I'm sorry I'm a little slow today. But as most of you know, I flew into Zurich and then took the night train here. But I'm sort of here. And if I'm slow, I'll probably catch up with you, maybe today or tomorrow. So this morning we muddled around. Muddled around? Because somehow we have to get on the same page. Do you have that expression? I didn't hear the question. Ja, zum Beispiel. Auf einen Nenner kommen.

[01:03]

But even if it's not very metaphorical, it's pretty the same page, yeah. Aber es stimmt auch, wir müssen irgendwie auf eine Seite kommen. Well, we're here in the same stream of sound, forest sounds, birds, etc. Wir sind hier in der gleichen Kulisse von Geräuschen des Waldes. And if we're going to discuss this concept of ending, continuous experience of self, we have to have some shared way of noticing our experience. So one of the subjects, I think, has to be for this seminar, how we notice our experience. Now, the most common term for

[02:05]

I have to get used to the acoustics in here. The most common term for noticing our experience is mindfulness. But mindfulness too easily suggests some sort of being aware. Maybe we need some more aggressive mindfulness. And aggression in English comes from aggress. which literally means to approach and engage.

[03:25]

And usually, approach and engage meant then to argue. So, but I don't mean to argue, but Maybe to argue a little. To argue with what your experience is. Or at least to approach and engage our experience. Otherwise our experience just just takes hold of us and makes us do things. And I, this morning, again muddling about. What's the word for muddle in German? Well, you have to decide.

[04:27]

Muddle, like being in the mud? Muddle means... Muddle means to... We have a term. Yeah, we do, okay. Like muddling through? Muddling through to kind of try things out. You don't know what's going on. Maybe it's a little like mud, you know? When I was a kid, they... You had to pick names, you be so and so. I always said, I'll be mud. Maybe with so many psychotherapists in here, I shouldn't say things like, just call me mud. Okay. So when we modeled around this morning, I said that, like with my daughter Sophia, we create a self.

[05:43]

so we can get a hold on her, get a handle on her. And fortunately and unfortunately, creating a handle called the self Und glücklicher und unglücklicherweise erschaffen wir einen Griff, der das Selbst genannt wird. to her school teachers, to the culture, to ambition, and so forth. And it's extraordinarily effective. It makes most of us behave the way we're supposed to behave, or someone thinks we're supposed to behave. But how do we take hold of that handle of the self ourselves?

[06:55]

Now, this is... I'm venturing into a definition of the self as a handle. And I would like to have other definitions of the self that come up, that you feel, that we talk about. We have to start somewhere. So let's say that the self is a kind of handle which allows us to take responsibility for mind and body.

[08:03]

And it's been clear when people studied people who have some kind of brain injuries, But they may perceive everything seemingly as clearly as everyone else, but if they can't give meaning to it in relationship to their self, they can't function. They can't function in relationship to their past and present, or at least with consciousness that they're functioning in relationship to their past, present and potential future. Now again, in all these statements, I'm venturing implicitly definitions of the self.

[09:04]

Because some people with brain injuries function in relationship to their past and present, but they don't know they're functioning in relationship to their past and present. They're not conscious of it. Okay, so perhaps consciousness is the territory of the self. Or an avoidable part of the self. Again, I guess I'm still muddling around. I thought I'd stop until tomorrow. Now I'm muddling around in a different way. Okay, so you have this handle that allows you to, you know, do well or perform in school and perform in your society.

[10:24]

And yet you would like to take hold of this handle yourself. You may think you're taking already have hold of it. But most of us have hold of it primarily in terms of how we define ourselves through others. Am I speaking in short enough phrases or am I too long? No, no, it's okay. Okay. Now, Buddhism has two quite interesting terms. The Buddhism has two very interesting terms, vikalpa and sankalpa.

[11:33]

And vikalpa means your previous nature. And we could say that your discursive thought is primarily your previous nature. It's developed through the handle of the self of previous natures. Okay. Your previous nature Is the nature created through your culture and your parents and so forth? And your experience? Yeah, that's natural love. How could it be otherwise? Now the Buddha says, the early Buddha says, I'll call him instead of the historical Buddha, let's call him the early Buddha.

[12:39]

says something like, oh monks, volition is karma. One wills and then acts through body, speech, and thoughts. Now, where does a statement like this sit? Let's say it again. O monks, volition is karma. One wills, one wills, and then acts through body, speech, and thought. Mm-hmm. Well, is this one who wills self?

[13:57]

And when we act through body, speech, and mind, body, speech, and thoughts, we're changing or reaffirming Our nature. Okay. Now, just to complicate things, what does the Diamond Sutra say? It said a Bodhisattva does not have an idea of a self, A living being, a lifespan, or a person. No, this must be nonsense. And I think we should recognize it as a kind of nonsense. At the same time, I think we ought to recognize it or take measure of it as coming from one of the most famous and definitive sutras, teachings within Buddhism.

