through consciousness. Okay, now let me give you, try to give you an example. We can understand form sort of perhaps as just signal. So say that you're somewhere in a city somewhere. And you suddenly notice something. And a moment later you have a feeling. And actually what's happening is someone's walking by outside, perhaps carrying a radio. And you notice that it's a song. When you first heard it, but you didn't even know you were hearing something, but there was something, that's form.

[01:16]

Then you begin to have a feeling, but you still don't know that it's a song. You just begin to have a feeling. And at some point you say, oh yes, that's a song. That's a song, Sentimental Journey. And that's the perception. Then you remember Or maybe let's say, to keep it more in this generation, I don't know if it's even this generation, Yesterday. And you say, oh, that's the song Yesterday of the Beatles. And then you say, oh yeah, the first time I heard that was in such and such a place, in such and such a time, and I was just falling in love or whatever.

[02:36]

And all those associations are this scandal. And they go together to make consciousness. Okay. So, when you get a feeling for the five skandhas, now, mostly, our consciousness isn't, our awareness isn't developed enough When your awareness gets more developed, for instance, if you see an insect flying through the air, you don't see its path. But if an insect lands on the water, you can see its path.

[03:40]

And when your awareness gets more developed, things leave traces in your awareness. You can feel little tiny moments that normally would pass you by. So for the most part, though, we're just conscious. And we don't see that consciousness is constantly being created. But in fact, when we first wake up in the morning, You're shifting from dream mind which isn't exactly conscious.

[04:46]

Mostly we're not conscious of our dreams and so forth. So sometimes when a dream is vivid, it pushes into our consciousness, but for the most part it's not conscious. The challenge of Buddhism is to create a fourth mind. In other words, once you really recognize that we have non-dreaming deep sleep, dreaming sleep and waking mind, Wenn ihr erst einmal wahrgenommen habt, dass wir diesen Tiefschlaf ohne Traum kennen und haben, dass wir den Traumschlaf haben und dass wir das Bewusstsein haben. Und diese drei Geistesarten kennen sich nicht sehr gut untereinander. The question yogic practice, meditation tries to answer, is there a fourth mind that joins these three?

[05:49]

That overlaps or is underneath. Certainly you are all three of those minds at different times. But can you develop a mind that's aware of all three? That's the question really that motivates meditation as a... deep practice. So what you're trying to do when you begin to observe these is you're basically slowing down the observation of how consciousness is formed. And whether you meditate or not, you always are waking up and going to sleep.

[07:06]

And you can study this transition. So you wake up, there's your pillow. And thoughts begin to come into your mind. I've got to get up and make breakfast or something. Then I have to drive to work or whatever. So thoughts begin to come in and it actually begins to form consciousness. But if you're sleepy, you still tend to, you know, maybe go back to sleep. And one of the qualities of, one of the definitions of mind is a mind is homeostatic and self-organizing. By homeostatic, I mean it tends to stay the way it is. So you wake up and if you're still sleepy, your mind wants to stay asleep.

[08:20]

That's why we have alarm clocks. It's kind of to break into the homeostasis of mind. But if you're really having a powerful dream or you're really tired, the own organizing or self-organizing quality of mind says, oh, that's not an alarm clock, that's a telephone. And I'm not answering telephones at this time. So you stay asleep. So basically, your dreaming state has organized the information to stay asleep.

[09:22]

So you can begin to study this transition from sleeping to waking. And the whole process of getting up, washing your face, etc., is to go through this process of establishing consciousness. So, do you have any questions at this point about what I'm saying? Yeah. I think I would like a clarification of form. Form, okay, well, I'll get back to that. Okay. Now, consciousness is primarily where we're educated.

[10:25]

And if you have a drink, say, We are not at the level of feelings, for instance, emotions. We are not as acculturated at a feeling level as we are at a thinking level. This is one of the differences with Asian culture in Japan. They're more educated at a feeling level and less at a thinking level. on the level of feeling and less on the level of thinking or the level of consciousness. That's why Japanese people often feel very free when they come to the States because their feelings are acculturated in the States.

