So, when you practice with the five skandhas, you're attempting to slow down the five skandhas. You're attempting to slow down the perceptual process. Now, the best minds of India for some centuries tried to understand how the world existed. And again, as I've talked with some of you about, instead of looking through a cyclotron for the ultimate particles of existence, Instead of looking outside through cyclotrons and electron microscopes

[01:05]

They looked inside through meditation. And they looked inside, particularly through shamatha and vipassana. Maybe you could say shamatha is like a very clear mirror. But you can see things reflected very clearly and stillly. And vipassana is like a lens in which you can look very carefully and clearly at something magnifying it. Now, it just so happens that this civilization attempted to find the ultimate particles of existence inside.

[02:33]

Now, it's a very interesting question why our culture looked outside and their culture looked inside. But that doesn't concern us now so much. What concerns us now is that we are at the bridge of two great civilizations who've taken a different way of looking at reality. And you're studying you through your own secretive processes. have discovered yourself in the middle of these civilizations.

[03:46]

And I bet most of you, even if it's the first time you've come here to meditation, There's been other intimations of this in your interests in the past. For we're part of a larger cultural process that we don't entirely understand. And I think although you are in service to yourself, You are in the service of primary processes in our society. And some of you through your sensitivity are in the service of secondary processes in our society that aren't so visible.

[04:48]

And I think out of your deep intimation of these secondary processes. And out of your kindness and compassion. Although really you're probably too modest to admit it's out of your kindness and compassion. You've come here. What happened in India these centuries just before the beginning of our era? They thought that the self was impermanent. They thought the five skandhas which functions as a self but doesn't have the idea of self in it.

[06:02]

Basically, the five skandhas serves as a self without having the idea of self. Okay, we can talk about that another time if you want. But both self and the five skandhas, the five aggregates, are seen as impermanent. Okay. But the effort was to find some perceptual unit, like an atom, that was permanent. And this whole Abhidharma teaching attempted to locate a unit that was permanent.

[07:08]

And it parallels remarkably modern physics. As you probably know, the word atom means can't be broken. Or maybe don't break. But we broke it. And we changed the world. And when we begin looking at these atoms, we discover that they are made up of finer and finer and more and more momentary particles. And we discovered that the instruments you use to look at it affect what you see.

[08:24]

Affect what you see, determine what you see, and change what you see in the process of observing it. So if you look with the kind of microscope that Jung looked with, you find a Jungian self. Or Freud or the new feminist-based psychology, so forth. You find something different, pretending enough. What you're looking with. So the self you will find through practice will be affected by the instruments you use to look.

[09:49]

Okay. So they began, these guys back there in India began to see this. And they originally thought that there would be a perceptual unit which would have a distinctive and permanent mark. It would have a shpababa, I think. It's called an own being. Right. And the more they examined it, they found that there was no own being at any point. And the more precisely you look, the more you're involved in the whole of phenomenal world. Okay.

[11:06]

It's like the car out there in the fog and you. So if you perceive something, there's an object of perception. So any perception requires an object of perception in the subject. And then it requires the field that's created between subject and object. So they tried to find out the basic unit of this subject-object perceptual field. Okay, so they discovered that, and they said a Dharma was something like one thirty seconds of a second. And then they discovered By the way, whatever they came up with, whether it was 1 32nd or 1 200th of a second, I don't remember.

[12:26]

Contemporary experimental psychology has come up with almost the same number. You can analyze a perceptual moment from the point of the presentation of an object perception and the recognition of it by the subject. And that formulation takes a certain amount of time. Oh, but what's been discovered by them and discovered by these guys back in India is that this perceptual moment if you meditate gets shorter and shorter. that even today a modern meditator, measured by modern science, can cut the length of time, this perceptual moment, cut down by many factors.

[13:56]

Okay, so it came, they concluded, there is no unit anywhere in the phenomenal world or in you that has any permanent existence. Now this is not Barclayism, you know Barclay, the English philosopher, Barclay, or Berkeley, it's spelled like Berkeley. It's not his philosophy of nihilism that everything is purely doesn't exist. Buddhism doesn't say this world doesn't exist. This world definitely exists. We just don't know how it exists. We can't grasp how it exists. We can't get a firm hold on how it exists.

[15:10]

So the conclusion these guys came to is if you can't really get a hold on how it exists, You should learn to live in such a way that you don't try to get hold of how it exists. And this insight produced Mahayana Buddhism, which really got put together about the beginning of our common error. And the fruition of that is probably Tantra and Zen. Now, was that assimilable? Okay. Now I'd like to try to give you a sense of what that means in its implications.

[16:53]

I'm ambitious. What took a thousand years, maybe we can do in 20 minutes. And what's taken me 30 years, we can do in 20 minutes. But it's really, yeah. And I'm still in the midst, you know. But at least I'd like to give you a feeling. Okay.

