It feels good to be here and thank you for coming to this prior seminar day or something like that. As you know, I think I just came from the practice period at Crestone. And I have to see it. The mind of practice period is stuck to me and we're going to... have too much of a practice period kind of time together. Or maybe you'll get the mind of being in an airplane over the ocean. Because I just came in yesterday morning. And maybe I'm still asleep.

[01:13]

I don't know. We'll see what happens here. Or perhaps we can find some mind together during these days today. And some of you will stay through the practice week. So I'm emphasizing my experience What I think is true for our practice is that according to the circumstances, internal and external, we have different minds. Yeah, and the seminar's title is, in English anyway, The Discovery of the Heart.

[02:34]

So I'm talking about mind, and maybe we will talk about heart. But I don't want to start speaking about the topic until this evening. So the topic of the seminar begins this evening. But Maybe we can say the mind of the seminar starts now. So what am I talking about when I make this kind of distinction? Yeah, I don't really know. But maybe we can find, together find something out about...

[03:37]

How Buddhism or how meditation practice has to be part of what we're talking about. Yeah, I mean, I want to speak about what you feel And what's important to each of us personally, if I can. But I also should speak about this in the context of Buddhist teachings and practice, too. Buddhist context and in practice.

[04:55]

This, what I call a prologue day, I always think I need to define what I'm doing to some extent. I see, first of all, as just a chance for us to be together before the regular seminar begins. And also, as a chance to just talk about more or less whatever we'd like, or if possible, in some detail about something that we wouldn't go into during the seminar. So I guess in the back of my mind I have a feeling of back of my heart, back of my mind, back of my head, back of my back, back of his back. I have the feeling of... Yeah, maybe some kind of basic teachings or basic attitudes ought to be discussed.

[06:30]

Now, if you bring attention... Excuse me for being so basic. If you bring attention to... Yeah, reading. This doesn't have much to do with Buddhism. But if you bring attention to your attention in reading, this is maybe Buddhism. Mm-hmm. Yeah, attention is our greatest possession. Unfortunately, it's not our possession in the way it should be these days because commerce has purchased it.

[07:37]

They pay a lot of money to magazines and television to see if they can own our attention. And it really does become part of how we define ourselves. So to practice, you have to look at how you define yourself. So first of all, let's say that in In practice you need to have an investigating heart, an investigating mind. And then we have our usual mind.

[09:04]

And so practice would be to notice or take an inventory of what's your usual mind. Yeah. You might say, well, why not just have my natural mind? Yeah, but if you look at what your usual mind is, naturally, natural doesn't have... much meaning, if any meaning.

[10:11]

In fact, there's almost no meaning in yogic culture to the word natural. Yeah. Because natural, if you look at it, it really implies some kind of God. Or some kind of ground of being where when change stops, then there's the natural way to do things. But from the point of view of yogic culture and Buddhism, then everything is an artifice or a construct or something made.

[11:18]

Except that I have the natural hair don't, I mean hairdo. We have natural hairdos. No, you have a natural hairdo. But whatever hair don't or do you have is done. Maybe we can open a window back there a little more. Unless it freezes somewhat. Thank you. Well, that's probably okay. Yeah, that's how we do it. So I think if you investigate your usual mind, you'll see a lot of it.

[12:32]

I mean, all of it is contextual. Within this seminar, you'll have a somewhat different mind than you would if you were doing something else. And part of the insight of practice is to choose the context for your mind. Now you can establish an internal context of mind survives difficult outer contexts, But they're closely related. There's no way you can be free from your perceptual, sensorial realm.

[13:44]

You can resist it, but that's also being affected by it. So it's anyway useful to take an inventory of your usual mind. What do you notice? occupies your mind in 24 hours or right now. Yeah. Some of it's personal, some of it's just the situation, some of it comes from other people.

[14:46]

Comes from other people at this moment and comes from other people from the past. Now I'm saying these things even though you know them all, just to sort of bring us together in this noticing our usual mind. Now I'm talking about just noticing, not judging or evaluating. But if we're talking about practice, it's just to bring non-judgmental attention to your activity, accepting attention.

