Now we've been speaking this morning and this afternoon. Yeah, sort of about self, but since that's the topic. But at least I have not been trying to reach any definition of self. I mean, all of us have a continuous, virtually uninterrupted experience of self. But if we try to look at that uninterrupted experience of self, sometimes there's more selfness and sometimes less selfness. And that's very important that there's more sometimes and less.

[01:05]

And it's important to notice when there's more. or less selfness. Because if you think of self as an entity, as something you possess. And something that possesses you. And it's sort of always there. Then at least in the immediacy, though you might over this period of your, the decades of your life, notice some difference. But in the immediacy of your moment-by-moment experience,

[02:07]

If you tend to think of self implicitly as an entity, something you possess, as you and you possess, then you won't notice the topography of self as it is. gathers and disperses in our activity. And if you want to participate in how you're put together, You have to find some way to participate in this topography of the medias. I don't want to try to review what we did this afternoon, today.

[03:40]

Though I would like it if those of you who have been here this afternoon and this morning would find ways tomorrow to review with all of us what's stuck in your mind or what made sense to you or Yeah, what seemed missing. Because if we're going to have a discussion of any subtlety about such a, as I said, simple and yet enormous topic, we have to do... Yeah, it's just because I just arrived.

[04:58]

As most of you know, I came to Europe a week later than I expected. I was on two planes from Denver. Last night on the night train from Zurich and then Eric and Christina picked me up in their car and dumped me on this pillow and said, talk. Well, I'm sitting here doing the best I can. But I am still entered into this field or this stream of awareness that's bigger than self. That the more we can feel this,

[06:01]

The more surprisingly the field will surface in each of us, we can find ourselves as we say in English, on the same page. Or in the same field of awareness that goes beyond our usual sense of self. And one of the things that I'm calling the historical Buddha, the early Buddha, is try not to think in terms of I, me and mine. This is me, this is mine, etc. Yeah, but what kind of advice is that?

[07:35]

It sounds good, but what do you do with it? What you do with it is you enter it somehow like acupuncture. into the field of mind. Darmakirti says the apprehension of an object is This is the defining characteristic of consciousness. Now we can read a sentence like that backwards and forwards and from the middle. In other words, if you want to Define consciousness.

[08:55]

Define not only knowing what consciousness is, but defining also to change the definition of consciousness. If you want to define consciousness, to understand it, to participate in it, and to maybe define it differently, The focal point is the apprehension of the object. All of this depth at least Zen practice, Buddhist practice, comes down, comes down to, turns on the apprehension of the object.

[10:12]

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, so I often give you a phrase. Very often in recent years. To pause for the particular. Yeah, I don't know how that works in German, of course. But in English it has a kind of punctuation. To, it directs you to.

[11:16]

Pause. Pause. Yeah, good. And then sometimes you pause for the pause. Mm-hmm. And there's two P's there, particular. The part. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, from the point of view of Buddhism, there's nothing but parts. There's no underlying ground of being. I'm very sorry to announce that. And I apologize.

[12:21]

What an absolutely exciting idea. There is no underlying ground of being. No, you know, as most of you know, I have this daughter I can't... Stop talking about her. Maybe she's my underlying ground of being. But she comes up because I live with her, right? So I study, well not study, I observe, I examine, investigate my own stream of being all the time.

[13:28]

And in the midst of the stream of being I inhabit There's this seven-year-old stream of being. Which is still developing. And I'm trying to participate with it. And support. But I'm a rather permissive parent. I'm grandmotherly. If you don't want to practice the cello, it's fine with me. We can watch... Spongebob. I don't know Spongebob. But who's the sweetest girl with the big feet?

[14:40]

Pippi Longstocking. She's got all the power you want. I like Pippi Longstocking. She's really something else, yeah. But my wife always makes, well almost every day, gets Sophia to play the cello. And in our little town of Creston, which is tiny but has everything we need, there's a man who makes violins and cellos and teaches the cello. So she has a quarter-sized cello made in China.

