I gave a little talk the other day in Colorado at the monastery practice center, in which I called it jokingly, From New Sphere to Moo Sphere. And noosphere is Teilhard de Chardin's idea that the more we develop, the more we become kind of pure spirit. And Christian and Western religious life has even tried to get the soul, the earthy, out of spirit and make it pure spirit. So one of the practices in Zen is this koan mu, where you try to take the meaning out of the word mu, which means emptiness,

[01:10]

And just say it as a physical quality on everything. Until every mental, physical phenomena perception has this accompanying it. So in the sense you're physicalizing the mind, And mentalizing or voicelizing the body. So I called it from noosphere to moosphere. So I won't say more about it now. Except that one way to get more of a sense of your heart is to feel it physically.

[02:36]

And to see if you can have a sense of location here. To take a big jump, it would be almost like you could feel yourself here. Looking up at your head. But we don't. We look down at our heart. Where are you looking from? What is this sense of location you have? I mean, that's a very important thing to notice that you have a sense of location that you look down at your heart. And that sense of location is something you've learned.

[03:48]

And it's very tied to the eyes as part of your brain and thinking as visual. And that's why I was suggesting to you another way of seeing where you see fields rather than objects. And the more you can see fields rather than objects, the more you can feel things with your body, And feel things with your heart. And I'm describing it this way because I don't want to make it sort of magical and religious. But I'm speaking about it as a spiritual craft. Which, as Westerners, it's quite hard for us to do.

[04:58]

And actually, in a realized sense, for any culture it's hard to do. But each culture and each person has their own bias. And that bias becomes your path. So if you just begin to sense the sense of location you have and really locate yourself in that location consciously You can begin then to sense the possibility of other locations.

[05:59]

So if you don't locate yourself where you're located you don't know other locations are possible. You take your location for granted. Now this sense of location is a very important quality in the sense of ego and self. And when you can begin to see that you have a sense of location, When you begin to see that you have a sense of location, you are really Creating the real possibility of being free of self.

[07:20]

And letting that sense of location float. Yes. Okay. Well, if you say your feet are down here, that's a sense of location. Your feet are down there somewhere. Yeah. But where you locate yourself in your body. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why I keep talking about these strange things. But really, it's tremendously basic, but very hard to see.

[08:24]

The ability to really see it requires probably the yogic ability to sit very still. Now, I'm speaking about this from my own experience. But I think it's helpful to be able to infer it from language. In other words, even if you don't have this experience, if I can make it clear to you that this is a possibility or makes sense, It makes it much more likely that you can have this experience. To infer it creates the possibility of being it.

[09:25]

Infer means to infer from, to draw a logical conclusion. Yeah, to deduct. To infer isn't quite as tight as to deduct. But it's like if you see smoke, you can infer there's a fire. To assume. Somewhere between assume and deduct. So you can see, I think all of you, that you have a sense of your feet being down there. And you have a sense of the sky being up there. But the sky is right here. It starts here.

[10:42]

You're all sitting in the sky. It's just a way of looking at it. But you have to make that little jump. Oh, I'm a sky sitter. A himmelhocker is... Good. So that's one reason we turn our feet up, actually, in zazen. They're not down there. They appear looking at us, or they're looking at us, or we're looking at them. And in meditation practice, your feet become soft and warm and friendly. Maybe I should do a seminar about friendly feet. Get very friendly with your feet.

[12:01]

And you know that all your acupuncture points in your body and basic organs in your body are in your feet. So let's accept you have a sense of location. Now, I don't know, I almost need a blackboard.

[13:12]

Do we have a, not for now, but during the day, this afternoon, is it possible to have a blackboard? A chalkboard, what do you call it? Is it possible to get a blackboard to write on? You'll try? Okay, fine. Because maybe I'd like to turn the five skandhas upside down and show them to you upside down. And since Ludger brought up the five skandhas, I'll at least tell you verbally now, though it turns out it's much easier if you can see them. And there's a lot of problem with the translation of English and German and Sanskrit and so forth. But basically they are form, feeling, perceptions, the grasping of things, and associations or impulses. and consciousness.

[14:31]

It's a way of creating a map on a cloud. To give some structure to a cloud. So does that mean I shouldn't do it again, right? So Lutgaard thinks I should do it again and you don't think I should. Okay. Okay, so all of you who don't want me to sit on the left and all of you who want to sit on the right... Okay. Now normally we, in addition to having a sense of physical location,

[15:39]

You sense your location in the primary processes of your psychological definitions. So let's take the fireman. His primary process is to put out fires. But he has a secondary process where he likes fires. And his sense of location sometimes goes down toward the liking fires. Do you have the picture? Well, okay, there's this primary process that he puts out fires. There's a secondary process that he likes fires. He wants them to burn for quite a while before he puts them out. So his sense of location of liking fires moves down here, away from the primary process.