[15:32]

What could it mean to say, no, really, really, practically speaking, let's not just believe this stuff? No self. No living being. No life span. No person. Yeah, sometimes I shorten it to no self being span person. Yeah, span person, yeah. So the syllables remind me of this teaching of the Diamond Sutra.

[16:37]

And that's exactly how you work with a Dharani. A Dharani basically is a mnemonic technique. A memory technique. To remind yourself of a teaching. And you're using the reminder to enter into the stream of being. The stream of the particular. Because actually what's happening is moment by moment perceptions. And the associations which come with the perceptions. No, I said this morning that I remember who gave this to me.

[17:39]

But if you hand this to a baby, she has no idea what it is. Or you give a watch to a baby, the baby doesn't know it's a watch, etc. So it's just a shape. And then you add something to the shape. And that's the fourth skanda in a way, we can say you add associations. And it's so immediate that you don't know it, it's just a watch. Marie-Louise, my wife, is now functioning as an architect, which she was trained to do. She's also a volunteer fireman. and drives all of the three trucks in Crestone.

[19:04]

They like the way she drives. In fact, there was a fire the other day in Crestone. Irresponsible people had a bonfire. I mean, it's really a question. One match can burn everything in minutes. The whole town and the mountainside. It's hot. It's high desert and very dry. And if it's windy, it's really very dangerous. So these guys were a little drunk and then they tried to put out the fire by putting all the extra logs on it. Yeah. The stream of being. And at four in the morning it burst into a big fire.

[20:08]

And luckily it wasn't windy. And some of you who have been to Crestown know where the log house where we live is. Marie-Louise always has her walkie-talkie with her for the fire department. And She was out of bed and at the fire station in seven minutes. I said, Marie-Louise, because I wasn't there at the time, I was in Boulder.

[21:09]

I said, you could not have been out of bed at the fire station in seven minutes. Yes, she said, my clothes were by my bed and I dressed in two minutes. I learned that in boarding school. In five minutes to drive to the fire station. On a dirt road. And there was one fireman there ahead of her, but he lives there. And then she's trying to change the school. So anyway, this is all to say I've become a house husband. You have become a what? House husband. House husband. What's that? Like a wife. So I'm doing cooking and doing dishes every night. And I don't know how to cook, but I'm having fun.

[22:16]

She puts, I cook and stuff, and she pulls on this equipment and helmets and everything. I could fight a fire too. Anyway, so sometimes I amuse myself, right? And I'm sorting the silverware. And there's about 20 forks and spoons and etc., And I decide to rinse them, collecting all the forks first, and all this, etc. And it's interesting, I could just extremely rapidly, without thinking, sort all the forks and spoons and knives out. Well, it's sort of my body does it, memory does it.

[23:18]

So this process, this is percept plus sign. So the way Buddhism thinks about these things, and I'm just doing a riff on memory now this afternoon. What Buddhism thinks is that there's a percept and then to know it's a fork you add a sign to it. Now I just made up a word mem sign, memory sign. So there's percept and then there's mem sign. And they go together instantly.

[24:27]

I don't have to have any thought process to know this is a watch. I can find it in the dark by the bed. Oh, that's the watch. I don't have to see it. I can just feel it. But actually, it's memory. If I don't add the mem sign to the percept, then it's just a shape. Mm-hmm. Now this, I don't know, this may sound kind of silly to you. But this is what's going on. And there's this moment where memsign, memsign, memsign, memsign and percept come together.

[25:34]

Now percept is considered, a perception is considered in Buddhism a kind of power. Now if the mem sign takes over the percept, the percept has very little power. But the precept has the power to cut through the mem sign or peel it off. The other day, a practitioner in Boulder told me he had a dream. He kind of woke up and didn't know where he was. And he's a mountaineer and I can't remember what exactly the reason was, but the room where he was sleeping sort of came, he didn't know where he was. And he had to put together the ingredients. Yeah, and there was a chair somewhere nearby. First he didn't even know what it was, but then the mem sign arrived and he thought, oh, chair.

[27:01]

But it had no real presence as a chair because the mem sign took over and it was just kind of a chair. But he discovered his body And he began to put it together and it actually took him a little bit and finally he realized what room he was in and so forth. And now he noticed this experience partly because he's a meditator. But even if you're not a meditator, this experience happens to you. But we're more familiar with it and more likely to notice it and analyze it if you're a meditator. And if you meditate regularly and enough, you can find yourself almost always in that gap between the power of the percept and the mem sign.

