And my practice was, if I had a question I couldn't solve, to continuously hold it in my awareness, consciousness, 24 hours a day, as long as it took before it melted or disappeared or whatever. And I remember sitting there, and it was this kind of, I just told this story to somebody, but kind of bush tree. And it was trying to find a way to grow in the space where the building was beside it. And I could see that the shape of the building was affecting the shape of the tree, obviously.

[01:09]

But it affected the shape more than just simple contact. It was like there was a kind of consciousness in the tree. And what happened in this tree? part of the tree was affected the other part of the tree. But the tree had no central nervous system. So this side of the tree really didn't have any continuous awareness of what was going on on this side of the tree. But when I felt the tree having some kind of intelligence or awareness, suddenly the problem of the observer dissolved.

[02:25]

And to me, the observer, I could open myself to noticing and experiencing the observer as a function of the mind itself that's being observed. So, if you have a conscious observing mind, it has a quality of consciousness. It's arising from consciousness. Excuse me? it has the qualities of consciousness because it's arising from consciousness. If you have an observing mind, say in meditation, in a kind of meditation, non-comparative consciousness, observing mind has the quality of the mind from which it arises. So the ability of mind to observe itself is just a capacity of mind.

[03:52]

It's not a separate kind of permanent entity that goes on into heaven. Although we experience it as separate. Yeah, it's like you can have something and you can take it apart and then this part can begin to have a separate history. So that's my comment in observing minds at this stage. Now the question is, shall I finish right now or shall we have a break and then we'll come back? Okay, so let's have a break. So let's have a break. A quarter of an hour?

[05:04]

Or do you want it to be quicker? Oh, half, it's always half an hour, unless... It is? Half an hour. But you always make me sound, you make it sound like you want it to be shorter, or you ask how short. It's always going to be half an hour. Precise. The next time I ask, how short will it be? Where's the rest of the team? Where is the rest? This team. Team. Team. But the coach is not on the team.

[06:07]

The bell's still ringing. It's still here. I don't have much to say. But let's see if we can get this glass under the suds of consciousness. But first let me speak again to Christina about self coverage everything. It's a practice, but it's a fairly simple practice. simple thing to explain.

[07:51]

So let's go back to Giorgio's desk, table. So Sophia said that this is Giorgio's house, this is Giorgio's table. So she's beginning to separate thinks into names and words. But her first instinct is to separate it and then say it's hers. But now she's separating and saying it's Giorgio's. So as I told you the other day, she was banging on the table, not too hard, trying to turn a piece of bread into bread crumbs with a can opener and a sieve.

[09:02]

And I was saying, now don't hurt Giorgio's table. That's nuts. Maybe it's your table. I don't know. Somebody's table. Don't hit the breadcrumbs too hard. I said, this table belongs to the forest. It's from a tree. And also there was a cabinet maker, a carpenter who made the table. And somebody finished it and stained it. And birds used to sing in the tree that this... So, if you take that view, and you take that movement, okay, it's Sophia's or it's Giorgio's, but it also belongs to...

[10:24]

the people who made it in the forest, and the people who will use it who stay there after us. So the practice of interdependence So is to move that sense of possession outward. So the familiar becomes the family, becomes everything. And when that really kind of snaps into place, you have a feeling self covers everything. So it's an expression that conveys or captures a little bit the feeling of when you feel completely familiar in the world, at ease in the world.

[11:37]

Okay. So you begin to see an object in a wide context. You could make an intertext. a wide text. And we're part of that text. Text, again, is a word that comes from to weave. Okay. Now, yesterday, Christa brought up a black spot on a table. And she referred to it this morning.

[12:55]

And she said that she's grateful that there's things that we do hold in common, that we all find the same or know the same. And we want that to be the case. And that's really one of the obstacles in practice. Because if you start to practice, there's a number of shifts in which you realize the way you've put the world together doesn't make sense. It's as if you'd put the world together with many, many flying buttresses. In the Gothic cathedrals, those things that support the walls from the outside.