[16:00]

No, it doesn't mean, of course, that we're not sometimes going to be judgmental or critical of ourselves. Or the reverse. But the power of practice is in the non-judgmental, uncorrecting, accepting attention. non-judgmental accepting so practice, you can mature, develop your practice.

[17:19]

if you develop a habit of this non-judgmental attention? Now, it's not a self-conscious attention. In fact, after a while, the attention to attention becomes just your natural awareness. And it's an observing mind and not an observing self. Now that's a difficult, I think for us a difficult distinction to make between observing mind and observing self.

[18:54]

And I can't really make the distinction for you. You have to really, in yourself, knock in yourself. See, I have to say that, because that's what English does. In yourself, in yourself, you have to notice yourself. When self is functioning. When you're comparing, noticing in terms of your personal history and so forth, when you're noticing what's going on, in terms of your comparative narrative self, then you can say, yes, this is self observing mind.

[20:22]

You see things in reference to who you've been and who you might be and so forth. But sometimes we just see things without any self-reference. But you think, oh, that observer... is that observer who is seeing things without self-reference is me. But the observer who's seeing things without self-reference, maybe it's you, but it's not you as a self. And you'll find out if you do establish this sense of observing mind, rather free of self-narrative, you'll start to feel differently about things and you'll feel probably clearer and even bigger physically and emotionally.

[21:55]

So if there's a different result with an emphasis on observing mind and observing self, we can say then that these are different locuses, perhaps, of being. Does what I'm saying make any sense? I mean, I'm trying to be fairly clear. Actually, I'm trying to be very clear, but I may only be fairly clear. Anybody have anything you want to say? Captain? I must have been extremely clear.

[23:19]

Or not clear at all. Well, it's very interesting to find the mind which is, it's a self, but it's outside, outside the self. I mean, in a way you described it, I have, I could see a line between the self, which has a very limited way, and I could see the self-mind, the mind-self, which has the other way, very clear, open and direct. I found it very interesting how Roshi described it, that there is a self, but also above all the difference between mind, between spirit and self, and above all to see that this self is limited and that the self, the mind, the spirit itself has a completely different quality.

[24:39]

So what I'm speaking about, and I feel from what you said, we want to give to this attentiveness, attention, we want to give articulation. To bring attention to your breath, which we will speak about during the practice week as a path, is to increase the articulation of attention through the breath. If you see the sun on an object, you have seen... You increase your experience of the surface of the sun.

[26:05]

Does that make sense? When you bring your attention to your breath, you increase the surface of attention. Or you change the surface of attention. Or you increase the surface of attention. And so... I just, my surface of attention just decreased by two. Okay. So you could define Buddhist practice as...

[27:06]

What surfaces do you want to give attention? What are the most fruitful targets of attention? And what helps us notice attention itself? So my feeling is to speak about the five skandhas again. And I probably won't speak about the four foundations of mindfulness, at least not this weekend. But you can understand the four foundations of mindfulness as a way to increase the surfaces of attention. The sun of attention shines throughout the body.

[28:32]

Emotions, mental objects and so forth illuminates the body and so forth. Literally, it's the case. Actually, it's the case. So, one of the things we do want to notice is, I think Gisela was referring to, How much our mind arises from associative thinking, self-narrative thinking. And how much our mind arises from the context in which we're present context, the presence of the present context.

[29:47]

Now we can say practice is about, assumes a shift from a mind that arises primarily through self-referential thinking to a mind that arises more fully from your particular context. Okay. So how can one make that shift?

[31:32]

I think we could now have an idea of anchoring the initial mind. So here I'm again just trying to create some attitudes, ideas, which can help you articulate your attention, your awareness. But, you know, and I can say these things, I think maybe it's like being in a boat and you don't know where you are and you begin to notice,

[32:38]

The shoreline over there, that must be this part of the world. And here I know where the water is shallow, so I could drop anchor if I want to. And if you don't have any sense, you're just sitting in this rowboat floating around. I mean, you're kind of lost. Because you're in the midst of your consciousness, your awareness, your attentiveness or lack of attentiveness, all the time. So, yeah, we're kind of swimming in this awareness, this consciousness and so forth.