[16:56]

But it's attached by a rubber band to the primary process. And whenever he likes fires too much, the rubber band brings him back to the primary process. Now, if a person loses that rubber band, and their sense of location becomes down here, he becomes an arson. And if you lose your sense of location entirely and go into the unconscious you can become crazy. So you need to take care of that rubber band. So the rubber band is one sense of ego as well as the location is a sense of ego.

[18:08]

And you need to know how to keep that rubber band attached. That makes sense. Okay. Yeah, that may be one thing he does, right? Yes. Do you mean that the primary persons always describe the so-called good motivations and the secondary the bad ones? Like extinguishing fire and kind of... No, that's too simple an image. Often the secondary process is better.

[19:12]

so let's take another example a person is a banker and they really want to be a poet and the secondary process is being a poet or a painter and at some point they simply can't get on the subway any longer or the drive to the bank and the secondary process of being a poet or a painter comes up Now, some people are able to balance those, like there's an American poet named Wallace Stevens. Who was a top insurance executive and at the same time one of the two or three major poets in American English.

[20:13]

So he was able to integrate secondary processes and primary processes. So you can either have one or the other or integrate them. And in all situations, you're in a play among them. Although, since secondary processes are not as controlled, by the primary process. Unconscious material or activity, though not bad activity necessarily, but unconscious activity is more likely to appear in secondary processes.

[21:14]

Okay. All right, so let me just finish this idea before we go to lunch. Now the problem is, if you are rigidly located in a primary process, are probably psychologically very brittle. Brittle means breaks easily. Something that's very hard, but . So if you are too located in a primary process, which is generally a consensual identity, Now we have a consensual identity.

[22:28]

Do you understand what I mean by that? We all agree that the stairs are there and the elevator is over there and we're going to come back here after lunch. And we all agree to keep our clothes on during the seminar and things like that. I remember my little daughter at the airport starting to take her clothes off when she was two or three. And I said, we don't take our clothes off at the airport. She said, doesn't everyone want to? I said, that's a secondary process. Primary process is we keep our clothes on at the airport. So we have a consensual identity.

[23:49]

But if that consensual identity and the primary processes of your psychological needs are too rigid and too firmly located, you're psychologically fragile. You're much healthier if you have a rubber band and it can stretch and you can move that location. But if you stretch that rubber band too far, you can be in trouble. You get the picture? Okay. Now, what happens in meditation is you begin to have a field consciousness and you can let that sense of location move quite freely because the rubber band becomes quite strong.

[24:57]

And you can even let go of the rubber band entirely. And you can begin to trust an inner process which takes care of you. But first it's good to sense how location works in your identity. and just become familiar with yourself intimate with yourself so you begin to feel at ease with both the presence of secondary and primary processes And that's what the first part of meditation practice is for the first few years, is developing this intimacy and at easiness with yourself.

[26:01]

As I said this morning, you begin to feel you're sitting up in a kind of strength. And the more you have that kind of being in a kind of strength, and an intimacy with yourself, you begin to trust yourself more. And you begin to allow more of the territory of who you are to be present in your life. And you're not tied so anxiously to maintaining primary processes and a mind which views yourself as the public criticizing you. So the main quality I'm emphasizing now in meditation is intimacy.

[27:21]

And intimacy is a bigger territory than knowledge. You can come to the limits of your knowledge of yourself and knowledge of the world. But there's no limits to intimacy. Okay, so please let's go have lunch. And don't lose sight of... I don't know what. when you come back let's practice intimacy with ourselves in meditation and since it's 1.15 and we're going to have either one and a half hours or two hours what?

[28:28]

three Yeah, since we're going to have one and a half hours or two hours, let's have three. Not three hours, we're back at three. All right, so I'll see you all at three o'clock. Is there a window or something we can open to get a little air?

[29:59]

Or are you all... Isn't it a little warm in here? At least for a few moments. Let's see. If it gets too cold, please close the window. Tomorrow morning when we start sitting, if you could sit again as we just did along the walls, and if you could sit more or less in the same places, then I can for sure straighten the postures of the people who I didn't today. Now, before I start on whatever I'm going to start on, would anybody like to say something?

[31:04]

Yes. I started sitting two months ago, and since then my right knee is giving me big problems. It's quite painful, and sometimes I think it's just one big torture. So I'd like to hear something about it. six months a year.

