Now I like to keep the Sangha in Europe and the United States more or less abreast of each other. And so one thing I probably should talk about, and that as Ulrike reminded me, is this distinction between sensation, perception, and conception. And the process of looking into our experience. But first, does anyone want to say something about what we've already talked about or bring something up?

[01:27]

Drive me in a different direction? Ready to be driven. Ich bin bereit, geleitet zu werden. Okay. I have a question about the five skandhas. I tried to capture and slid away. Also mir sind die fünf skandhas nicht ganz klar. Ich habe das versucht zu fassen, aber es ist mir entglitten. What part slid? Welche Teile sind da entglitten? I took a little step from consciousness to the field of mind, perception. Right, so it started head of mind.

[02:29]

Really? So non-graspable feeling is where you lost it? I lost it or something. Then I got to my sensation only prior to concerts. Then I didn't. So let me come back to non-graspable feeling then. And to sensation. As they will come up in this, if I speak about these three words.

[03:48]

Which may not work so well in Deutsch, I don't know. In German they may not work so well, I don't know. Okay, so the situation which gave me the suggestion of how to speak about this. I had, it was, you know, morning, I guess it was, maybe it was during practice period, it was about... 3.30 or something. And I had a bag of dishes and things breakables that I had decided to bring down to the center. And the log house where I live with Marie-Louise and Sophia.

[05:15]

Who will come here Saturday. They're coming, they were going to come earlier but they're staying at a cousin's house now who insisted you can only stay here if you're here for Friday as well as Saturday morning. Because his cousin had something to do and needed her to be at the house, a woman. Oh, he's a female cousin and a male cousin? Yeah. Oh, really? Like nephew and niece, huh? Anyway, so I had this bag of breakables. And it was one of those moonless nights, which can be very dark. And so as I had a paper bag and as I went out the door, the bag broke. So I didn't really have time to go get another bag and put all these glasses on.

[06:33]

So I tried to hold it so it wouldn't fall apart. Because the first round of the Han had started. And that's the sounding board. So it's seven hits and then five hits a minute apart and then three hits more or less. So I know the path quite well down and I can do it fairly quickly. But with this bag of breakables, broken bag of breakables, my pace was rather different. And even a little trip would have left a lot of breakables, broken glass and stuff on the path.

[07:50]

So anyway, I started down the path, holding a flashlight under the broken bag. And, you know, the path is rather stony. And although I'm very used to it, there are bears in the neighborhood. And sometimes right around our house. And it's a little, you know, it's totally dark, no moon, you're a little lit. You know, it's over there. But the broken bag was more dangerous than the possible bear. So I'm holding the flashlight. And a stone would appear in the momentarily in the flashlight.

[09:11]

And at that moment, you have the eye sensation of the rock, the stone. A moment later, the flashlight's illuminating something else. So I no longer have an eye sensation. If I'm going to know where the stone is, I know it because it's a percept held in my mind. So it's no longer a sensation per se. It's now a percept. And I have to remember more or less where the percept is in the dark.

[10:31]

So I don't trip over the stone. And I go like that down the path. Sensation, percept, sensation, percept. And this perception and sensation is in a larger conception. In other words, the sensation disappears. And then the percept, as soon as I step over the rock, disappears. But the disappearing sensation and the disappearing perception, this is what Buddhists do when they have nothing better to do.

[11:42]

So, Both these disappearing percepts and sensations are in a larger conception. They're in the larger mental frame. that I know I'm in the first round of seven hits. Three or four are gone already. And I know that the Second round is only five hits.

[12:57]

And that won't be quite long enough to get rid of the bag of breakables. And get my robes on. And get to the sender on time. And while the third round can be endless, And in Zen, most rules are made so that they are partly arbitrary. So the first seven hits are fixed. And the second five hits are fixed. But the third could be two or it could be five. It's the abbots or the doshis, whoever's leading them. Zendo's privilege.

[14:10]

Yeah, and sometimes I take advantage of this privilege. And I get there after four or five hits. But Christian is out waiting in front of Otoan for me, carrying incense, which is about to burn his fingers. I'm exaggerating. And I know sometimes it's rather cold or rainy out there, and I don't like to keep him waiting too long. So all of that plus knowing where my room is and knowing where the zendo is is part of the conceptual frame. Okay. So now this is a fairly typical Abhidharma analysis. There's sensation.

[15:35]

There's the perception of sensation. And then there's the mental framework in which both happen. And this is rather different than thinking about it. For instance, once you develop the ability to notice these distinctions, you can then develop the ability to feel them, you feel them mentally and physically. And they have a different feel in the body and even a different kind of location in the body.

[16:39]

Okay. So you can hold yourself, hold the mind, the mind-body, in conception only. Like right now, I'm in the middle of this room. Sharing the physical feel of the conception that Giorgio made when he designed this room. And I presume he conceived of the room as if it would what it would like to be sitting here or over there, etc.

[17:43]

So if I hold myself in the conception, and don't think about it, there's a certain feng shui of the room that becomes apparent. Okay. All right, in like manner, you can hold yourself in percept only. And that's what I described as the third skanda. Okay. Or I can hold myself. hold mind and body in sensation only.