[17:55]

So there's a bell and there's a stick. Also hier gibt es eine Glocke und ein Klipper. A clipper and an ein clipper. There's a relationship between the stick and the bell. Es gibt eine Beziehung hier zwischen der Glocke und dem Stab. And the basic sense of this is, in Buddhism, is that no matter how thoroughly you examine this bell, there's no way for language or logic to grasp its identity. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, it's empty of being a bell, but it's full of everything else.

[19:08]

So you can't find anything that's intrinsically bell here. It's a bell when I ring it. Until I ring it, maybe it's a teacup. Or something. Okay, so if you accept by inference or logic that there's no inherent reality to this bell, No matter how much you divide it down, there's nothing bell-ness about it. The same applies to this and me and you and so forth.

[20:12]

You're not going to find any self that finally, I know myself. I know myself. You may have the sensation of knowing yourself, and that's great. But there's nothing you've got hold of. Okay. Now, some of you... know this already. It's common sense. But it is not our consensual reality. And there's not too many people you can share this with.

[21:14]

And if you share it with people, it's still on a pretty superficial level because your guts and your life are in another world. Okay. So, if this doesn't have reality, and this doesn't have reality, that does. The interaction of the bell and this has reality. But would you please try to grab that sound? It's fading, come back little sound. But it can reappear. Now the symbol of yab-yum or male and female joined in tantrism is used to symbolize this because although the union of male and female produce what we know of the world,

[22:42]

The male and female remain separate bodies. And if they produce a baby, it's a third body. Okay. So, the bell and the stick are about to have a baby. Okay. Your karma exists here. So, A doesn't exist and B doesn't exist, but AB exists. Mm-hmm. And BA exists.

[23:55]

You already said that. No, you didn't? Okay. AB exists, and something that's different, BA exists. Now, if only AB exists, the world would only exist from your side. But the world also exists from the side of BA. And BA and AB are not the same. And never will be the same. What's left out? We don't know. We don't know. And this second baby is different than the first baby.

[24:56]

So AB prime is different from AB. And BA prime or two is different from BA three and BA four and et cetera. OK. So what's the conclusion? You're living in a world where space and time don't exist outside you. You live in a world in which space and time are discontinuous. You can't say things like, I have no time. In terms of consensual reality you have no time, but in fact you are time. And you are space. And whatever this is right now, there's a consensual reality in which space and time are something we're existing in.

[25:59]

Also in dieser uns allgemein vertrauten Realität ist Zeit und Raum etwas, in dem wir existieren. But in a fundamental sense, in a spiritual sense, this room is something we've created. Aber in einer mehr grundlegenderen Art und Weise, wir können sagen einer spirituellen Art und Weise, ist dieser Raum etwas, den wir hervorgebracht haben. Each moment is, let's say, an empty canvas. Okay. Except there's some sketching already been done on the canvas. Somebody sketched this room in. And someone, in fact, Berlin with its funny blocks and interior blocks has sketched in the way this building is. And you came here already quite sketched.

[27:15]

And all of us are sketching here on the canvas. But the sketch is not complete. And if you think it's complete, you're living in a different world than the Buddhist world. And if you act like it's complete, from a Buddhist point of view, you're only half alive. And you're missing a lot. But we don't miss it, but we don't know how to assimilate it because we're actually in this room and it is partially sketched whether we think it's fully sketched or not. But you're not participating very well in the sketching process. And you feel isolated by the sketching process and threatened by it. So if a leader comes along who's really good at sketching, you get sketched in very quickly.

[28:53]

And unless you know that this sketching process is going on, you're easily controlled by someone who sketches well. So you want to get involved in your own sketching process. Okay. So far so good? You okay? All right. One more little shot here. The Japanese have a word that comes out of Buddhism, which is ma.

[29:56]

And ma can be roughly translated as the functional moment of space-time. Okay. How do I get to that? Once these Mahayanas saw that there was no indivisible moment of reality. They saw that it's all interrelationships. There's no individual moment. But these relationships create a kind of self-organizing system. Okay. Okay, now this self-organizing system is called a mandala.

[31:05]

So instead of seeing atom-like moments, they saw mandalas. Okay, now a mandala has a center. And a territory. The center expands into territory, and the territory closes in on the center. Okay, what do I mean by a mandala? The best example I can have come up with that's graspable immediately is the way a gardener sees a garden. If you're not a gardener or not a horticulturalist, you just see plants and bushes and it looks nice. And if you're Monet, you may see the garden in such a way that it produces a painting. And if you're walking with a close friend, you may see the garden in such a way that it produces falling in love.

[32:46]

Or you may just see a bunch of bushes and some bees that scare you. But what the gardener sees, he sees an individual plant with all the things which produce the fertility of that plant. What's the angle of the sun? What the soil's like? What insects come? Yeah, what in some insects stay away from some plants and are attracted to others? And some plants grow near and the plants help each other and so forth.