[33:06]

In the beginning you just have a lot of discomfort, so it's better to try to sit for short periods of time and increase them slowly. But the ego is going to try to stop you from sitting. that had not occurred to you at lunch. In fact, such duty to humankind didn't occur at lunch at all. It only occurs when you started meditating. And if The ego can't embarrass you through your duty to humankind. It'll tell you your knee is about to die. And as long as the ego can get away with this, it will threaten you with... Anything that threatens the ego will threaten you very deeply.

[34:14]

But once you realize this is very basic Buddhism at such a fundamental level, it's the activity of meditation. But when you can sit through whatever comes up, you have a tremendous ego strength as a result of it. It's very strange. If you can Not let your ego push you around, you make the ego stronger. Stronger in a good sense. Not stronger in a sense, I'm the only guy around. But I don't care if there's lots of you guys around, I'm comfortable.

[35:29]

And we have, you know, as I've often said, we have no puberty rights. We have nothing that shows us that life is more difficult than our parents thought it was. So I think it's good myself to have this difficulty which isn't hurting you. It's just hurting. Or maybe it's hurting you. The you of you is hurting. In any case, in the end, you either want to sit or you don't. And then you find it's a useful way to explore yourself or you don't. But if you think that your sitting is doing actual physical damage to you, then sit in some way that it's not. Okay, one more maybe or something.

[37:10]

Yes. Yes. I'm also sitting since two months, and just since about a week I have difficulties that I start falling asleep during sitting. And I'm experiencing this right now at the seminar too. So it's quite an obstacle right now. So what can I do? It means your zazen is working. Really? So the ego says, ooh, I'm really getting exposed now. Go to sleep. So this very difficulty is where your zazen is at right now. It's good. Have you ever noticed when you're trying to read a book, particularly if you're a bit sleepy,

[38:13]

A book that's demanding. So you're reading away. And you notice you've fallen asleep. So you wake back up and you try to read again. And you read the page and you're perfectly clear and then next thing you know you're asleep. So you wake up and then you read again and then you fall asleep again. Did you ever notice that you fall asleep on almost exactly the same word? This word is asking something of you. So two things happen. One is your ego says, go to sleep. You don't want to face whatever you might think of if you really saw what that sentence meant.

[39:34]

Your primary process says, go to sleep. But your secondary process says, yes, go to sleep. And we can sneak it in past the ego. So actually two things happen at once. Going to sleep allows you to understand something you can't through consciousness. It opens you to something and going to sleep also protects the ego. So, this is quite good. And that's what zazen is all about. To try to find that territory where you can find out what happens when you're asleep, but allow things to happen which don't happen when you're conscious.

[40:37]

So this is part of becoming intimate with yourself. Now you also have an old habit that as soon as certain processes start secondary or unconscious you tend to go to sleep. Because we have two forms of consciousness that are part of our life and our culture. Waking and sleeping. And we divide what like dream and imaginal consciousness mostly occurs in sleeping. Now meditation practice awakens dreaming and imaginal type consciousness.

[41:40]

So you're used to sleeping when that happens, so you go to sleep. So if you're going to find out this third state of consciousness which is neither waking nor sleeping you've got to get past the sleep trigger. You've got to be able to let things happen which trigger sleep but you don't go to sleep. Now there's two ways to do that. One is to get a lot of sleep so that you're not so sleepy when you meditate. Another is to really develop a subtlety that can move in this territory without falling asleep. And the very reason the most important time to do zazen in the morning is because you're sleeping.

[43:00]

Your dispersed body, your dispersed dream body, It's all over the place, like the memory of a computer on a hard disk. When you wake up, you're trying to get yourself to reappear on the screen. They're scattered all over the disk, all over the planet. And the alarm clock goes off. And you go, boom, and you try to bring yourself onto the screen. So you wake up and you say, oh, I know who you are. But you want to actually do zazen when this process is not complete. Now, a third way to attempt to do it is before you go to zazen, a third way to try to not fall asleep in zazen is to have two cups of strong coffee.

[44:19]

It doesn't work. Because it locks you into cognitive processes. So you can stay awake during zazen but real zazen doesn't happen if you have a lot of coffee or caffeine in you. So if you're like me and sometimes you get two or three hours sleep And there's a bunch of new students who are in the Zen Do. And they don't want to see the Zen Master sound asleep on his cushion. You have two cups of strong coffee. You have. I have. So at least you look good for the new students. Your backbone is rigid with coffee. But it's more honest to just go in and say, this...