[11:32]

You can just have a new kind of freedom. That's why Japanese people often feel so comfortable because they can express their level of feeling more than in Japan and suddenly feel so free. And we sometimes feel the opposite. We go to Japan and we feel very free because emotions are much more distinguished than here. But sometimes we have a drink, for instance. You have two or three beers. Or Klaus offered me a whiskey earlier. You'd see me very quickly after a few whiskies slide down the skandhas. And I would dream of having a schnapps. So when a person has a few drinks, they become often more emotional. And they feel free of the restrictions here because we're less acculturated emotionally.

[12:45]

I'm describing it this way just to try to find an access so you can get a feeling for what I'm saying. So not only is this a movement this way, From first hearing the radio to etc. Each one is actually its own field. So, for instance, you have memories of feelings that are different from mental thinking memories. And we could also add here, but I won't because that would complicate it, the sense fields.

[13:58]

Because looking at these colors or the smell brings back things from at the smell level of memory. In other words, we have a history here as well as here. You have a whole history that's stored in smells. We usually subordinate that to our visual consciousness, but it's still there. So a certain rainy day will bring you back to a city in childhood or something. Okay, now feeling here, emotion is really a perception.

[15:03]

In English, sept part means to grasp. And sept heißt nehmen, annehmen. So an emotion like anger or something has a beginning and end. It's something to me grasp, boy, I'm really angry now. It's got a hold on me. But feeling is, well, also means sensation. It's more non-graspable. Okay. Now, there's a feeling in this room right now that wasn't here this morning. And it wasn't here before we came into the room. And if anyone comes in this room, And as soon as they open the door, they're struck by the feeling in the room.

[16:16]

And if there's a different group in here, you open the door, there's a different feeling. And if two or three of you leave, feeling will be different. Together, these of us who are right here, have generated a very particular field of view. It's unique to this moment. It's completely dependent on just now, at this time in the afternoon, and each of you. But you can't grab it. None of you can say what it is really. You can say it's soft or it's quiet.

[17:19]

Actually, you can't say what it is. But each of you know it. And it's loaded with more information than consciousness. And it has more information in itself than just consciousness. And what I have understood so far, if you speak about focusing in your tradition, then it will describe in Buddhism the unspeakable feelings. trying to allow a non-graspable feeling to come up to a level at which you can recognize it. Now, all mental formations in Buddhist teaching are understood to be accompanied by non-graspable feelings. Arne Mendel, for instance, has built a lot of his work on noticing

[18:25]

the non-graspable feeling of a person in a coma. The person's not speaking and there's no communication. If you join non-graspable feeling to that person, you suddenly realize a lot's going on. So part of the teaching of the five skandhas is if you see this process by which consciousness forms and you decide to use this map There could be other maps, but this has been the basic one for 2,500 years. You can begin to locate yourself in one Skanda primarily and not the others.

[19:35]

Just like you can locate yourself with a few drinks in an emotional skanda where you feel how angry you are or how loved you are or whatever. Now what the technique Freud basically used, a meditative technique, this free association and being on a couch or whatever, It's basically a meditative technique. No, I think people don't know quite where he got it. But the practice of free association moves you to this skanda. So you kind of suspend consciousness and in this skanda you begin to feel associations you don't notice when consciousness, which is a controlling mechanism, is dominant.

[20:53]

So you can be in consciousness, which allows us to know, like somebody's been in a fallen down of a tree or something, a kid, and they're unconscious, and then pretty soon they start recognizing people, they're conscious. Okay, we can say consciousness is something like that. But you can also sort of suspend that a little bit like you do in sunbathing or something. You have more of a free association. If you practice one-pointedness, you then can be more in an area of direct perception. And one useful practice is to take something once a day, like flowers are always nice, And just rest your consciousness in it.

[22:11]

In the shape of the petals. In the lifting of the stem and so forth. And if you really pay attention to flowers, you often see they're moving slightly. It looks like that's just there still, but if you look real carefully, you'll see the petals are changing slightly. Okay, so feeling is, I describe non-graspable feeling. Now, non-graspable feeling and form, the state of immediate consciousness is somewhere in here. All right, say that I just look at you.