[18:52]

And we can call that the first scandal. So, if you make these distinctions, and you experientially make these decisions, these distinctions. As Siegfried pointed out earlier, we're talking about a inseparability through differentiation. Okay. So anyway, that's the distinction that I made between sensation, perception, and conception. Okay, so it's useful, I think, anyway, if we're going to know how we actually exist and function, to be able to see and feel thinking and emotions occurring within a larger conception, or an

[20:16]

within a conception. And you can feel that when you change the conception, almost like it was a room, It changes the feelings, emotions, and thinking that occur in the room. You can change the feeling and thinking thinking within the room, and the room will change. As in a dream, if you change the thinking and feeling, often the scenery, the container for the dream changes. So through being able to make and hold these distinctions, you begin to be able to participate

[21:42]

Yeah, rather fully in what thinking arises, what emotions arise and so forth. You can see that in this kind of a conceptual container, These feelings of anxiety say arise. If I take the walls down and open them up, different feelings arise. So these distinct Abhidharmic-like distinctions... increase your ability to participate in your moment-by-moment mental and physical activity.

[23:13]

Physical and mental activity. Now the point of this exercise originally was primarily to know the experience of sensation only. Now, this Abhidharma-like analysis is quite similar to what Merleau-Pointy does, Gilles Deleuze, which is to try to get very close to

[24:17]

an analysis of appearance. Because the existence as we know it is always a flow of appearance. So how close can we be to the initial appearance? the immanence of aliveness itself. So, without these distinctions, you can't really practice sensation only. Okay, so that's a little riff on that. Any comments?

[25:33]

Yeah, I don't know, I'd have to look it up. It's like that, yes. Those words apply. I mean, I try to do everything in English. And then every now and then, oh, there's a Sanskrit word for that. Someone else? And if I understand correctly, a little crisis can help to develop sensation only, in this case, when you get up a little too late.

[26:38]

For yourself, I mean. Yeah. For that crisis, you have no initial moment to get up. Notice these. Okay, yeah. She was sleeping the other day during the break, and I said, wake up, little Susie, I mean Krista, and she leapt up. What am I supposed to do? You're really in another world. I can go more into this sense of sensation only, but right now I've been talking so much I want to stop.

[27:50]

Yes, Christina. According to your narrative, there is this light, and within the light, sensation appears, and then when the light is gone, perception remains. Eye sensation. There are other sensations by walking and so forth. And the light in your narrative allows the distinction between the two.

[28:54]

And for us, this is often lumped together, and so it can be hard to distinguish between, oh, this is my sensation and this is my perception. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it takes some time to separate sensation from perception. I mean, but a common example that we do at much of the world, I don't know about here, but at Crestone, We're certainly in one of the most remote places in the United States. But if you draw a line on the globe from Los Angeles to New York, we're directly under the flights. So the early morning and the late afternoon flights.

[30:20]

So while you're in Zazen, you can hear, you have the sensation of the sound. And you can have the perception that it's an airplane. Or the perception that it's a sound. Or you can just feel it like the music of the spheres. Or maybe like Susan listens to music.

[31:22]

The way each note may be just an experience that you can't say is even sound. So if you think, oh, that's the Los Angeles flight, then you're thinking conceptually. And even you're thinking conceptually when you say it's the sound of an airplane. dann bist du eigentlich in diesem konzeptionellen Denken und du bist auch darin, wenn du nur denkst, dass es sich hier um das Geräusch eines Flugzeuges handelt. But if you can just feel, you're feeling, sometimes your feeling happens and you don't even know why and then you think, oh, there's an airplane over here. Manchmal ist es so, das findet, es entsteht eine Empfindung

[32:26]

And the more you can be in just the feeling, the non-graspable feeling in this case, the fourth skanda, or the second skanda, then you're in sensation on. Then you're in sensation on. But the way we function, particularly at first when you develop this, you're shifting like vibrating a string. Between sensation only and perception, back to sensation only, back to perception. Like the feel of this rain and not just the sound of this rain.

[33:31]

And you can be in the sort of territory of the feel of the rain, the sound of the rain, without really saying it's rain. And you can be in the sort of territory of the feel of the rain, the sound of the rain, without really saying it's rain. And when you're in that territory of the feel of the rain and let's say sound of the rain, everything is equal. Because all sensations are equal. So the world flows through you and the situation and the circumstances in a different way than when there's a hierarchy of conception and perception.

[34:42]

Maybe it would be like taking a nap in this room during the break. Where you're not quite you're not fully asleep. But you're too asleep to really perceive anything. And you just feel something's going on in the room. And there's no effort to know whether it's... person or a cat. Or the rain. And you don't care.

[35:45]

This would be a good state of mind in which to die. Something's going on but I don't really care. If it stops all this will be fine too. So you don't have to be asleep to be in this state of mind. You can just be in a very receptive state where Nothing takes the form of perception so... Scept means, in English, to grab, to hold on. Per-ception.

[36:47]

Con-ception. Also, du kannst dich in diesem empfänglichen Raum befinden, wo du nichts ergreifen musst, dieses... So you're just letting things flow through you and the world flows through you. And you know the modalities of the world. In a new way. Okay. This is like you treat a cat differently than a dog. And I found that every cat needs to be treated a little differently than your previous cat.

[37:51]

So as you learn how to relate to your cat, The particular language your cat wants or tries to teach you. You can think of your body as different kinds of animals. And to work with the Tantians is one way of relating to the Maybe three different body animals. It's a kind of language. I heard someone say the other day, if you call your cat and the cat comes, you don't have a cat, you have a dog.

[38:54]

Then you don't have a cat, So I think it's time to take a break. Okay, thanks.

[39:20]

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