Hello everyone. I've heard that it's rather difficult to get here by bus and so forth from other places and so we waited a little while for people to come. Now we have only an hour and a half, a little less now. So we really don't have much time to meditate together. But I brought my bell in case we did. And But I think since we have so little time together, I'll let you mostly meditate on your own.

[01:05]

And today we'll talk about this question of healing consciousness from the point of view of Buddhism. Now you've heard a statement probably that Zen practice is the practice of everyday life. And that means that everyday life is the territory of your existence. And it also means that the territory of your existence is not somewhere else. By the way, this is Herr Dr. Ulrike Greenway.

[02:06]

who is my friend and willing to translate all this stuff. Oh, Herr and Frau, Frau-Doctor. Well, her. Okay. So, the sense that the everyday is the territory of your lived life, of your existence, is also the realization that this present of our lived life, can absorb and be the subject of all your intelligence, compassion, love, So if we take a question, a statement like my announced topic here, healing consciousness,

[03:45]

you would, from the point of view of the way Buddhist practice looks at things, you'd look very thoroughly at what is healing. And you'd look equally thoroughly at what is consciousness. Now if we take the title of this conference, The Power of Vision, here we have two more words, The Power of Vision. So I will... In this... hour and a half or so, I will try to speak about healing consciousness within the context of vision and the power of vision. Okay.

[05:11]

So healing, at least in English, means to make whole. Now, it doesn't, I should just say as an aside, that it doesn't include the sense of healing of, oh, something bad happened to me, I want to get rid of it. In Zen practice, more than the emphasis, the definition of Zen practice is that what there you make whole, you don't get rid of anything. Okay.

[06:13]

So what do we make whole? You make your mind whole. Man macht seinen Geist, Verstand heil. Your body whole. Seinen Körper. Your relationships with your friends whole. Die Beziehungen zu unseren Freunden. Your relationships to strangers whole. Unsere Beziehungen zu Fremden, die machen wir auch heil. And your relationship to the world. Und unsere Beziehungen zur Welt. Okay. How do you do that? Wie macht man das? Now If we're going to talk about international politics and a vision, an international or non-national vision, you have to recognize from a Buddhist point of view that your innermost thoughts, your most intimate thoughts are also international.

[07:24]

if you have private thoughts that are different than your public personality private thoughts in which you kind of put down other people you know And yet your public personality, you try to act differently. This is not being whole. But it doesn't mean also this kind of practice of wholeness also doesn't mean you're putting yourself down, criticizing yourself for not being whole or perfect. But it's a kind of dialectic or dialogue, a recognition of what you do, just what you do actually, and that recognition within a context of wholeness or the possibility of wholeness. Okay, so here I'm emphasizing just the idea of healing as wholeness, not as getting rid of something or removing something.

[08:55]

And in Mahayana Buddhism and Zen practice your vision of the world is part of your wholeness. To really have a stable sense of self and a stable existence at ease with yourself you need to also have a vision of the world that works within you that's not just ideas but that is present within you Okay, now consciousness. Now I'm going to use the word consciousness to cover a lot of territory, which maybe I'll divide up into different kinds of consciousness, but right now I'll just say consciousness.

[10:17]

Now again, just as I am studying the titles of the conference in my talk here, studying the words of the titles, And I'm using that as sort of an example. In the same way you study what these words represent in you. So, We're conscious.

[11:20]

Right now you're more or less conscious. Whether you're fully conscious is something else again. And to what degree you can be conscious is something we find out. Now basic distinction I made this morning in the meditation discussion in Zazen is that in India they made a distinction between waking consciousness, sleeping, dreaming consciousness and deep sleep consciousness. Or I should say, the mind of deep sleep, the mind of dreaming sleep, and the mind of waking. And those Those three territories, as you know, your dream sleep is not something you're really fully conscious of.

[12:46]

When you try to make it conscious, it slips away. And deep sleep, of course, we're not conscious of at all, though we're actually very connected with the world. So Zen practice and Buddhist practice has been to find a mind, a consciousness which covers these three and creates a new kind of consciousness. Now the first distinction if you learn how to meditate is that you go into meditation like going into sleep but you go into a territory which you're awake in but is not the same as usual waking consciousness. Again, from those of you who were here this morning, I hate to repeat this, but I think it'll be clearer if I do.