[14:10]

Yeah. I don't know. In English they're called flying buttresses. Do you know what they're called? Well, it's like much of your life has been propped up with these things. And when you take them away, the walls settle down to what they would... And things you cared about and tried deeply, thoroughly, tried the big effort to achieve somehow aren't important to you anymore. And some people go through a period of weeping for a few days.

[15:27]

Because you really cared and tried, and now it wasn't important. And I say it's an optical practice because often we want to... Compassion is to share with our friends. Und ich sage, es ist oft ein Hindernis in der Praxis, weil wir aus Mitgefühl die Dinge mit unseren Freunden teilen wollen. And if you practice seriously, you go through a period where your friends don't want you to practice because they can feel you changing. Und in der Praxis ist es häufig so, dass du durch eine Zeit hindurchgehst, wo deine Freunde versuchen, dich abzuhalten von Übeln, weil sie das Gefühl haben und fühlen, dass du dich veränderst. And usually your old friendships are restored. But sometimes not. You just live in two different worlds. So not wanting to give up your connection with your friends is a kind of obstacle in practice.

[16:30]

But, you know, usually you solve it by, you feel such a deeper connection to yourself and to people, you say, I just have to hope this deeper connection continues with my friends. But there are many common things we share. And of course, Krista knows, she's practiced a long time, that this black spot doesn't have a simple objective reality. But we... Yeah, but still we... we find ways to ask ourselves the question, what is shared objective reality, if such a thing?

[18:06]

Well, of course, there's no actual objective reality. Because we're subjects. Even our experience of objectivity is experienced by a subject. But we do have an experience of being objective. Of finding ourselves in a finding Yeah, of being objective. And that means trying to see things as they are. But that's another, that's really to... Go into that much would take too much time.

[19:12]

What does it mean to see things as they are? In any case, of course, I believe you were in a group which I'm told couldn't come to a common feeling. I had a hard time coming to a common feeling. So at least you had the black spot that you were on. Black spot, what do you mean? Like in fresher eyes? It was like a black spot on the table. Objectively confirmed that it was. There was a black spot on the table. Ah, zumindest habt ihr einen schwarzen Fleck am Tisch gehabt. No, I thought it was in a metaphoric sense. No, no. And an objective black spot. She should have reported to Christiane right away so Christiane could have cleaned all the black spots.

[20:15]

Also dieser objektive schwarze Fleck, den man sofort Christiane melden sollte, damit er entfernt werden kann, But for some reason, I don't know if all of the group you all discussed this black spot you shared. So already it was your reality. I had a good friend, quite a good friend anyway, who... was in prison for many years for driving the getaway car in a bank robbery. As he put it, I don't know exactly what happened, but he said he just did it. They asked him at the last minute. He was a motorcycle racer, hill racer, you know, driving motorcycle.

[21:24]

He was one of the two or three best. Is that what it's called? Yeah, and they'd race up hills, and he was one of the two or three best in the United States. Yeah, and they'd race up hills, We lost our motorcycle. Yes. I can't tell the story then. Okay. No, no, sorry. We're another one. Anyway, so... I didn't translate so far. No. Because there was a lot of discussion about our motorcycle. Go ahead. Also, der war einer der besten motocross oder abwärts hügelfahrer von Amerika. And I guess guys who do that rob banks now and then. So the guy who was supposed to drive the car, I don't know what happened to him, but they said, would you do it? And he said, well, sure. Well, somehow, anyway, one of them got caught and he turned state witness and

[22:29]

told on my friend. So he was in prison for, I don't know, four or five years. And he put a black spot on the ceiling of his cell. And he didn't know what to do with his mind and et cetera, so he used to just lie in bed and concentrate on this black spot. And it turned him into a Buddhist. Yeah, so here's a black spot, you know. And he began to have these experiences looking at this black spot.

[23:38]

He says, and then he started reading to see what this is about. And he became a Buddhist and lived at Tassajara for some years with Sukhya Rishi and myself. And he looked at this black dot and then he had different experiences. Then he started reading things about Buddhism and then he also went to the Sahara in the 60s and practiced there with Suzuki Roshi and me. Okay. The team has arrived. The other team. Hi, Sophia.