[23:13]

I'm not thinking about you. I can feel the non-graspable feeling. It's almost like a kind of liquid. And it actually has a kind of energetic quality. There are certain points where it's more overlapping than others. And it has different qualities of energy and in different points it is cut across. You can imagine if there's a string from Gerald to me and me to you and you to you, pretty soon there's literally an infinite number of strings here connecting. And just like... You know, these stream games, there's points where they cross more than others. And Japanese have a word for that. called the ma-point, an A-point.

[24:40]

There are certain points where all these strings come together more than others. What we sometimes call charisma, or a person who has a certain kind of power, is they intuitively know, like Michael Jackson does, know how to step into a huge auditorium and hold the whole room till he moves a finger and ten, five hundred thousand people start cheering. Often these big rock stars and movie stars not only do they happen to be able to sing, they actually have... many people can sing well. But only some know how to step into a huge audience like... But only a few can enter this large mass, this audience, and pull the audience into his stomach.

[25:54]

This is a kind of shamanism. And it works through this non-graspable feeling. And if you talk to Mick Jagger, he probably isn't conscious of it, but he definitely knows how to do it and when he's on and when he's not. Now, I'm trying to make this more ordinary and not something mysterious. This is actually a Japanese business instruction manual. Japanese say, well, let's get into this meeting with these Germans and Americans. And we'll control the agenda with our stomach under the tables. And they feel that, you know, if they really put their energy together, if someone brings up something that they don't want to bring up, the guy will suddenly feel like,

[27:11]

I lost all my energy. I don't know why I couldn't bring that up. But we German and American business people have our own powers. I'm not saying better or worse, I'm just saying it's different. But I'm saying that cultures can emphasize different kinds of ways of being, being in the world and with others. If you want to teach yourself about this, Say you're coming into a room. And you're late. Step in and let the non-graspable feeling take you over. And don't think, just let that feeling guide you. And then let this feeling guide you.

[28:34]

And you feel something happening. And in fact, if you are good at it, you can virtually be invisible. You can move through the room in a way that people just kind of don't notice somehow. And that's simply working with non-grabable feelings. Now, if I just see you, let's say, go back to form, and I don't think about you, what's present then? Awareness. So this is also not only upward, it's downward. Because the more you suspend thinking and just enter a situation as a form, you're actually entering it with just awareness.

[29:40]

And the more you let the consciousness fall and the closer you come to this form skandha, the closer you are to this mindfulness. And this is the consciousness that wakes you up at 6.02 a.m. So when you go down the five skandhas, you're putting down all the baggage of consciousness. When you wake up in the morning out of dream sleep, the baggage of consciousness you start picking up one suitcase at a time. My job, the meeting, who's angry at me, And you basically generate consciousness. And the five skandhas give you a way to see the world arise in your own mind.

[30:45]

So you feel yourself creating consciousness. The word The word for the world in Buddhism is Lokadhatu. Which means not a world which has an outside creator. But a mutually co-created world. But when you see how consciousness arises, you begin to feel the co-creation. And when you get to know how consciousness is created, then you also get to know how this mutual development is created. When consciousness arises in me, the stick observing consciousness, consciousness arises in you too.

[31:54]

Now what a good Zen teacher would do is start a conversation with you, consciousness to consciousness, And then maybe if he or she is practicing with you to shift consciousness in the chakras or to shift into non-graspable feeling out of consciousness. So you start relating and you feel something different. I know the first night I met Suzuki Roshi. And in college I'd been with many, not many, but several well-known philosophers and theologians. It was interesting what they said, but I didn't feel it. But when I went into this lecture by chance of Suzuki Roshi, I suddenly felt all my senses open while I was listening to him, not just my head.

[33:21]

And it was simply because he was open in all his senses while he was talking. He was clearly hearing, smelling, feet on the ground. And that osmotically caused me to, my senses to open. So we're always mutually generating our own consciousness and other people's consciousness. So as you become more familiar with this, it allows you to rest in non-aggressible feeling or just form.