[14:03]

If you spend the night, four or five or six hours just lying in bed, but resting, but not going to sleep, you won't feel rested the next day. But if you spend the same number of hours and during that time you go to sleep, you'll feel rested the next day. So there's a kind... are the kind of beings we are, we exist in a kind of dialogue between different kinds of consciousnesses. In a sense, you can say that our very daily existence isn't founded to some degree or founded basically in mystery. Because we don't really know when we go to sleep what fully happens and when we're awake we actually don't know what fully happens because unconscious things are also happening.

[15:48]

So there's a basic mystery in our very consciousness and existence. Okay, so when you practice meditation and you go into meditation, like going to sleep, but you stay awake, And you do that as a habit every day, like brushing your teeth. You don't do it because it's special or good or you want to or don't want to, you just do it. You'll begin to find there's noticeable differences in your waking time when you don't do it. So this is the first major distinction in Buddhist practice, which is beginning to know the difference between a

[17:00]

waking consciousness and let's call it a waking awareness. So let's say you go from a divided consciousness and when you go into meditation or zazen you go into an undivided consciousness Or a quite differently, more fluidly divided consciousness. And I'm calling that more fluidly divided or undivided consciousness, awareness. Okay, now this is the basic kind of situation of Buddhism in general and Zen in particular.

[18:11]

So you begin to know this thing. taste this undivided consciousness, you get the feeling of it on a daily basis. And then you begin to find it's present during the day too, present during your waking. It's present the way the space between the words on a page is there and the words are there. And it's present the way there's a certain pace of silence in this room right now as well as a pace of talking and activity. And you begin to have the physical ability to move in and out of this space of awareness and consciousness.

[19:22]

of the divided world and the undivided world. And you begin to taste its presence more all the time. Then you, next, maybe we could say kind of next step in Zen practice, Is this awareness that you go into in meditation? You use it to explore your world. And you use this undivided or less divided awareness to look at the divided world. And if you do that, you're beginning to see things in a more whole way.

[20:41]

What bothered you before, you begin to see differently. What was there hasn't changed, but somehow you're surrounding it differently. Okay, now one of the vehicles of awareness And I'm trying to teach you this or present this to you as a craft, as a skill. Because I want you to be able to see that this skill is something that can be present in your daily life as you do your daily life.

[21:41]

Yes. So one of the accesses to undivided awareness is your breath. So you have to start joining your consciousness with your breath. You have to start joining your attention to your breath. And that's first what you're doing. You're bringing your attention to your breath. Now I'm also here talking about healing the body as well as healing the planet. I mean, we can say healing begins at home. So when you begin to bring your consciousness and your attention to your breath, you're beginning to make breath something that can shift consciousness into awareness and awareness into consciousness.

[23:14]

So breath in a way becomes a way you can speak the language of awareness and the language of consciousness. So you begin to practice a little bit each day and more and more as a habit being in the world in your breath. And not losing contact with your breath. Now, this room has a particular pace. It's established by its shape and so forth. And it's established by the presence of all of you. And by my speaking. And that pace of the phenomenal world needs to speak to us.

[24:34]

So if you begin to find your mental and physical activity within the pace of your breath, That begins to open you to the pace of the phenomenal world. And that begins to open you to the pace of your friend's breath. This was the headquarters of Stasi before I heard this place. What secret police and all are against is conspiracies. What the secret police and so forth are against are conspiracies. And in English what the word conspire means is to breathe together.

[25:44]

So it actually makes people a little nervous if you start establishing relationships with others not through language and social conventions but you immediately start breathing with them. Which can establish a kind of disturbing to us intimacy immediately. It can establish a disturbing intimacy too immediately. So you have to learn to modulate this finding the breath of your friends with language and social conventions. But the point is, breath is an intimate part of consciousness. Okay.

[26:58]

All right, now we've talked a little bit about consciousness. Okay, where does it come from? What's its source? Okay. When you bring your attention to your breath, the source is your intention. And a certain level of your consciousness. Now if I tell you what you might do is bring your consciousness to your breath as if your breath was a kind of flashlight. Okay. So you bring your breath to the organs of your body. And you begin to study the parts of your body, outside and inside, with your breath.

[28:08]

And you begin to study the positions of your body, inside and outside, with your breath. Now one of the practices of Zen is the study of the body through the body. Now that's, we also have, it's usually translated mindfulness of the body. But what it really means is bodyfulness of the body. Okay, there's also feelingfulness of the feelings and so forth. But right now, for the sake of time, I'm sticking with bodyfulness of the body.