[34:06]

So the gardener sees the particular fertility of that flower. And everything that goes into that flower is the mandala, fertility mandala of that flower. And that's a self-organizing system. It has its limits. I mean, what's happening over on the other side of the mountain doesn't have that much effect. So it has boundaries, a kind of boundary. And this plant has one mandala, and this plant has another mandala. So there's two mandalas right there. And with each plant, there's actually an infinite number of mandalas in one garden.

[35:16]

Now, if you're cooking a meal, there's a certain time that goes with cooking that meal. And the time you feel at the beginning of the meal when you have time to decide to use this or that, and near the end of the meal when everybody is waiting to be served, the time is different. And you do things differently. You penetrate that time differently at the beginning of the meal and at the end of the meal. Isn't that right? Suddenly just what you need is there and you make decisions differently.

[36:28]

It's a different kind of time. The clock shows the same kind of time. The clock is wrong. Your experience of the time is more accurate in any functional sense of time. Now, clock time doesn't really exist. It's a consensual reality. If you get out far enough in the universe, you can see it starts bending. We don't see the bend close in. But actually you feel it when you, the difference between cooking a meal and the beginning and end. Now, When you do zazen, it's a different kind of time than your usual time.

[37:58]

Now, you're back there, you asked me, how do you plan your zazen time when your life gets you to do other things? You asked something like that. Part of the answer to that question is, is that from consensual time A, usual time A, it's very hard to plan for zazen time, which is a different kind of time. And when you're doing zazen and 20 minutes seems like an hour, it's an hour. And when you're doing zazen for an hour and it seems like two minutes, it was two minutes. A special kind of two minutes. Now, sometimes you're cooking this meal. and you really the soup doesn't taste right and you need something and you reach up and you pull out a cookbook

[39:19]

And it's ten minutes before you have to serve everybody. And you open the cookbook and it's exactly what you need. How do you do that? Have you had that kind of experience? We try to explain it mechanistically. Or it's chance. But you've entered another kind of time where the usual rules of how you find something are different. Yeah. So sometimes, particularly artists know this, they create a certain state of mind, they don't know how to solve something, and in a certain state of mind, the solution is there.

[40:37]

Ordinary logic does not work. So you want to deny it and say it's something, you know, I don't know. Let's wait till the scientists prove it before I experience this. But probably the scientists are behind you in this. In fact, they might like to study you. Almost done.

[41:40]

There's a certain kind of time that we're supposed to end at six. It's another five or ten minutes. There's another kind of... I'm worried about the time and your ability to be in this time, but you can stand it for another few minutes. Whatever we have created here has a continuity in time and space. That leads to the next moment that contains all of us.

[42:44]

Now you have one stream of time that's running through you that we could call like a secondary process. That you'll be glad when this is over. Even though you're glad to be here. And what you're planning to do this evening. And so forth. Now, that's your own separate streams. And none of those are measured by the clock, although you fit them to the clock. But there's also a time, a kind of time to our seminar which is like cooking a meal. And just as there's a kind of time that has a beginning and a middle and an end for cooking a meal, And there's a quality to that unit called cooking a meal time.

[43:57]

That leads to the afternoon or the next day and the next cooking a meal time. Now what a really good cook does is really knows how to move in that time. Particularly like a cook in a restaurant. Okay. There's a time to this seminar, which is like cooking a meal time.

[45:03]

That leads to tomorrow morning. that is the stream of time and space that we've created that leads to tomorrow. And that is called Ma. So it's like each situation has its own time-space mandala That leads to the next continuity. Okay. It's a little bit if we imagined that we tied ribbons between each of you. And we tied ribbons to all the objects in the room.

[46:06]

Pretty soon there'd be literally an infinite number of ribbons, but thousands of ribbons connecting. I could pull on this one, pull you. Although you don't see it, those ribbons are there. And we're affecting each other on many levels. And those ribbons all together have a kind of point where they come together. And ma means the ability to know just where to hold the ribbons, where they all meet. Now that's a very sophisticated idea of time and space. It's an interactive idea of time and space.

[47:14]

And it has to do with perceiving through pauses. In other words, if I look at you and I look at you, I'm not pausing. But if I look at you both and stop for a moment, I feel something. Now that gets me closer to ma. The particular ma, that's the two of you, I can feel if I pause for a moment. Now that moment of pause becomes a kind of unit of existence that they were trying to look for when they tried to divide it up into own being moments.

[48:22]

And that pause also means emptiness. So, if I come in this room, and the basic Buddhist practices are, you get in the habit of, you come in the room and you stop for a moment and let the mandala of the room hit you in the stomach. that you stop for a moment and simply allow the mandala of space to somehow grab you in the belly.

[49:08]

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