[33:43]

But where's the beach? Where can we rest or anchor? I think it's useful to create a physical experience of an initial mind. I think it is a great help to get an initial mind, a physical feeling for this original spirit. Initial. Initialized. No. Initial just means first. Your first mind. Bring me here. But if you're just swimming in consciousness, when does first start?

[34:48]

What part of our mind do we call first? Okay, so our mind arises through objects of attention. Our mind can rise without an object of attention, but then it's arising through mind itself being the object of attention. So a mind arises through an object of attention. So you developed a Pavlovian habit. Reflex, yeah. Whenever something first appears to you, you have the feeling of this initial mind. And I suggest you practice it more mechanically.

[36:01]

Find a strong instance, which is like when you come in a room, when you open a door. So as I say, when you open a door, you feel the room you're entering rather than think the room you're entering. You try to stop for a moment when you enter a room. And we even have a practice, which is to enter a room with the leg nearest the hinge of the door. Or to notice with which leg or foot you enter a room. And as you know, I like to point out in English, it's the M-trance.

[37:18]

So you go through a little step there where your mind comes to your body or you feel the situation without thinking it. You feel a situation without thinking it. All right. So if you develop such mindfulness habits, You can begin to establish an initial feel for an initial mind. And that initial mind can be more contextual or situationally arising, sensorially arising. And then whatever your secondary mind is, second mind is, is what it is.

[38:45]

Okay. I think that's enough for the starter. This morning. So let's take a break. And be back in about half an hour. Unless I ring a bell. Okay, thanks. Danke. I'm hoping you will contribute to this discussion. Didn't you almost have your hand up earlier?

[39:48]

I didn't miss that. But if you want to start. I had a question about acting within the smile. For example, if I enter a room and I feel the room, how do I decide what I do all the time? What do I say? In which goes or which mind I act?

[40:49]

Because I am a person with a body, but when I am in this mind, how do I decide? Well, as I said, it's initial mind. So then there's the context. If you have to respond, you let that mind appear. That's all. You're letting the situation initiate the process of decision. In the beginning you have, let's say, you establish, you have a feeling for a situation. And then the thinking, acting part. takes over and the feeling disappears.

[41:53]

It's still there, but we don't notice it usually. Our attention isn't developed enough to encompass both simultaneously. Through practice, attention then can encompass both simultaneously. Okay. It's not difficult. It only requires repeated effort. For a century or perhaps for a year or two. You did it? If I make a comparison between the mind that observes and the mind I'm just in,

[43:03]

Is there a mind where the observer disappears? Or is an observer in every state of mind possible? An observer is possible in every state of mind. But sometimes the observer is very strong and sometimes the observer virtually disappears or does disappear. But it can pop back up out of the surface. It's wonderful to just disappear.

[44:33]

And we can in effect disappear. But something usually brings us back. If it doesn't, goodbye. Frank? What I'm interested in is what makes attention possible. What is possible when I'm attentive? If I'm attentive right now, something becomes possible. And it depends on how I am attentive.

[45:42]

And I think there are different attentivenesses that make different things possible. And the media that wants And when we say zazen, another attentiveness arises that the media wants to have. It's interesting that attentiveness puts itself on different surfaces. But something becomes possible, the surface is like open or respond.

[46:53]

There's a force, there's a certain attentiveness. Maybe you could say something. Well, you've said it all. There's a good phenomenology of attention, attentiveness you just presented. And what one wants to do is more and more become aware of this phenomenon. we could say the topography of attentiveness. But unless you have a question, there's not much I could say, because what you're saying is part of what we're doing. The question is what can I do to become aware of this attentiveness?

[48:07]

But you couldn't have told me what you just did unless you were aware of it. What do you want, more? It seemed as if we're just talking about one attentiveness. And I think there are different ones. Thank you. Yes. I didn't mean to start out with only one sense of attention, but perhaps that's what it felt like. Yeah. Let me use the image of, again, of the simple instruction of don't invite your thoughts to tea.

[49:44]

We spent here a few months ago, I don't know, in November or sometime, quite a bit of time with this simple instruction. But it's again interesting to take as a not only as a practice, but a practice when you get the feel of it, opens up many things, and can even give us a vocabulary to notice our practice.