[29:17]

Okay, if you bring your attention to your outer posture and your inner posture, you're beginning to create interior space. And that inner space gets bigger and bigger until you feel you have no boundaries. And it's not an inner space that closes you off from the world but an inner space which joins you to the world. We could say consciousness sort of works from the outside in and awareness works from the inside out. And you can actually begin to feel that the way the world arises from inside and the way the world arises from outside. For a depressed person, they don't have much a way to deal with this world arising from inside and outside.

[30:30]

The more you live in the delight of your own consciousness and awareness, the more the world is whole. I mean, if it's possible to experience delight If you don't have to deal with a big problem right now, the delight can be here right now. Ease and delight is present in this room. And present in each one of you. But our divided consciousness makes it very, very difficult for us to kind of let it happen.

[31:44]

But awareness is always playing on the waves of delight. Okay, so let's go back to you bringing the flashlight of consciousness to the parts and positions of your body. And you find, let's just take one thing, your stomach. Or we can be more subtle and say your hara or your chakra. Now chakras are just places in which you can locate yourself. So if you bring this flashlight of awareness to your hara or to your stomach, say, You see that you're bringing consciousness to that place.

[33:06]

But as your practice, after a certain point, suddenly you'll find that the consciousness is arising from your stomach. Do you understand that? First you're bringing attention to this. You're bringing consciousness to this. And when you bring consciousness to it with enough intimacy and ease, you suddenly find that the hand has its own consciousness. And you're not just bringing consciousness to your hand, your hand is generating consciousness. Okay, so your whole body is generating consciousness. It's not something that just exists in your mind.

[34:17]

And every organ of your body is generating consciousness. We even say every pore of your body is generating consciousness. Now, if you have a kind of boss consciousness that's always kind of from somewhere in your imagined brain trying to run things, all these other consciousnesses are kind of saying, leave me alone. So you've got to create a kind of territory of awareness or consciousness, which allows all the parts of you to be conscious. If you can do that, you'll be healthier. And if you get sick, you'll be able to go into that place where the sickness is and let it be conscious in its sickness. And I'm not kidding.

[35:29]

And this is not some big deal and difficult to do. You really have to decide that it's possible. And what I'm trying to tell you is that it's possible. And you're sitting there in the midst of your stomach consciousness and which you notice if you overeat. Or you're sitting there in the midst of your heart consciousness if you fall in love or something. And different feelings you'll begin to notice actually come from different parts of the body. And when you get a cold or disease or a headache, it comes from a particular part of your body. So healing consciousness in Buddhism would mean developing this kind of consciousness, which I just described.

[36:31]

Okay. Now, awareness is more, is a Let me give you my simple definition of the difference between awareness and consciousness. If you go to sleep at night and you decide to wake up at 6.32 and you wake up at 6.32, it's awareness that woke you up, not consciousness. You weren't conscious during the night, but somehow something was keeping track of the clock in your body, and at 6.32 you woke up. When you look at the clock, it's 6.30.

[38:03]

How did I do that? Now, some people have more ability to do that than others. But when you can do it is when awareness is more awake in you. Because awareness doesn't sleep. It can be overlaid by consciousness, but it doesn't sleep. Okay. So the more you can look at your life in awareness... the more you find your problems and your lived life occur within wholeness. And that doesn't mean that you now try to not be conscious at all, you try to live in awareness only.

[39:08]

Okay, because wholeness is also this dialogue between, friendship between consciousness and awareness. Because wholeness is also this dialogue between awareness and consciousness. Now, the reason I used the example of waking up in the morning at 6.32, is to point out that these things like awareness are not just the property of yogic adepts. Yeah. Yogis and adepts in Buddhist practice are certainly more skillful at these things than But really the main thing is knowing this is possible and noticing it's present right now in every situation in your life.

[40:27]

To begin to see the topography of consciousness is not just, oh, here's this room full of light. No, this room is a topography of consciousness. Okay. Now, let's go to the power of vision. Now, vision means to see. But usually seeing, when you have a vision or somebody goes on a vision quest, it's not something that appears through their ordinary seeing. So it usually has a jump in it.

