You're cold. Good morning. Now Miriam asked me to, since this is the last of the four talks that I agreed to give on mindfulness, awareness and consciousness, Miriam asked me if I would be saying, what would I do next, etc. And presently I don't have any plans. Perhaps in January I'll see. I want to think about how this So let's get a feeling about how this worked, these four, and the topic worked, and what might be useful to talk about in another one or three or four talks.

[01:05]

And whether maybe it's better to give a series of single talks, because I don't know how many people are actually able to come to all four. But, of course, I'll continue the call on Sunday night, which is met four times. We have six meetings to go. So if, depending on the feeling I have and the feeling from you, I'll think of a topic and I will send you a poster. And in the following Sundays, I think of this place, as our letterhead says, as a study center and not as a church or temple. And so I don't know what will happen next Sunday.

[02:10]

It's really up to the people here. If they want to do something, fine. If they don't, it's fine. And this food can be used for any good or purpose the group likes. But unless somebody says something definite or makes a decision, I think you can assume there'll be nothing happening on Sunday. We have been having talks every Sunday anyway. Yeah. Do you think people would like to continue that? Well, that's it. You have to be safe. We have an incredibly brief meeting after the discussion. Okay. Between the lecture and discussion, if it can be incredibly brief. Okay, I'll assume that most of you are familiar with what I've been talking about. Mindfulness practice is, you know, probably the one word that covers Buddhist, all of Buddhist practice, is mindfulness practice.

[03:14]

Certainly it's the gate to all Buddhist practice, because you could say, you could also say non-mindfulness too, which is obviously a form of mindfulness, although it is. But also mindfulness, you know, Girgis people practice remembering, and almost any religious, spiritual, healthful practice would emphasize to some extent mindfulness. And Mahayana Buddhism is a Buddhism for lay people, but by being a buddhism for lay people becomes actually more complicated than Theravada Buddhism, which is more for monks, for people living in monastic life. And that's for a number of reasons.

[04:21]

One is my later development. Not really that much later, but it's later in spirit and feeling. And also, Practicing in daily life actually requires, in some sense, more subtlety or practices at least which don't depend on a repetitive, stable, calm way of life. So I'm trying to present some of the differentiation and subtlety of Mahayana practice, but in a way that I hope you can get a feel for it and make use of it. And as I've often said, just permission or to know about something allows something to appear. You may not know how to do it, or it may not make sense to you exactly, but to know such way of looking at the world exists affects how you perceive the world and you begin to notice possibilities that you didn't see before.

[05:37]

Because after all, there are The world is far more complex and so much more is happening on each moment than our ability to know or to perceive it. So we have a wide range of choice depending on how we look at the world. So, mindfulness practice starts out in a very practical way of being mindful of the body, and mindful of your feelings, mindful of your mind, and mindful of objects. It's a phenomenal work. But as we discussed in the first meeting, this mindfulness is not the mindfulness exactly of, or only, of the mind knowing the body,

[06:41]

but it's the contemplation and mindfulness of the body through the body, or in the body, or as the body, and the mindfulness of feelings through the feelings, and so forth. So mindfulness practice begins with mindfulness of, let's say, your interior, just your physicalness, your organs. and how that visibleness is inseparable from the way you think and feel and so forth. And then that's usually the first. And then second, you become mindful, if I don't change that, you become mindful as a practice of how you're walking and how you look and so forth, in the way mindfulness of your situations of the exterior, so-called exterior world. Now the tools in all this are your attitude and yogic meditation.

[07:50]

And I think one can say yogic meditation fairly easily and quickly, and it sounds synonymous with meditation. Meditation has a kind of sense like the Confucians used meditation. It's a kind of sense of, and most psychologists in the West want to use meditation, is there's a kind of practice which creates a mental and physical harmony and a harmony with your personality and your world and your friends and so forth. That's really not very good meditation. And when we say yogic meditation, I think it's also important to be aware that yogic meditation is much more ancient, much more ancient, much older than Buddhism. And we talked about this some in the Sashim, so I hope those of you who are in the Sashim who just finished will tolerate my repeating myself a bit.