[24:39]

Okay. Now we learn to, we develop the practice of meditation. And we begin to be able to observe our mind. The activity of our mind. You begin to be able to distinguish between the field of mind and the contents of mind. Now, when we practice meditation, the posture of meditation

[25:42]

creates ideal conditions for a mind of absorption. Yeah, and the word Zen actually means something much closer to absorption than to meditation. Jhana, the Sanskrit root, means something closer to absorption than contemplation and meditation. And as everyone knows, jhana and chan and zen are Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese versions of the same word.

[27:07]

I think we should change it in the West, so I'm calling the Dharma Sangha publication Xen, X-E-N. So it's a new product like Kleenex or something. Xerox. Now, how do you continue this absorption when you're not sitting meditation? Of course, as we talked about bringing attention to the breath and so forth, this is all very basic.

[28:09]

More... a more advanced yogic or mature practice, would be the practice of releasing thoughts. Yeah, I'll call it that, releasing thoughts. But by thoughts I mean feelings, sensations, moods, etc. releasing mental and emotional formations.

[29:10]

Now, if your mindfulness interior and exterior mindfulness is fairly well developed. You can feel the arising of each moment. This is strictly speaking what is meant by Dharma practice. And the center of Dogen's teaching is the simple phrase to complete that which appears. Okay. And Dharma practice is to be present as... Things arise in mind.

[30:26]

And dharma practice is to be present when things arise in mind. To have a feeling of completing them and releasing them. To have a feeling of completing them and then letting them free. Okay. Now, when one has this experience, nun, wenn man diese Erfahrung hat, or one aspect of this experience, is things appear in considerable preciseness. Dann ist es, dass die Dinge in ziemlicher Präzision erscheinen. And you have a feeling of their preciseness and their duration and their releasing. Und du hast ein Gefühl für ihre Präzision, This is a kind of meditation that you do in the four postures of walking, sitting, reclining and standing.

[31:32]

It might be good to do it in grocery stores where you can't cause too much trouble. So your initial mind, and this is an important idea, the initial mind, you feel, of course this is all like simultaneous and instantaneous. But you feel kind of precision in your initial mind is before contents arrive.

[32:35]

And we can also call that original mind. When contents arise, you feel them in a preciseness, and your meditative absorption, if we call it that, is able to If they're fuzzy, they tend to hang around. But if they're precise, they tend to dissolve. And that's what Dogen means when he says, complete that which appears. You're not just passively receiving these things that appear.

[33:54]

But you know you're participating in the appearance. Just the word appearance means that you know that they are conditioned by mind. So as appearances within mind, you have a sense of completing them and releasing them. And once you know your mind, You're not observing your mind, you are your mind. This is quite natural. I look at Ursula and she appears. That's quite a pleasant experience, actually. And... Yeah. And then I look at you and you appear.

[35:14]

And that's pleasant enough. And then I look away and see you and you both, I'm sorry, goodbye. And I just, my mind or body mind or... can just fully be present, quite fully be present. And just as I sort of breathe in and out, I can feel a kind of breathing in this experience of you. Because what I know is an experience of you. And that's my experience. Sophia's experience, I mean my experience. But you are an experience of yourself. Mm-hmm. And when we're in meditation sometimes and the body image drops off, our experience is quite wide.

[36:27]

So when I know you as my experience, I'm closer to feeling you as you know yourself as your own experience. So it becomes after a while like breathing in and out. And you can practice for a while breathing in appearance and releasing appearance on the out-breath. It's actually much faster than that, but you can do that as a way of getting in the habit. Now, as you get more used to this, and this initial mind is established, before the contents of mind arise,

[37:40]

And it means also that if it's before the contents of your mind, you really have to release the previous contents. Excuse me. Before the... If you have a mind before contents arise, the previous contents have to be released. So you get close to this tiny edge that divides past and future. We experience this duration. Because what we experience is duration. And when this cusp of past and future When you're not in the time frame of past, present, and future, widens into a present.