[41:40]

You know, you're thinking like this and then something happens, you have a vision. So again, Buddhism looks at this as a visionary thinking as a dimension of our human existence. And wouldn't say that it's necessary to go sit for 40 days between two cactuses in Arizona. That may help. But because like a zazen posture, it helps you get in touch with it. But a vision is a way of seeing in a whole way.

[42:54]

So when you practice this way of seeing your body from inside and allowing the consciousness of your body to arise, And you practice seeing the situations of your life, sometimes through consciousness and sometimes through awareness. You're getting closer to having a play in your thinking of specific practical thinking, of visionary thinking that play together. And that is what goes on in you. Now, if you want to begin to live in more fully in this play of ordinary thinking and visionary thinking, you begin to have to have the calmness of another pace that allows this to happen.

[44:31]

Now, when you're sitting between two cactuses on the edge of a cliff, you've profoundly changed your pace. But you can change your pace right now. But not when it's in the grip of your adhesive consciousness. So you need to get the skill of sort of being conscious and dropping into awareness or sensing awareness at the same time. And again, the easiest way to do that is to get in the habit of finding yourself residing in your breath. So your sense of location is not in your thoughts, the narrow band of thoughts, but your sense of location is residing in your breath and in awareness.

[46:01]

So instead of having your mind going one, two, three, four, five, It's more like you go one, zero, two, zero, three, zero. Yeah, or zero, one, zero, one, zero, three, zero. Yeah. I couldn't even translate that. Yeah. So this is possible when you see the picture to begin to reside more in this zero. And this zero is sometimes called bliss. Because the more you can feel it, it's a kind of real bliss. And it's also called emptiness. Now, if you have a shitty picture of the world, it messes it up.

[47:20]

I mean, if you're thinking, oh, that's a person that just, yeah. So you have some responsibility in this play of consciousness within you and awareness To decide really what you think about other people. And how you feel this world exists. Now, the Buddhist view is the world is in each moment in a continuous creation. We're not passive recipients of a world that was started a long time ago and we're stuck with. Yes, we've inherited a world that we've created together.

[48:22]

But how this world is is quite different. Look what 40 years of Soviet socialism made the difference between 40 years of West German capitalism. It's made a difference in who West Germans and East Germans are, even though the wall is down. And that difference arises from you. Now, this last war we just had in, much of the world had in Iraq. was supported by a lot of countries because the language that the world talks about itself in supported the war.

[49:46]

And a lot of people who oppose the war and war is terrible actually don't have a language to describe the world in other than say war is bad. And until we who are opposed to war develop a language as ultimately everyone's opposed to war. But if the major world language supports war, it's really hard to stop it. War has to be stopped before war starts.

[50:51]

And these countries, nobody's at war right now, I mean the major powers, but they're talking, their language is war. So Buddhism would say it's necessary to create a language for the world that's more whole than the language of war. And language is the responsibility of each speaker and each singer. And a lot of the singers are actually doing quite a lot to help develop this language that's more whole than the language of war.

[51:54]

So if we're going to have a healing vision of the world we need to have a healing language of the world. And a language that arises, it will arise from vision. So you have to find your own inner language your own language of inner consciousness and be really true to yourself. and how your inner consciousness and the world join. And this is your task. It's not so important to rush it and expect to have it done by the time you're 25.

[52:59]

If you commit yourself to the task, And you see other people who commit themselves to this task. And you intuitively encourage others to commit themselves to this task. The little bit that you do, you don't make much progress actually, but you make a little bit of progress. that progress is picked up by other people very quickly. In fact, if you're probably real advanced, it intimidates everyone else. So the small amount of progress you make through your commitment to make progress Through your commitment to a vision of wholeness, the small progress you make, multiplied by every one of your friends, and every one of your friends' friends, is much bigger than if you did it all at once in five years.

[54:12]

I hope that makes sense to you. So it's the commitment to the wholeness of vision which counts more than how much you can do in a short time. So don't be impatient. You begin to feel what feels whole to you in your heart. And I call this your Schatzkister. I call this your Schatzkister. Because it's your treasure box where your most intimate feelings are recovered. So you see a child. You know, sort of innocence and potential and energy and aliveness. And your heart goes out to that child.

[55:36]

That feeling is a treasure. As watching some duck walk around in the grass can be a treasure. Just how you feel at that moment watching two little ducks go around can teach you something about how we feel. Then you look at your friend and say, why don't they make me feel like the ducks? You know, because you're looking at your friend too much through divided consciousness. And you're looking at the ducks more with awareness. It's real hard to think too much about ducks. Unless you're an ornithologist.