[34:35]

And it's a kind of technique to move into awareness. from consciousness or back and forth. Does something not make sense? Is there something that I haven't made clear or is not understandable? Yes. I'm still having difficulty with the difference between consciousness and awareness. I'm fully conscious of my being unaware. Yes. Yes. What did you say? Not fully unaware.

[35:50]

In other words, again, as I said, if I step forward and I trip now, and I fall, awareness will need to catch me, not consciousness. But generally, when you're involved with conceptual consciousness, awareness is fairly dormant. Now, part of this teaching is that this skanda, samskara it's called, is where karma is formed. So when you're acting with all this associated thinking, that's why it's called impressions, it leaves an impression in your memory and you're more karmically loaded here.

[36:58]

the more I am here in non-graspable feeling, basically I'm generating almost no karma. And in fact, I'm undoing karma by being in that state of mind. So meditation, zazen mind, And meditation and zazen-geist, which is not consciousness, it's awareness, and the basic mental posture of zazen-mind is uncorrected mind. You just let it be. Even if it's busy thinking, you just let it be. You've really got to profoundly leave your mind alone and accept what's ever there. The more you do that, you begin to create a state of mind that's neither dreaming nor... That's considered a different liquid.

[38:29]

And as I always say, you either cook your karma or get cooked by it. And in these skandhas you are constantly being cooked by your karma. So, when you are in zazen mind, It's a great place to mature the self. Because when you're sitting in Zazen mind, one of the first things that happens for the first couple of years usually, is an immense amount of personal history floats up. And you don't try to correct it. You just let it be.

[39:44]

And the more you let it be and don't try to control it with consciousness and the more you have the physical courage of sitting without scratching, without moving You break the adhesive connection between thought and action. Because each of us is everybody who's ever lived to some extent. So there's murderers in us, as well as, you know, saints. And I don't mean that we're all some sort of oppressed people. repressed murderer waiting to get out but more that there's a fear of who we really are underneath consciousness. But if you get so that you can really sit still and know you won't move

[40:46]

And that's why 20 minutes or 30 minutes is a good time. Because if you move after 15, you're not sure you can really... But always sit the same length of time. It gives you inner courage to let anything come up because you can just sit there without moving. So you're neither repressing nor expressing. So you can think of maybe ordinary consciousness as beef broth. And maybe Zazen mind is chicken broth. Or just plain water. So your karma, all your associations come up into that mind and actually they change in the process of being in that broth rather than consciousness.

[42:15]

So meditation actually alters your karma, makes the connections different. Makes the connections different. Alters your karma. And then stores it in the storehouse consciousness, the warehouse, in a different way. So the first year or two of meditation, actually you get to know your karma very well. You get to know your story in a very full way. In some ways we could describe it as a recapitulation. You redo your story and make it your own.

[43:16]

In many ways that frees you from your story. To act into the future with a future not predicted but only by your story. So that kind of thing comes out of the five skandhas. Now this is not meant to be philosophy, but an experience of the world. Unless you have some specific questions, I think that's the best I can do with this at present. Just that anything that happens to you happens to you as form, as feeling, or as perception, or as all the associations that occur, or as loaded consciousness.

[44:34]

There's nothing you can experience that doesn't fall into one of those categories. Your double skandhas, you're unloading consciousness. So awareness is unloaded consciousness. Yes. Yes, that's right. Anything that comes into you before you think about it. Right here, I'm standing on this. And here, that's form. As soon as I have ideas about it, I'm generating consciousness.

[45:36]

As soon as I have a felt sense, I think it happens to me. I think it happens to me. Yes. What happens to you before you start having thoughts and feelings about it? Now, in a way, this is a kind of ideal because there's no such thing as pure form. Because there's always, as long as you're alive, some quality of knowing. But there's definitely a movement in this direction and a feeling of pure form. And you can notice when there's really a strong... Okay? What does it mean that all these skandhas are empty?