[39:16]

Where we could also say self covers everything. Okay. So you're really at this point where time, space, duration, present is a dharma. Your actual experience. Now, let's just imagine that this initial mind There's something like this initial mind. Und lass uns einfach nur mal vorstellen, dass es so etwas gibt wie diesen ursprünglichen Geist. And now your initial mind in the early part of practice and all points in practice should be acceptance. Und dein ursprünglicher Geist in der ersten Phase von Praxis und eigentlich in allen Phasen der Praxis sollte annehmen sein.

[40:26]

You can never know things as they are if you don't start with acceptance. So, sort of like this initial mind... free of the contents of mind, is rooted in developing acceptance. Okay, so now it's a bit like looking into clear water. It's like you look past the frogs and the... moss and flowers, and you just see the clear water. But of course, there's all kinds of things in the water. Suzuki Roshi used to say, if the water is completely clear, pure, dragons can't live in it.

[41:30]

He means, even dragons need food. Yeah, so, of course the water is clean. clear and also has things in it. But just as you can concentrate on the clear water and then look at the things, you can notice the clear quality or empty quality of mind, before the contents of mind arise. And actually, since it's your experience, you can sustain it as you wish. Now, when you see this, when you have this feeling, then consciousness is a content of mind.

[42:55]

Because consciousness as a predictable, cognizable, etc., arises in this initial mind. so consciousness is not the observing quality of mind so this initial mind free of the contents of mind can also observe itself and that dynamic of the initial receptive mind observing itself creates the kind of, what shall we say, dynamic, which allows consciousness to appear.

[44:06]

Now, so consciousness appears, and you can feel consciousness appearing. And you can, so this is a mind that's also continuous at night. You taste this mind in lucid dreaming. Man hat einen Geschmack für diesen Mind beim luzigen Träumen. A mind that's awake in the middle of your dream. Ein mind, der wach ist in der Mitte deiner Träume. In a normal sense you're not conscious, but you're observing your dream. Aber du beobachtest deinen Traum. And you can even bring consciousness into it and change the dream a little. Und du kannst auch Bewusstsein in deinen Traum hineinbringen und ihn dann noch ein bisschen verändern. Try out different endings.

[45:11]

And there should be playfulness in this. If you practice meditation a lot, there should be a playfulness. Try out different endings. Okay, within consciousness then, as a content of this initial mind, self-mind can arise. So in consciousness, you can see self-mind arise. Now, we can say that what is functioning in this initial mind, like clear water, is not self, because self hasn't arisen yet, because self arises through consciousness.

[46:21]

So we can say Non-self. Because it is a way of functioning. But we call it non-self. So, here we have the title of our seminar. The wisdom of self and non-self. Now, when you see self as a self-mind,

[47:24]

That's a function of consciousness. Then you're able to use self as in a, we could say, simply a wise way. Because self then becomes purely a way of functioning. So I think that's the best picture I can give you of what we would mean by non-self and what we mean by a freedom from self which now, in terms of the craft of practice, would be seeing self arise as a function of consciousness.

[48:52]

And that's possible through knowing consciousness as arising in awareness. And that sometimes is called big mind. And you can begin again in meditation to feel a kind of mind that doesn't have boundaries. And you can feel it being very empty or shifting into just sense perceptions. And the bliss that arises when there's just sense impressions. Or rising in the thoughts or consciousness.

[50:01]

So it's not that there's no self. It's rather that self has a place in the picture, but it's not the whole picture. And part of the confusion why it's difficult to think about it, is because of our usual identification of the observing mind as self. When we separate observing mind from the observing self, it's not so difficult to understand what we mean by a freedom from self.

[51:18]

And when we understand the ability to observe a mind is a function of mind itself. Okay, that's the best way I could say it today, I think. You know, from my... Christa's speaking about this black spot. From my little window where I'm sitting at a desk in the gatehouse here, there's a kind of density of trees out in front of me. And even at 5 o'clock or 5.30 or so in the morning, there's still light in the forest.