[08:57]

That's what I've been thinking about. But you can't say yogic meditation is only a non-Buddhist teaching that's wedded to Buddhism because yogic meditation has developed in relationship to Buddhism. So yogic meditation almost becomes, in some sense, synonymous with Buddhism. And it developed in India along with Buddhism. But simply we can say that yogic meditation is a practice that has nothing to do with Buddhism, that's wedded to Buddhism. And the main way in the Theravadan school that it's wedded to Buddhism is through vipassana. In other words, you use meditation, shamatha practice, calmness practice, to develop a state of mind that's different from your ordinary state of mind, which is defined by discursive thought,

[10:00]

what I call the third space that's not waking and not sleeping. And realizing that calmness and settled feeling, which is not understood just as you're calmer, but this calmness is definitively a different state of mind. and you see and perceive things, feel about things, would make decisions differently. As some of you must know from practicing zazen, in practicing zazen you will see things in a different light and a different light than you saw things before. No matter how many categories of your personality, habits and experience you permeated something through, In meditation you see it from a different perspective, and you'd make different decisions.

[11:03]

So vipassana is... Now, I'm here talking about not the vipassana that many American and Western teachers teach, which in many ways has more to do with Zen than it has to do with Theravada Buddhism. But traditional Theravada Buddhism, vipassana means applying the teaching of Buddhism through a calm mind to personality, body, the world, and so forth. So basically, vipassana is a kind of moralistic insight, moral insight, not moralistic, moral insight, in particular, seeing the world through the mind of calmness, seeing the world in terms of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and so forth. And you begin to analyze, then, through this mind of calmness, not mind of thinking, through this mind of calmness, which is a different kind of thinking analysis, you analyze the world according to non-self, impermanence, everything's changing, suffering, and so forth.

[12:15]

Colin Wilson finds fault with Sartre because he says there's no way Sartre and other existentialists can really say the world is, in some, completely horrible, finally horrible. And Whitehead, who's a more Buddhist and Western philosopher, says that the notion of life is inseparable from self-enjoyment. The notion of life is inseparable from even an absolute of self-enjoyment. And the sense of awareness in Buddhism, and particularly Mahayana Buddhism, is that awareness is really not separate from enjoyment. It's not a neutral kind of computer-like awareness that just sees things. and notes the differences and so forth, and notes that things are characterized by non-self. This sense of non-self, particularly in the intermediate stages, the beginning stages, you may see a lot of shit in your life and stuff, and uneasy feelings, and you may feel the dis-ease, unease, that are a lot more pronounceable.

[13:43]

But until you can throw everything away, even throw the sense of enjoyment away, which still is another kind of enjoyment, awareness is inseparable from a sense of satisfaction or enjoyment. Now, how we can say, I think putting things in a somewhat historical perspective, allows you to make the decision to practice with more clarity because, basically, Buddhism and Buddhist practice is an adult decision that you make, knowing that somehow the gift of life is not sufficient, that our life requires a decision. And so if you see the decisions that have been made in Buddhism, historically, I think it helps you see parallel decisions in your own life.

[14:49]

So in a way, Mahayana Buddhism, and Zen in particular, develop not Vipassana so much, but develop Samhita itself as Buddha. So in Zen, the feeling, I guess you'd say, are you practicing Buddhism? Truly, if you're practicing Zen, you're practicing Buddha directly. That distinction is clear, but you couldn't stay with that. And I might say, an admonition, practice Buddha directly. Don't practice Buddhism. In Theravada, you're more practicing Buddhism. Here's Buddha's teachings that he gave us, and there's more in Zen. I mean, excuse me, in Theravada Buddhism, there's a continual consciousness of the historical Buddha. In Mahayana Buddhism, you almost don't have any consciousness of the historical Buddha at all. In Zen practice, you could practice that and never know anything about the historical Buddha.

[15:57]

for it's so clearly become a lineage teaching and a teaching not of a teaching but of a way not even of a truth but a way and that way is always presenting or activity so Buddhism, Zen and Mahāyāna in a way Instead of applying the... Now, these distinctions can't be entirely clear or separate, but instead of applying the mind of calmness to the world in the light of Buddha's teaching, apply the mind of calmness and Buddha's teaching to the mind of calmness. And so are in the mind of calmness the taste or body of the Buddha. So as again I've said, particularly in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism was just a culture, a world culture, and in world cultures are the cultures or way of viewing things which is most related to the body.