[15:40]

But the last few months, she's outgrowing it. Her hand's getting too big. Anyway, I... Marie-Louise gets her to play the cello. And she likes to play the cello. And she learns these songs almost immediately. But she still doesn't like to practice. I don't even... But when she does, I had to force myself.

[16:42]

We notice she was in a bad mood before. She didn't want to do it. And almost always, she's in a better mood after and better than if she didn't practice. And I don't think it's because she's proud of herself because she practiced well or something like that, because often she doesn't. She doesn't like her presence being talked into it and blah blah blah. But what has she done? She's had to. on each finger and each string, she's had to pause for the particular.

[17:51]

She's had to pluck the string of the moment. And somehow, pausing for each note, and allowing each note a kind of fullness of some pleasure, seems to actually kind of Organize your mind. Well, that's not quite right. the relationship of mind and body, because it's her body doing it as well.

[18:56]

So as I say, she's had this little homeopathic dose of pausing for the particular. And the rest of the day her mind and body literally seem more in tune. And it seems that for the rest of the day your body and your mind are in a better harmony. And I am not very musical, but I have the feeling that something similar happens when I practice sasen. mindful attention, engaged mindfulness, then how do you do that?

[20:05]

Because, you know, just this stream of mind or stream of being just flows right past us. How can I say it flows right past us? Does it leave me behind? No, it kind of drags me with it. This is the future you wanted, isn't it? Yeah, I guess so. But how can I not feel it's... pulling me along.

[21:11]

How can I feel a pace? The topography of this immediacy is not the same. as when I was walking up here. And it's not the same as it was this afternoon. There's quite a few more of you here. This is a rather different field. So although I I'm not going to review much of what we did today. I can comment on it a little. And also bring up some of the Dharmic craft. that allows us to participate in the stream of mind and being.

[22:34]

Yeah, so this evening I give you the traditional old Zen phrase, just this. It makes sort of sense. It's kind of refreshing. But the drill is the way of doing it. is to form an intention to introduce Just this. Or to add just this. To every appearance. To every point appearance.

[23:59]

How do you know what a point appearance is? Usually our mindful attention is not that refined. But just this is a way to To refine our mindful attention. You want to somehow embed the phrase Just this. In the moment by moment activity of mind and body. And it's a craft. No, of course I'm suggesting you do that every moment from now till when you die.

[25:12]

But I know I'm being idealistic and foolish. And it doesn't work that way anyway. Yeah, that's impossible. But it really does help if you make it a strong intention for a short period of time. Yeah, you can only hold a strong intention for so long. A few days after New Year's. So why not try it, say, between now and tomorrow morning? Or between now and Sunday afternoon? And you don't try to do it successfully? And you don't blame yourself if you maybe Saturday evening you remembered.

[26:31]

But you do want to notice how often you were able to do it. Because it does show you how often you're able to engage an intention with the stream of mind. And it's amazing You know, how little we can do it. Although we have here in love, it's fairly easy. So you've got to sort of somehow be something like in love. So you've got to sort of somehow

[27:33]

in love with this experience of being alive and wanting to Bring an intention, a wisdom intention into it. Or some kind of articulating intention. So the important thing is not how often you're able to do it, but how often. Strong your intention is. The strength of the intention somehow works underneath consciousness to kind of clarify it. And sometimes out of this articulated or deepening clarity under consciousness,

[28:44]

What am I talking about? The fish of intention takes a leap out and splashes into consciousness. Excuse my joke, but you can notice whether it's a self-fish or a non-self-fish. Now what happens when you do this? What we talked about, one of the things we talked about today is what is meant by memory in Buddhism. So, I ask you for the sake of this conversation and this weekend, is to forget about everything, every definition of memory you know.