[56:52]

So ducks just bring out awareness. As does a beautiful day like this. So you begin to explore wholeness in yourself. And you begin to explore the language of wholeness. Now, I give you one more little example of how to do this. I'd like to have a few minutes of meditation before we end, but I'll try to end in a few moments. Okay. It would be nice if each of you were complete. In fact, each of you is complete. You don't know how to notice your completeness. Okay. You're incomplete from one point of view and perfect from another point of view.

[58:13]

And one of the big forbidden thoughts of all cultures, almost all cultures, is don't think you're perfect. I mean, they're afraid you might spend all day in the cafe then. But in fact, sometimes you're perfect. Sometimes you would look at the world and it's just perfect as it is. So if you want to find how you're complete, you have to start being complete now. So really, you find ways to make each thing you do completed. Und wirklich so versucht er herauszufinden, alles was er tut, in seiner Weise vollständig zu tun.

[59:29]

It sounds stupid, you know, like kindergarten stuff, but it's true. Und das klingt etwas blöd, wie so Kindergartenkram, aber es ist wahr. So if I, maybe we call it karma garden. Ja, vielleicht sollten wir das karma garden nennen. Or dharma garden. Oder dharma garden. So if I lift my hand and I put it back down, I do it with a feeling of it's a complete act. As I'm sitting here looking at you and feeling you, I feel very complete in my looking at you. Nothing seems to be missing. And if I take a breath, I feel, oh, there's an inhale. Now it's complete.

[60:31]

Now exhale. If I reach out for the glass of water, I feel that motion. And then I actually have a feeling of stopping for a moment. And in that stopping for a moment, I feel the coolness of the glass. And then I lift it up. I bring like a tool, you know. And then I lift it up. But Dharma practice is something like that. In the beginning you begin to see each thing in a kind of separateness and completeness. And when you do that also I begin to feel the pace of this glass. This glass having no handle requires to be handled in a certain way.

[61:40]

It requires me to use two hands. That's actually why the Japanese and Chinese don't put handles on their cups and bowls because they want you to use two hands. Not because they don't know how to make handles. They're quite smart, actually. It's because it's a yogic culture that wants you to bring your energy together in your hands as you do things. And to move things into the field of the body. So if I bring this, give this to Ulrike, I pick it up here, I might change it here, but I let it pause for a moment in the Schatzkister. And then it starts to glow with Schatzkister energy.

[62:56]

I mean, maybe I'm exaggerating a little, but it's kind of true. Now I pass the time. Can I have it back? Okay, so if you have a feeling of on your breath and in your activity of each thing that you do, you do it with a sense of completeness. If you make this a habit, in one year you'll begin to feel much significantly more complete. And you'll feel at any moment you can rest in completeness.

[64:03]

And if you feel complete, you don't care so much about what happens. Right now you're complete. And when you have the detachment of not caring so much what happens, you see much more clearly and are in fact more connected. So this is the practice of bringing healing vision and completeness into your activity and mind. Now, I'd like us to sit for just a minute or two. And while you sit, I might say something, I might not. And mainly you want to sit so your backbone has a lifting feeling through it. And so your backbone breathes.

[65:26]

And your body feels open. Thank you. You don't know where you are right now.

[69:37]

You don't need to know where you are right now. No one can find you. Not even Buddha can find you. And yet the whole world is present within you. We didn't have time enough to go very far in the direction we started.

[71:23]

But let me say that if you want to come to a vision of the world that acts in you, First you have to look at what vision of the world do you actually have? What do you think really is going on here? And who actually do you think other people are? And what is your relationship to other people? When we see another person's pain and not their name or nationality, we're already in a different world than people used to be in. Now, I hope, I wish all of you the courage of the way you want the world to be.

[72:27]

Hmm? I wish you all the courage of the way you want the world to be. Without that courage you can never have real stability in your inner consciousness, in your interior space. And the courage of the way you want the world to be is also the courage of how you'd like some human being to be. Just imagine what kind of person you really wish existed on the planet.

[73:29]

When you were a child, Or now. You could say to yourself, it would be really nice if there was somebody like that. It would make me feel better about all human beings. If you'd like somebody else to be like that, why not you? That's your job. Thank you very much. Thank you.

[74:54]

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