[17:15]

So I think when you practice you can have the feeling, as I've said, of not just breathing but the body of breath. or abiding in your breath body. So you're not just haunting your breath, you're abiding in your breath body. So in early Theravadan teachings they emphasize the inhale as one unit and the exhale as one unit. And to abide in the inhale with no anticipation of the exhale. Now, Zen practice would emphasize that way of looking at things even more. So that there's abiding on this breath as if it's the whole world, isn't it? And the exhale. So the world doesn't become a continuity that you're always generalizing your experience and personality

[18:20]

on, but rather a succession of discrete moments or dharmas. That's what the word dharma means, a succession of discrete perceptual moments. Now space-time, the conception of space-time as a yogic phenomena is important because, not because it's a big topic philosophically, but rather actually you are, whether you're philosophically minded or not, your personality and your activity is based or implies or actualizes or assumes a certain sense of space-time. And as I've often said, that the Western view is that space and time are different from each other, and in general the common view, and that space and time represent distance, that there's a distance.

[19:45]

Space is what separates you and me. Now, overall, you can say in the Asian view is that space is what connects you and me. And I often suggest to you simply practice that one thing. If you can practice that one thing like you were fishing in an aquarium with water connecting you, if you could practice space connects, space connects, and even time connects. you will find actually that repetition, using language in that way to dialogue with, to talk with your habits, your personal habits, can radically change your way of feeling, acting, and so forth. Now, in the Buddhist view, space and time are just names for the same dimension.

[20:47]

kind of pause, a natural pause. Space and time are a natural pause. And space and time are seen more as connectives, if we want to think of it as a bond, than a obstacle, or a separation, or a gap. we could, if we want to use the word distance to describe space-time, we would have to call in a Buddhist world, Buddhist realm, space-time as a spiritual distance. Now, one of the differences between early Buddhism and Zen is that there's a sense of... I would say that Buddhism You could divide Buddhism up into three things, renunciation, realization, and manifestation.

[21:57]

And the early practices emphasize renunciation. In other words, that if you can create a blank mind or a calm, stable, imperturbable mind in which dispersed thoughts are removed, the true nature of the world will appear. Now, in my opinion, this is a rather simple view, and it's often a view that gets the kind of popular way Zen is expressed. If you practice and you realize the story or something, it means that the one mind has appeared by getting away the clouds. Take away the clouds and let you see the moment. This is, I think, too simple but useful. It's a useful image like mirror mind. The mirror isn't... just sees things, their attention. The mirror doesn't care what images appear. They come and go.

[23:00]

You can ask, what's the surface of the mirror? Do you need to wipe it? So there's famous dialogue around the six patriarchs, succession. But still, it's too simple, but very useful, but too simple. Then you have the emphasis on realization, which is you can't have a kind of gradual removal of thoughts, and gradually... It's true, but it's not as effective a way of practice. And probably in the end, conceptually, it's an interference in practice, but that's the understanding of the schools which emphasize realization or sudden enlightenment. Because it's actually a complete turning around and you see it immediately.

[24:04]

Now, so that's more the emphasis on realization. This thing just doesn't appear by clearing the mirror, but rather you realize it through various kinds of practices and attitudes. But Zen in its fullness emphasizes manifestation. that this spiritual distance, as I said, is something you manifest. So you don't just see things as they are, as Dobin has been emphasising, you enact things as they are. That there isn't a kind of passive things as they are, which if you clear, disperse the thought, you will then see things as they are. but you manifest things as they are. So awareness and mindfulness practice then becomes the mode of manifesting things as they are, manifesting spiritual distance, shall we say.

[25:34]

Awareness is a kind of plastic presence to awareness, which through your practice, through yogic power, you manifest. And the word in Japanese is jōriki. Jōriki means, you know, creating power, strength in your heart primarily, but also in your whole body as energy. So in this sense, Well, let me go back again to the story. The early Zen teachers, Wang Bo and... earlier than that, probably, emphasized the spaciousness of mind. Mind is space. Mind is awareness, but a space in which objects and things appear, but is more fundamental than the objects. And the early teachers say spacious mind is... The main teaching of Dursin is sometimes called original faith, original mind, and so forth, describing various ways.

[26:45]

But the Zen later emphasizes with Basso, Matsu, and others on function rather than just a realization. And function emphasizes Everything is a field of energy as well as spaciousness. And it means that you have to locate that field of energy in your own body first. So, mindfulness practice becomes not just aware of your body and how it is, but awareness of your body as energy. And then finally everything is energy. So the Eightfold Path in Zen Buddhist teaching becomes a way in which you empower the Eightfold Path.