[50:55]

So, let's just start with Sukershi always said, don't invite your thoughts to tea. Well, we can all have a feeling for that, I think, quite easily, particularly in zazen, to, yeah, just sort of let our thoughts come and go without inviting them to tea. And I think, especially in zazen, we can have a feeling for it, But the instruction to not invite your thoughts to tea is also a thought. So if you really don't invite your thoughts to tea, you can't have the thought of not inviting your thoughts to tea, so it doesn't work.

[52:04]

I'm sorry, Suzuki Roshi, I can't do your practice because I can't have the thought to not invite my thoughts to tea. Okay, you can be my successor. No, that didn't happen that fast. But what you notice in practicing something like this is there must be a difference between the thoughts that you're not inviting to tea and the thought to not invite them. There must be a difference between the thoughts you're not inviting and the thought which is deciding not to invite them.

[53:21]

Okay, what's the difference? Part of the problem is we just don't have a rich enough vocabulary for how the mind functions. So we're going to have to rename these things. Okay. The thought to not invite your thought to tea is actually an attitude. Okay. Or let's call it an intentional thought. And the thoughts you're not inviting to tea are discursive thoughts.

[54:23]

Okay. Now, we're supported in or able to name these, give these thoughts different names, Because discursive thoughts produce a certain kind of mind. Intentional thoughts produce a different kind of mind. So we could say, Please invite your intentional thoughts to tea.

[55:23]

So now this is, it's assumed you discover all of this by yourself by the simple instruction of don't invite your sauce to tea. And in fact, most of us don't. Most of us don't. discover the difference between intentional thoughts and discursive thoughts with any clarity, just by the practice. And why don't we? It's, you know, is it because we're dumb? I know, it's not because we're dumb. It's really just, it's discovered if you... I don't want to sound so sort of gung-ho, but as if you practice as if your life depends on it.

[56:50]

I mean, if really not inviting your philosophy becomes You feel that to live this life fully, I have to accomplish this. And I don't mean you abandon your ordinary life or disdain ordinary life. I mean, Bodhidharma coming to the... to the West, or coming from the West and to the West.

[58:00]

Not only brought zazen sitting, I mean, in contrast to most other schools of Buddhism, he brought the sense that through Through the body of sitting, all of Buddhism is present. And all the teachings arise through the body of sitting. Okay. And he also brought the sense that the ordinary details of life are our practice. It's not just zazen, but also the living of the ordinary details of our life. And this view which arose with the mythology of Bodhidharma, informs all Zen Buddhist practice and monastic life especially.

[59:25]

and informs what we're doing here. Hence we lost two people to go work in the kitchen. But it would be very different if we had a staff who cooked for us. Yeah. It's like if you worked in an office. And when you finished the day at five o'clock or whatever, you then cleaned your own office instead of waiting for the crew to come in to do it. People might have simpler offices. Yeah.

[60:37]

So the tea ceremony begins with setting out the bowls and cleaning the bowls after the tea ceremony. Tea ceremony includes the whole thing of when you take the bowl out and when you put it away clean. These are ideas which have their mythological source in Bodhidharma's teaching. All right. Now, if you feel the world that's in a teaching like, don't invite your thoughts to tea, in meditation, then this will open up either Fairly consciously or just open up in fact?

[61:56]

Can you say, do you wake up? This teaching will open up if you practice it in this way, consciously, or just will open up even if you don't notice it fully. Okay. So there's a difference between, we can say, intentional thoughts and discursive thoughts. And Tsukiroshi is giving us an intentional thought to not invite our discursive thoughts to tea. In discursive thoughts, the observer won't disappear. But in a mind of intentional thoughts, the intentional thoughts can just become the mind itself and disappear.

[63:06]

And Buddhism, as you all know, to stay with the basics, is rooted in vows and intentions. Vows and intentions. Okay. Which means it's rooted in the idea that everything is... And that means that everything that we do and say and think is something that is created, something that we do. So the Eightfold Path, the first teaching, starts with right views, which we can also understand as vows, and right intentions.