[30:19]

I know we're all attached to our memories and our definitions of memories. And I'm not taking away your memories. I'm just defining memory as everything that's not here. No, the example I used is this is a watch. That's memory. As I said, if I'd given this to Sophia when she was... A few months old? I don't think I would have if she would have thrown it on the floor. But she certainly wouldn't have known it's a watch. For her it would just be a shape. And maybe when she developed her attention span a little bit it also might be a click. So it might be a shape and a sound.

[31:46]

That's what's here. Everything else, that it's a watch, that I own it, blah, blah, blah, somebody gave it to me, blah, blah, blah, that's all memory. Now the question is, and I'll just bring it up and I won't try to unpack it or develop it. Is that In Buddhism we say that everything that's not here we call a sign.

[32:49]

A sign called forth from your experience. And a sign which then You look at it, you say, hey, that's a watch. Now the watch is not here. There's only a shape and a sound here. The watch is something you bring to it. So technically we say there's the percept and the sign. The percept says Shape sound. The sign says watch. Risk watch.

[33:49]

So I made up a word, mem sign, memory sign, mem sign. So in each moment our stream of being is a mem sign joined to a percept. It's so fast, so immediate, so inhabited by us that unless you're a kid, you don't notice it. the immediacy of this mem sign and percept. Now, from the point of view of Buddhism, the percept has a power. And the mem sign has a power.

[35:17]

And usually the mem sign captures the percept. And makes us see things. In very predictable ways. In predictable ways that flow from our accumulated experience. Our accumulated nature. Our accumulated nature. Okay. Now, they've done studies which say, you know, if you take, you put a syllable at the beginning of a And you put a syllable or a word at the end of a line.

[36:20]

And you put some black dots in between. People read it as a sentence. If the black dots are the right length and so forth. Basically, the men signs take over the perception. This allows us to read very quickly, scan. No, a poet doesn't want you to do that. So they try to interfere with your habits of guessing. So a poet They want you to notice every word and they want you to notice the horizontality of the word and the verticality of the word.

[37:41]

The horizontality of the word is how it fits into the sentence, defined by the context of the sentence. The verticality of the word is how it sticks out of the sentence and has lots of other meanings. And the verticality of the words may create a kind of resonance that, when you call it another tone, that floats above the sentence. Overtones. Well, in this very situation we're here, there's a kind of horizontal knowing of this situation. a field we're creating and to various degrees we allow that boundary to expand or contract and maybe you're mostly in

[39:12]

Your own field, I, me, mine. And to various degrees you feel I, me, mine sort of weakening and you start including other people, your family or friend. But there's also a verticality here too. And each of you has vertical resonances. So there's also, excuse me for sounding a little crazy, you know, new age. But there's also overtone feels and undertones that are flowing here.

[40:38]

They aren't captured by the mem signs. And when you can release percept from mem sign. Or allow percept to dance with mem sign. But allow percept to dance with other partners too. The present becomes the presence of the present. It becomes much more complex and much more satisfying. This simple little acupuncture, just this, has this power.

[41:48]

enters you into, it begins to teach you or show you the point present. You know, what you notice. And sometimes you sort of direct the noticing and sometimes you notice without directing it. So there's a noticing. And if you try just this until Sunday afternoon, you may be surprised what you notice. And one thing it does, it takes you sort of out of your thoughts. No, it's not entirely your thoughts. And you notice the momentary immediacy more.

[43:03]

And in this joining of percept and menisci, just this kind of separates them a little. And gives more power, more presence, To the percept. And to the verticality of the percept. That's kind of sloughs off. Do you know sloughs off? Sloughs off is to kind of like... It slides off. sloughs off the mem sign. And what happens is the stream of mind and being becomes surprisingly more clear. More precise. And there's even a feeling of certainty.

[44:26]

And it even creates a feeling of security and of truth. through the process of perception when it's just this you actually feel more engaged which then when you're engaged with mem signs mem signs which we have to have to function But when mem signs are the dominating definition, they hide the present from us. They tend to hide the immediacy of the present.

[45:32]

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