[28:17]

So if we ask what is self or We have this topic self. Which presumes a question. What is self? Or who is self? Or maybe it's a process. How is self? Yeah. Maybe we can use what-ness as meaning how. So what kind of whatness is self? Well, perhaps prior to everything is this stream, maybe stream of being. Stream of particularities.

[29:34]

And those particularities are at each moment a mem sign and a percept. And if you begin to feel it, which is part of, let's call it, aggressive mindfulness, I never thought of aggressive mindfulness before, but why not? Our mindful attention may be more better than just mindfulness. Because we're talking about an active participation in knowing. And from a Buddhist point of view it means, it would mean in this case, to feel the percept simultaneous to or parallel to perhaps

[30:36]

The mem sign. Because at that moment, from the point of view of these terms, vikalpa and sankalpa, your previous nature, which flows through the mem sign, Takes hold of the person. And tells you what it is all the time. Tells you how you're going to relate to it. And whether it is I, me or mine. And whether it is Yeah.

[31:48]

So Buddha said, again talking about the early Buddha, it's not fruitful to think in terms of this is I. I am this, this is me. Yeah, this is mine. All of those things. And again, you can take... If how you perceive is the flow of your already accumulated nature... How do you enter into that flow? Well, you need some kind of, you know, that's what, again, Dharanis are about. It's like you put your hand in a stream.

[32:52]

And the water flows around it. So sankalpa is to put your hand in the stream. Vikalpa is the stream. So how do you bring intention or wisdom into the stream of the previous nature. Yeah, so this basic idea in Buddhism is primarily the flow of being is the flow of our previous nature, our already accumulated nature. Our already accumulated nature is not usually enlightened. And I think we know we suffer a lot through our already accumulated nature. And that already accumulated nature is too immediate for us to participate in.

[34:09]

So when the Buddha says, the early Buddha says, O monks, volition is karma. So our accumulated nature is a kind of intention. Or a kind of willing. And it's what we will that accumulates. And what we're responsible for. Well, what if we will to see, very simply, everything is impermanent? We have a habit of seeing things as permanent.

[35:20]

Or implicitly at least permanent. We assume they're permanent or we want them to be permanent and we want our future to be predictable. That's natural enough. But what if you can put your hand, intention, your volition into the stream of being? And when you put your hand in the stream of being, Yeah, you're actually maybe changing your nature. Because when you don't put your hand in your beak, your nature just keeps reinforcing itself. And where is this nature flowing? It's flowing in the joining of mem sign and percept.

[36:36]

No, we have to function this way. But we can notice we function this way. And you can put your hand in the stream of being. And the percepts remain pretty much the same. But the mem signs are bouncing off your hand. So if you say, I, me, mine, And you just bring it into your attention, aggressive mindfulness. I mean mine, I mean mine. You look at the trees, or I'm riding here in the train and I'm watching the dark tunnel of Switzerland and Austria pass by, occasional lights. I can say, I, me, mine.

[37:42]

And yet they're gone. They went, wait, wait, whoops, went right. I saw it for a moment. I passed the train. I can't really say it with much, with strong selfness, I, me, mine. Yeah, but can I do it all the time? Right now, I mean, I know all of you, virtually all of you very well. But can I be here somehow in a space putting my hand into this field, this dream that we're making right now? Can I have some experience here without I, which has less selfness? Less I, me, mine. Perhaps there's no sense of a lifespan here. Perhaps you're almost just shapes, Martians.

[39:06]

Marsmen. Well, you're from Venus, he's from Mars. That's a literary reference. There's some stupid book about it. In English, I don't know if it exists in German. Yes. It's a series? No, I've just seen the title. You got the picture? Yeah. Mars a person. The sense of it is that you, the sense of sankalpa is you begin to notice a nature free of your previous nature.

[40:22]

Or you allow a new nature, something like that, I'm being very mechanical the way I'm speaking, to form around, yeah, some phrase like I, me, mine. Or no, I mean mine, or less, I mean mine. It's like you put your hand in water and maybe things start to accumulate on your hand which would have flown right by. So this is a way from the point of view of Buddhism To think about self as an accumulated nature and to think about intention or volition as a way to enter into that accumulated nature, how it's accumulated, and if it's accumulated or entered differently than usual,

[41:47]

Or noticed differently than usual. It begins to allow you to feel your nature as a conventional nature. A conventional way of behaving. But not necessarily you. or not necessarily your identity. It's more of a role, a provisional identity. So if your accumulated nature is more of a provisional nature, is there a true nature? What is your true nature? Or is that just another kind of accumulated nature?

[43:00]

I think maybe we can discover this during a break Your true nature wants a break Okay, so I'll see you in a while Half an hour. I hope all of your true natures come back. I actually like you just as you are. I hope you come back just as you are.

[43:29]

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