[27:50]

Views, intentions, speech, conduct, mindfulness, livelihood, and so forth. And the way the Eightfold Path empowers you. and you empower the Eightfold Path. So then let's look again at these four stations, as I said, of mindfulness. Stations of mindfulness are foundations of mindfulness. Not just mindfulness, but foundations of mindfulness are contemplation of the body on the body. Again, not contemplation of the mind on the body, but contemplation of the body on the body, feelings on the feelings, and so forth. Now, that's, I think, difficult to get a hold of intellectually and more difficult to get a hold of as a practice, even though to some extent we do it already, even if you know nothing about Buddhism.

[28:55]

So then, if you can get hold of it intellectually or understand it as a view, then you may begin to see not just... probably door is not to try to practice it as much as to try to... you'll begin to notice that you are to do that. But it's a slippery area of practice, my dear, particularly for us. So the last one is contemplation of objects of perception on objects of perception. And that's not difficult. But here we're moving from... First you practice inner mindfulness, and then you practice outer mindfulness, and then you practice them mutually and simultaneously. But really to practice them mutually and simultaneously would mean that the energy of perception itself, or the perception as like you don't see an object, a light shines on it,

[30:06]

You don't see the light until it shines on an object. So that object which is both the light shining, the light is manifest by the object being in the beam of light. I saw some of Miami Vice last night. And these guys were trying to sneak Miriam Vick from Miami. She's addicted to Miami Vice, or at least watches it once a week or so. More than once. That's an embarrassment. Anyway, they had to get into this guy's house who was some kind of importer of counterfeit currency or something. So they had to get under all of the electronic beams that were, you know, once you interrupt them, they set off alarms. So they had some little spray paint can or something, I don't know what it was, and they sprayed into the air, and they could see where the lines of light were.

[31:11]

That's not great. You couldn't see them until you sprayed them. And then once they sprayed them, they saw these little red lines going around. They would sneak underneath them, you know, spraying as they went. Well, in any case, objects appear. and they also make manifest the awareness or light that allows you to see them. So that kind of feeling, you practice the mindfulness or contemplation of mind objects on through in as mind objects. Now when you can do this the way you abide in your breath, you can abide in this mode of perception, this would be a kind of developed mindfulness practice. And it would be thought of as abiding in the way Buddha is or Buddha sees.

[32:20]

And it means the ability to shift your... Just as you can shift your identity stream out of your mind into your body, out of your thoughts into your body, you can shift your identity stream into and let it rest or abide in the inhale, and let it abide in the exhale. And knowing that you can move that sense of abiding in this mutual, simultaneous mindfulness of mind, the objects of perception, as through the objects of perception. This is a more subtle way to say, practice non-self, because the usual idea of self as permanent personality is not true. doesn't describe this, what I'm talking about.

[33:35]

So someone said to me the other day, Buddha isn't the practice of no self or one self, but rather multiple selves. In this sense, you get the ability to move your identity stream or find how you abide. As soon as you're practicing the self of discursive thoughts, and then you can practice the mind of calmness, you're already in the realm of multiple selves, which is the practice of non-self. Maybe I'm trying to tell you too much in this one lecture. It's the last one, so I'm summing it up. I don't know how much time I have. I'm not doing too bad. Yeah. Okay. Now, when you get the Yogacara school and the Lankapatara Sutra, mind-only school, which is said to be the teaching of Bodhidharma, the Indian patriarch who brought, supposedly, Zen to China.

[34:42]

Actually, there does seem to have been a real Indian teacher who was called Bodhidharma, living in northern China, I believe, came from India. whether it's not clear at all that he ever used the Lankavatara Sutra. But in any case, that's the teaching of Bodhidharma is the Lankavatara Sutra. But now, mind-only teaching, the way it's used in Zen, is that you have these seeds of experience, the karma is these seeds of experience that you store. And when you look at anything, the seeds, like hungry goats, crab, whatever, perception you have, and what you perceive is your perception. And that's in general a practice we do. You don't hear an object, you hear yourself hearing the object. And that's an important practice and simple practice, the way practicing with space connects rather than space separates.

[35:56]

You can practice hearing yourself hearing, see yourself seeing, see seeing, hear hearing, and so on. But this sense of yogacara or mind only is that whatever you see is a visualization or a karmic recreation of what you see. And so you have a sense of, for instance, if I look at you, I am creating, with cooperation with you, I am creating a visualization or image of you. So what I'm seeing is my mind seeing you and also what, from my experience, creates this you. And you are participating in shaping that yourself. Trying to control it, probably. But in any case, that kind of play is going on. At the same time, if you see yourself seeing, you can also, I can look through that to you or have a sense of you that's not limited to my visualization of you.