[45:45]

Okay, are you all okay? Pretty good? Yeah, okay. Well, I'm sorry, here we go. I don't know if I can do this, but we'll see. There's probably a picture of me on the other side now. That's your worldview. That's a good example of a sense of location. If I change my location this way, I can write world very easily. If I try to write it this way, my sense of location interferes in my shaping the word world. Anyway, that's your worldview. And down here is unconscious. And here is primary processes.

[47:10]

Down here is secondary processes. It's fairly simple. It's four dots. Okay. Now, this sense of your world is very related to your primary processes. And this is a kind of subliminal, below the light. Subliminal, below the light.

[48:11]

Subliminal, I don't know what it means. But anyway, sort of below the light anyway. And this is your primary processes. And your unconscious often relates to secondary processes. And of course there's also a relationship this way and this way. Quite simple. Okay, now Zazen is over here somewhere. Right there, I mean... And zazen affects both this and this. Okay, this is zazen.

[49:12]

Now there's two aspects of zazen traditionally. One is vipassana and shamatha. Now, this aspect, although in Zen practice vipassana and shamatha are united, still, let's separate them for now. Now, shamatha means concentration. So the processes of concentration change the temperature and viscosity of consciousness. So things float in it, happen in it differently when the temperature is different. Now I'm just using words like temperature and viscosity to give you some kind of image.

[50:30]

Don't take them too technically. So if you develop concentration, if you're able to allow an uncorrected state of mind to begin to happen, And within that uncorrected state of mind you can give it a little bit of form. Through bringing your attention into your breath. And bringing your attention into your body. This tends to take the energy out of cognitive thinking. And you will tend to shift more and more to a kind of field of consciousness.

[51:31]

Okay, do you follow that? If you're not trying to correct your consciousness, but you're trying to just bring your attention to your breathing, you're not trying to push thoughts out, But it's a bit like, instead of being involved with all the sailboats and speedboats on the lake, you more and more feel the water itself. And the number of boats in the water is, you don't interfere with them, they can float around as much as they want. And the more you can bring your breaths and attention together, the more you suddenly find you can slip beneath the surface of the water.

[52:54]

And you find out magically you can breathe underwater. And you can see the bottoms of the boats. So you're seeing secondary processes now. You're not just seeing primary processes. So you're still with me in this. And then you begin to see fish swimming by. That you hadn't noticed before. Now usually the moment you drop below the surface, you go to sleep. So zazen allows you to get closer and closer to the surface of the water. And I can see people doing meditation. And they try the water out.

[53:58]

It's not too wet, it's kind of wet. There's actually an expression in Buddhism to be able to immerse yourself without getting wet. This is one of the reasons the image of the lotus is there. The lotus is a symbol for Buddhism. And the roots are in the mud. The stem is in the water. And the blossom is up above the water. Now, when you overemphasize the spiritual side of Zen practice, You all want to be in the blossom like a ladybug or something. Or a prince or a princess or a fireman or something. Prince Buddha fireman. He's standing on the lotus. So, but practice is you actually kind of, you let yourself down off the leaves.

[55:35]

And after a while you feel, oh, actually I don't have to get it, the stem is there, I'm also the stem. So you sense the stem part of you. And I can see people in their meditation, the water starts to rise as they're sitting. And they enjoy themselves up to about here. And then they get to about here and their head goes... And it's true. Some of you are sitting like this. And it definitely means you're thinking too much. When you sit like this, you think. And you pull your chin in and you don't think as much. So I can see the water rising. I think it's about here and then. It's true.

[56:49]

As soon as you can actually see the water, you go to sleep. As long as you can feel it. Okay. So, certain kinds of consciousness... Let's call it all consciousness. Certain kinds of consciousness, because of its temperature or viscosity, support cognitive thinking. Certain kinds of consciousness don't support cognitive thinking. The kind of consciousness you have at night doesn't support cognitive thinking. That's why if you wake up and you've been having a dream and you try to remember the dream, cognitively you lose it. Because the kind of thinking, mind, or the kind of consciousness that allows dreams to happen gets dispersed by cognitive thinking.

[58:01]

A person with developed yogic skills can think in dream consciousness without dispersing it. But you don't have to worry about that. All you're trying to do is get familiar with this territory. Okay. So, when you develop consciousness, bringing your, in the most direct and simple way, your attention to your breathing, I'm going to dream about this guy, I'm sure, tonight. You're looking at this and I'm looking at him. I can see his five skandhas, yeah, very clearly.