[64:29]

So we're also speaking about now how your attention is informed by your vows and intentions. We're talking about how your attention is formed by your vows and intentions. Okay, now if we stay again with this little, don't invite your thoughts to tea, we can see we have, the discursive thoughts are the guests that we don't invite to tea. And the intentional thought which doesn't invite them is the host.

[65:33]

And as most of you know, this distinction between a host mind and guest mind is a basic teaching device, instrument of the Blue Cliff Records. Now, what teaching is there? The host mind is always at home. The guest mind comes and goes. Yeah, it's nice to have guests. But you don't want them always living in your house, you know. So... Is your host mind always home?

[66:52]

So that's again one of the... You can see the emphasis of our practice is on something called host mind, which is always at home. Now, the host mind is also the teaching of detachment. So to not always having to invite your guests to tea is also the teaching of detachment. Now I'll come back to that this evening and tomorrow. Okay, someone else?

[68:05]

I would like to add something to what Judita said to the disappearing of the observer. what I don't understand My feeling is that you lose consciousness when the observer disappears There is the state of mind where you have the feeling the observer is no longer there. Later on I can describe in detail what happened. And so if the observer did disappear, is there still knowing possible?

[69:25]

Is there a secret observer? Yeah, well... It's like you're not conscious, really, most people are not conscious during their dreaming. But the dreaming can surface into knowing. Often we're not... When we have the dream... So there's definitely knowing, a kind of knowing, we can say, going on.

[70:33]

Not that knowing isn't consciousness. So we have to have a wider idea of knowing than just consciousness. We can talk about that more, how it works, but that's enough I think, Bertrand. in the sense that you said that there were different forms of attention. Can one say that devotion is a form of attention? Of course. Yes, in the sense there is room for devotion in the yogic culture. Of course. What would be the emphasis in Zen practice

[71:56]

Perhaps we'll come up this evening or tomorrow. Yes. I was reflecting on what you've talked about from the beginning. You started out talking about the mind and the self. And then you differentiated the kinds of thoughts with intentional thoughts and discursive thoughts. Is the function of discursive thought the self function and intentional thought a mind function? Is the function of the discursive thoughts a self-function, and the function of the intentional thoughts a spiritual function? Well, yes, I mean, I think the distinction you're making is useful.

[73:05]

But I wouldn't say a mind function, I'd say an awareness function. Because both consciousness and awareness are functions of mind. But in the big sense that Buddhism Zen means by mind, you could say intentions are a mind function. The reason I'm asking is because it's possible that an intentional thought becomes a discursive thought. Of course. And I guess it's a matter of practice to prevent that from happening. Well, I wouldn't say you want to prevent it necessarily. If an intentional thought turns into a discursive thought, then it's just a discursive thought.

[74:12]

Okay. The mind that arises through an intentional thought you want to protect in a way, guard, from turning into a discursive mind. You don't want the... You don't want the intentional thought that turns into a discursive thought to drag the mind with it.

[75:12]

Now, Dogen says very clearly in a fascicle that... Dieter suggested we look at a few months ago. From the point of view of practice, the only use of the discriminating discursive mind Of course, the discriminating and discursive mind has many uses, but the use in relationship to practice is it helps us decide to practice. In that way a discursive mind turns into an intentional, an intention.

[76:20]

That goes both ways. Now, sometimes I feel, oh dear, you poor folks, I'm talking with you and I'm dispersing mind, intentional mind. You get lost in the obscure topography of mind. And some of you want a machete to cut you way through the underbrush to a natural mind. We need Manjushri's machete to clear the path. But you know, The mind is cluttered up with our concepts and words.

[77:31]

And someone said, most of the words, he said in German, most of the words in German are leased out to Christianity. permanent rent control by Western culture. Okay. So when I first started practicing, here's how I'm practicing with this Japanese guy. who I always thought was very big until I saw myself in a photograph beside him.

[78:32]

And he was, you know, he knew English... By the end of his life, he knew English in a certain way brilliantly. But in the early days, English was somewhat primitive. And my first self-assignment was to help him with his English. So after lectures, I would go in and say, okay, a lot of double negatives again, etc., And he'd sit in his couch. He didn't really like it.