[37:05]

So the more you see yourself that way, you see that this is not a practice to know everything, though in some ways it's called technically all knowledge, but it's really to know what you know. And you know what you know in the midst of this mystery. So in that sense you're simultaneously a mystery and my karmic representation of you. And, of course, since you're not an inanimate object, it's more complex than my looking at the chair, because you're participating in that karmic projection. And I prefer to use visualization, though it doesn't cover the territory completely, over using projection, because projection has some technical, psychological meanings which I think are different from other kinds of limitations.

[38:08]

All right. So now, to make that more subtle, awareness would be to... If I visualize my backbone as a column of breath, when I do that, I am not actually, if you notice it subtly, you're not visualizing your backbone as a column of breath or light or energy in your body. you're visualizing your backbone in a visualization of your body. So like in cancer therapy, when they visualize little armies of guys attacking the cancer cells, which is proved to be quite effective treatment. It seems to work best in children, able to imagine and do it. You are not, and I think it would be, you teach people to do it more subtly and more effectively if you didn't teach them to really to visualize it in their body, but to visualize it in a visualization of their body.

[39:20]

And then, once you have that feeling, you can become a participant in this visualization of your body that lives simultaneously with your body. And that's the most subtle sense of mindfulness or awareness practice, because you're aware of this subtle body which is another way of describing something in a different kind of articulation that's related. You're describing this seed-grabbing body, karmic seed-grabbing generating body, And you begin to, and I think people's health, as I've said before, is often a function of whether this body they visualize and live in and their physical body, not yet visualized body, are in harmony or in phase. So mind-only practice, or vandavatara-sutra practice, which is the early basis of the Zen, is involved with knowing how what you perceive is both mind-only and also a mystery.

[40:45]

Now this then would be another way of articulating the same thing of contemplating the objects of perception. And like all things in Zen, this thing on the one hand is the body of karma, the body of your experience perceiving through the past, And that very body you live with is also the body of Buddha or the body of illumination. So as you can see, perhaps, that Zen and Mahayana practice take... move more... the strain moves more from the development of shamatha practice calmness yogic practice, finally forgetting about whether it was Buddhist yoga or any other, saying this actually is this way of perceiving, acting, particularly through the shortcut of yogic concentration, is the body, is to practice Buddha directly, not to practice Buddhism through applying the vipassana or insight of Buddhist teachings to the world.

[42:16]

So the Enlightenment and realization that Buddhism is not historically a development of vipassana, but a development of shant. Now, one of the main practices of, the last thing I want to say, is one of the main practices of mindfulness is the mindfulness of other people. And that is probably the most important and difficulty of all mindfulness practice. And it said, in the end, if you want to say what's Buddhism about, it's basically the same as the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Boy Scout-less is how do you help other people? And this teaching is entirely in the context of helping others. And it's said in the early teachings, as I pointed out, that if you're deep in meditation, deep and finally realizing your sign or what allows you to have one taste or not two tastes of the world, and you finally got it, and a visitor comes to the door, you get up and you help them, you give them cookies and tea and so forth.

[43:36]

that the practice of hospitality and being interrupted by others and your teacher and so forth takes precedence over no matter how powerful your concentration state is or important or significant or something. Now, we try to modulate that a bit by going to some place, Crestone, or having periods of meditation early in the morning. where you have less chance to be interrupted. So the mindfulness of other people... Now, it's pretty difficult to really be mindful of other people, and it's especially difficult in terms of people's personality, the world, society and so forth. We have to treat this in some way that it's possible. And the main emphasis in Buddhism and mindfulness of people is not to know other people psychologically perfectly, though that would be nice in actual practice.

[44:43]

It helps because you can see people's patterns, no clue. But rather to do what I was saying, using you as an example earlier, to see through the karma to the dharma, to see through your culture. So when you learn to, in a way, Again, the best way I can say it in English, you learn to look without seeing and see without looking, or hear without listening, or listen without hearing. So you listen to people, but you also look at them from another way. Like you look through their personality and culture at them in some way that you can't grasp, say, or define the person. So you're taking care of other people, you're being mindful of other people in this way of looking at them in terms of their personality and expectations, and simultaneously looking at them in a realm that you can't exactly define.

[45:42]

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