[46:52]

None of them. None of them are permanent. All of them, each one moves toward emptiness. As all of this moves toward form, form equals emptiness. But consciousness doesn't quite equal emptiness, it's too loaded. So this is the formula, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. That's a question. Yeah.

[47:55]

What happens in a situation where I'm completely... If I'm completely concentrated and it feels to me as if when I'm completely concentrated it's at the top and the bottom at the same time. Yeah, maybe so. Concentration tends to be a door that opens and to other modes of mind. When you focus consciousness, you're using focus not in your technical way, but in this general. When you focus consciousness, you can notice the associations or perceptions, etc. Das heißt, wenn ihr Bewusstsein fokussiert, dann könnt ihr die Wahrnehmung und die Gefühle auch wahrnehmen. Wenn ihr euch auf die Form konzentriert, ist es mehr wie ein Feld und weniger als ein Punkt.

[49:05]

Und Form... So let me say something about a dharma and we'll end. Let me say something about a dharma and we'll end. Dharma means the smallest experienceable unit. Like one breath, perhaps. And when we're generally in consciousness, we don't notice dharmas.

[50:20]

We tend to notice generalities, generalizations. I notice people, not person, person, person. Now, again, I'm not knocking our consciousness. It's a fantastic tool. It's a profound way we human beings have of functioning. And thinking is obviously a powerful tool. Look what the world has created. It's sometimes a little stupid with nuclear power plants and stuff. But it doesn't have to be where you live.

[51:41]

Now, you don't want to always, from a Buddhist point of view, you don't want to always live in your thinking and your consciousness. We all need some experience of timelessness. Of kind of stopped space. And both are present all the time. I mean, as you know, I noticed as a kid, there's no 12 o'clock. It's a minute to 12. half a minute to twelve, a millionth of a second to twelve, and then a millionth of a second after twelve. I remember I said to my dad, there's no twelve o'clock, Dad, I'm nervous.

[52:45]

He was a scientist, so he said, well, when something is approached and then passed, we say it exists. And it remained a kind of insight for me. The world is what we say exists because we're approaching it and passing it, but you can't grasp it. That's another meaning of emptiness. These things have momentary existence. They appear in our consciousness. We can give them a sense of permanence and duration, but actually they are in a measureless momentariness. And we can call that an experience of timelessness.

[53:59]

There's no 12 o'clock. There's our experience of, yeah, it's getting closer to seven, we have to have dinner soon. But also at this moment there's this absolute independence of a kind of stopped feeling. Now a Dharma is a way to practice with this. Okay, so the best way I can give you a sense of a Dharma is I've already implied this morning and this afternoon is to work with the word nourishment. To try to do things in ways that nourish you.

[55:09]

If I'm speaking with you right now and I feel nourished by the way I'm speaking, this experience of nourishment is a Dharma. If the next word I feel a little bit not nourished, depleted by. That's karma. At that moment I'm creating some kind of thing that stays with me. So I can feel when I'm creating karma and when I'm more free of it. And since I'm still attached to having less karma If I notice I'm speaking in a way that's making me feel less energy, less in touch with vitality, or more accumulating effects that make you feel uncomfortable or me feel uncomfortable,

[56:18]

I don't criticize myself for it usually. I don't see what I'm doing. Though sometimes I do that. But usually I just shift toward feeling nourished again. So if the next word I feel nourished by saying it, then that's a dharma. So you can practice with this. Again, taking a walk. Find that way of walking that you feel nourished as you walk. Get to know that feeling. And simply refuse to do anything that doesn't nourish you. It's a kind of toughness.

[57:32]

You have to say, I don't do that because it doesn't nourish me. And if you have to do it, do it. Find a way to move into it so it nourishes you. Again, Dogen said, The coming and going of birth and death is where most people drift about without nourishment. ist die Art und Weise, wo viele Leute schwanken und hin und her getrieben werden, ohne genährt zu sein. But the same situation is also enlightenment or dharma. So if you begin to feel nourished, you're entering a dharma gate. When you don't feel nourished, you're usually entering a karma or samsara gate.