[79:34]

He didn't like it. But anyway, he tolerated it. Maybe that's why I don't learn German, because you'd all be coming in to sit on the couch with me afterwards. So anyway, people used to say, and when I first started having to be the teacher and giving lectures, that I spoke a kind of Jap-glish. And when I started giving lectures, people came to me and said I would speak a kind of Japanese-English. They could hear. Japanese-English. They could hear. They could hear funny constructions in my way of speaking that I'd gotten from Suzuki Rosh.

[80:42]

My, you know, Sophia, my little daughter, she speaks a lot of English now, but it tends to be German construction. We have some kind of barley for breakfast or something. And I have to leave. And she says, why you're barley not eating? No, why you're barley eating not. Oh, I'm eating not because... So anyway, like that. But anyway, the first years of my practice were trying to absorb the Japanese and Buddhist vocabulary for practice. And host and guest was one of the main distinctions. But there were many, and we went through the whole hundred Blue Cliff Records koans.

[82:05]

And we first had a translation by a man named R.D.M. Shaw, I think his name was. And it's completely a Christianized terminology and understanding. It looks like a translation, but it's a translation of the words, not what the words really mean. So every koan he had to re-translate. And for a while I... And I knew a German woman who was German, and I asked her to translate from the German translation by... Who's that early German translation?

[83:17]

Gündert. Gündert, yeah. So I paid this woman $50 a koan, and she translated them, and I gave her the English translation of the German to help her. And I knew a German woman, and I asked her the Gundert, He earned her $50 a day. Because I was convinced the Gundert translation was better than R.D.M. Shaw. So really my engagement in those days was not just in trying to understand the teachings, but understand the language of the teaching. Yeah. So it took me a long time to replace my English words with Japanese words.

[84:39]

And Sanskrit and so forth. And then it took me more time to change those technical terms back into English technical terms. Because There's not so much stuff you have to machete away if your terms, what you're naming is fairly accurate. And if I say the garden is full of snow and there's autumn leaves are still under the snow, And you have to be careful if you've got a kid because the pond is half frozen. You all understand that.

[85:44]

It's completely simple. But if I said the equivalent thing about a Buddhist teaching, you'd say, what is all that? Host? Host my intention? If I said that in a Buddhist way, you'd have problems with it. So anyway, I'm trying to share with you partly, what I'm doing is trying to share with you the development of a terminology in the West for practice. So I'll just end with saying what has come up now a number of times with consciousness awareness, that consciousness is a function of mind. Self is a function of consciousness. And we can say to be contemporary, ego is a function of self. In other words, as I'm defining it in Buddhist terms and in Zen terms, self is a creature of consciousness.

[87:07]

It swims, lives and is being nourished in As when you are dreaming and are not conscious, the usual sense of self doesn't swim there. Something else, something self swims there, but it gets distorted or enlightened. And consciousness is the medium of language. Okay. So this is, you know.

[88:23]

And just finishing, consciousness, the job of consciousness is to supply us with a predictable chronological cognizable relevant world. And self is a big part of establishing the relevance of what we see and know. So we want, as I say, you want the trees to be in the same place in the morning as they were when you went to bed. If they've walked around the yard during the night, it's quite disturbing. So we want the world, we need the world to be predictable.

[89:34]

Okay. Deeply want it to be predictable. So we almost believe it is predictable. We implicitly want it to be permanent. And that's the job of consciousness. But as we know, everything is changing and is impermanent. So our practice doesn't succeed or fail because we're not moral enough or virtuous enough. doesn't succeed or fail because we're not virtuous. Of course, our virtue and character are at the basis of practice.

[90:47]

And it's our intentions which arise from our virtue and character. But our intentions don't function with effectiveness if we don't understand how the mind works. So the problem, the main problems in practice is how the mind works, not whether we're virtuous or not. And if you identify with consciousness as you, as being you, then you have a problem. So we're not trying to eliminate consciousness, we're just trying to identify with it in a different way.

[91:59]

Or have a wider sense of identity and knowing. Lunch is just about to start. It's always good to start with an appetizer of a bell. It's very tasty, the bell. So here comes the appetizer for a little moment.

[92:31]

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