I'm not entirely in control. So afterwards, after the break, let's break up into small groups. At least you can talk with each other, if not with me. And should you have a topic or just all of this is enough?

[40:50]

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