[58:34]

And each moment is such a... So you can work with the feeling of this word nourishment. And it's up to us to know what nourishes us and doesn't. And if you don't know, find out. Like when you wash your face, do you feel nourished by washing your face or not? Start with real basic things like that. Okay, now the other word to work with is completeness. Okay, again, say I'm picking up this bell. You can ask, how does a painter know when the painting is complete? Well, It's a feeling.

[59:40]

It's an aesthetic feeling. How does he know when each brush stroke is complete? You begin to know when something feels complete. For instance, I just made this motion. That makes me feel complete. It moves into this chakra and out. So I tend to find myself doing motions that make that I feel complete. And if I do this, it's a little harder to feel complete. But if the music's right, I could probably... But generally, particular actions have a completeness. There's a completeness to the way your posture feels.

[60:44]

So say I'm going to pick up this bell. I notice the thought, I'm going to pick up this bell. I let that thought occur. And I don't rush it. I say, you know, we never ring the bell twice. We ring it once and once. So I let the thought appear, I'm going to pick up the bell. Then I have to move to pick up the bell. So I do that in a way I feel complete. When I touch the bell, the bell is somewhat cool. So I let the coolness of the bell, I feel that for a moment. Then I pull the bell into my body.

[61:46]

That feels complete. And then I put it down. And in each of those motions I felt a completeness. Now, in awareness, as I said, awareness is very fast. I'm exhausting my friend here. Awareness is very fast. He suggested that instead of completeness, completeness should be a better word. That's a different way to translate. If I think of it as consciousness, I have to slow down my consciousness.

[62:52]

Like a movie. If I think of it as consciousness, I have to slow it down. But from your point of view, if I pick up this bell, just as fast as anybody else picking up the bell. But for me, in a kind of feeling of awareness, each thing had a sense of completeness. Now, you can see that practice when you do meditation. That's the reason I do it this way. Here's my cushion. That's complete.

[63:54]

I'm kind of acknowledging the cushion. I turn around to you in the room and I feel the room. It's a separate act. I don't just generally walk in. I don't just come... That doesn't feel right to me. Well, I come in. I can do it quite quickly. But still, for me, each is complete. This is a complete movement. And then I lift my, I come up, I don't just stand up, I come up to standing. Now if you say, get up, and I just get up, I'm going from one point to the other. But I'm actually coming up into, through a process, to standing.

[64:59]

And then I, so I step back, and then I step up. Then I feel my backbone. Then I bring my backbone down to the cushion. And then I fold each leg. Now that's slowed down and that's the teaching in meditation to do each thing completely. But that can be applied to anything. Picking up the salt shaker. Yeah. And it's common sense.

[66:02]

If on all your small actions you've done it with a feeling of completeness, whatever your psychological condition, you're going to feel more complete at the end of the year. And probably simply having the clarity of a dharma in each moment is going to make your psychology a little clearer too. So if you begin to notice what nourishes you and what makes you feel complete, you're working with the Dharma gate of each moment so again we can understand Dogen's statement the coming and going of birth and death is our true human body and it's within this true human body of the coming and going of birth and death

[67:10]

that we're either deluded or enlightened. And it's your choice. And practice is simply to give you the choice to bring you into the focus of the Dharma gate. That's enough for today. So, would you be willing to listen to the bell with me for a moment? And thank you, Johannes and Klaus, for inviting me to come. And thank you for willing to be exhausted by my flow of English.

[68:26]

And thank you. I really enjoyed being with each of you. Thank you. Come into your breathing so each breath nourishes you.

[70:01]

And so each breath feels complete. The inhale. The exhale. The pause at the bottom of the breath. The end of the exhale. The pause at the top of the inhale. Each of these four aspects you can feel a completeness in. And in the mind itself. That's a tractor or something other we hear.

[72:42]

But that's empty of the name, the word tractor. It's just your own hearing. Your hearing. You don't have to name it. just the blissful activity of being alive.

[73:42]

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