[52:20]

There's already light in the forest. Kind of half of a black spot in the forest. And it's created, there's three layers of branches that are sort of in between me and the... half moon-like black spot. And this dark shape itself is made by the tree trunk and a curved branch. And a shading of black-green branches.

[53:28]

And behind that, there's some openings with sunlight coming through. So this half a black spot is framed by sunlight in the front and in the back. And it gives me some mysterious feeling. It's a kind of complex black spot. And I can feel its presence while I'm sitting working. And every now and then I look up to it and let myself disappear into it or melt into it. And it seems to echo some interior space for me.

[54:31]

You know, in China they have... have an idea which is called inscribed landscapes. To notice something as beautiful is to change it. They have such an idea. Okay, so... Because we're participating in the landscape. And when we notice something is beautiful, we often preserve it.

[55:33]

So if I was a Chinese administrator and part-time poet spending a week here at Rostenberg, And I saw this half-moon black spot. I might write a little poem. But the... When is a tree a poem? My friend Eric asked me this question this morning. And I found all the trees turned into poems. But here I especially disappeared in this half-moon black spot. Unable to move from this absorption.

[56:39]

Yeah, I'd write it out and we'd put it somewhere and other people would come and they'd try to look and find the black spot. They couldn't. But there's many such places in China where poem after poem has been inscribed and people come and they try to see what the previous poet saw there. Defined to share the beauty of this place. No, I suppose this half-moon black spot. Und ich nehme an, dass dieser halbmondförmige schwarze Fleck Und ich denke, der wird deswegen in mir hervorgerufen, weil es da so etwas gibt wie einen Eindruck in meinem Alaya Vishnana, dass ich in meiner früheren Zeit etwas Ähnliches gesehen habe.

[58:08]

in some meditative absorption, some way in which the interior space formed itself was similar. even though it's only temporarily and perhaps only for a few days able to be seen the way I saw it this morning. my noticing it so vividly, probably is because of imprints from previous interior or exterior experiences.

[59:27]

But imprints that are not carried in my story. So what I'm saying here is that your story draws certain memories, your imprints, from this storehouse. Ja, this storehouse. Was ich hier sagen will, ist, dass eure Geschichte bestimmte Eindrücke aus diesem But if these imprints are not drawn from my personal story, but are imprints drawn from other moments when I just saw something uniquely without any reference to personal things.

[60:41]

We can call this Buddha mind. So if I just see this half black moon, half black spot, And there's no personal associations, but there are imprints from previous times. We would call that Buddha mind. And what self is there there? Well, in that sense, we call it something like big mind.

[61:45]

It's not self that's transmitted between in a lineage, but this experience of big mind, which you almost have to pick up the feeling from, from your teacher or somebody who's realized it. bei dem man wirklich wörtlich das Gefühl aufnehmen muss von dem Lehrer oder von jemandem, der es Because if you pick up the feeling of it, like hearing off tune, it gives you permission or the faith that it's possible. And your physical experience of big mind through someone who's realized it. And even though your mind is completely perhaps caught in its habits, this physical taste, touch of big mind,

[63:11]

big mind, becomes a kind of guidance in your practice. It's almost like it waits there for your own realization. So, That's enough. So why don't we sit a minute and then we'll stop. Thank you for translating. You're so welcome. And so you're hearing Buddha mind just now.

[68:18]

And you might be hearing self mind. In a way it's your choice. And your practice. And your practice. It's nice to hear both. I hope some of this is helpful to your own practice and your own living.

[69:54]

Thank you for spending the time with me and with each other. And thank you, Christiane and Giorgio, for being our hosts. At lunch he said something very beautiful. He said that what I can say here is connected with our spirit, with the Christianity of my spirit. I would like to interpret all of this and say It is the spirit that we have created, the spirit of nature, the spirit of the energy that we have tried to establish in this place.

[71:11]

And I think it is such a wonderful statement, because it shows that this Adam was not otherwise. You don't have to say it in English. I'm sure it was too good.

[71:28]

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