[59:15]

There's a secondary process right there. Okay, so as you develop concentration, you begin to link zazen mind with the unconscious. And the minnows of the unconscious begin to swim into your zazen. Minnows are tiny fish. Smaller than sardines. Like you see in streams. Like you see in streams. Okay, the minnows of your unconscious begin swimming. And your immediate reaction is, I bet there's a shark. Because mostly we're scared of our unconscious.

[60:17]

And we think the shark and the barracuda of I'm going to go crazy are swimming in there somewhere. And mostly they're minnows. Mostly when you look closely, they look like sharks from a distance, but up close they're minnows. Occasionally a big whale swims by. Which is quite exciting. At first you just think it's a wall. Once I was in, little anecdote, once I was in the, during the, who knows what it was called, the Persian Gulf Crisis, I don't know.

[61:20]

The late 50s anyway. I was in the Mediterranean on a ship, a merchant marine ship. And there were both Russian and American battleships in the Mediterranean. And I was at the wheel of a 500-foot freighter, which is a pretty big freighter, 500 feet. Mm-hmm. And our radar picked up an immense object right out in front of us. In the dark and in the fog. So I was just an ordinary seaman and the mate on my watch I was 19 or 20. He began signaling with flashing lights and everything. And no response. And this suddenly felt like as far away as that wall, an immense battleship with a

[62:23]

aircraft carrier not far behind went by. No signal, nothing, except after it got past us, suddenly one light went... Just to let us know we were there. That he was there. He or she. And probably that ship had so much equipment it had us completely tracked. Sometimes something like that happens in meditation. You're sitting in a wall of fog or a immense something is there and you just think it's the background and you realize it's some part of you.

[63:47]

And you sort of say, anybody there? Sometimes it will give you one little blink. So this is what makes meditation fun, these things happen like this. So maybe I didn't want to be a fireman when I was a kid. Anyway, so when you're practicing zazen, this concentration opens you up to unconscious material. Okay, now the way of seeing that arises from the way of seeing that arises from concentration is called vipassana. It's called insight.

[65:01]

Okay, so this is not ordinary thinking, but the kind of thinking that arises through concentration. And that kind of insight concentration begins to allow you to see your world view. begins to allow you to see how your world is put together. So do you see how zazen affects unconscious processes and your basic assumptions about what the world is? Okay. But it doesn't affect much these primary processes and secondary processes. Except as they're affected here. So... So over here we have practices like the five skandhas and the six paramitas.

[66:27]

And these practices of the five skandhas are actually a way to transform the primary and secondary processes. Because you change, technically we say, you change the basis, the bases of personality. You change the base, you begin, your personality and ego is predicated differently. Okay. Is that okay so far? Yeah, do you have some questions about it? Yeah. What kind of practice?

[67:47]

Which ones? The five skandhas? Okay, I'll come to that. I'm sorry. We're going to get you to get it yet. Yes? Is there a translation for skandhas? It means heaps. It could be the five scandals. No, no. It is a scandal, though. Okay. Now, when you practice The reason Western Buddhism has so little effect on Westerners except giving them a sense of well-being, which is a lot, is because mostly Western Buddhism so far has been taught in here.

[68:52]

And part of it is also because our spiritual tendencies are anti-intellectual. And Western religious teachings, for the most part, emphasize faith and are not an avenue for real intellectual examination. One thing you should know about Buddhism is it's 50% intellectual. Or it's 100% intellectual. And 100% not intellectual. Okay, now by intellectual I don't mean that you believe in your thoughts.

[70:13]

I think most intellectuals believe in their thoughts. That's why artists, businessmen and so forth actually practice Zen better than intellectuals. People have a tendency to act and do things physically. Looks like cement up there. Sounds like a violin case. It's the Berlin marching band.

[71:14]

Anyway. So Buddhism feels that anything that can be thought about should be thought about. Yes. And what can't be thought about shouldn't be thought about. Now, we tend to think about what can't be thought about and sometimes don't think clearly about what can be thought about. There's lots, I mean, thinking is, language thinking is within the limits of language. So a child who asks, what's on the other side of blue? It's a very poetic question. But it's not within the limits of language. They're misusing language.

[72:18]

And a lot of the intellectual questions we ask are a misuse of language. We can't, they're philosophical questions. Okay. Okay. So if we can get past the, if we can see that a certain amount of intellect is necessary in practice, you'll come a long way. In fact, the word for faith in Japanese Buddhism, daishinkan, means great faith root. And it means faith rooted in experience and intelligence.

[73:35]

Not just kind of blind faith. Okay. So we need to practice Buddhism in the West. We need both this and this. In the West we have to practice Buddhism both here and there. I think I should stop. I will take a break pretty soon, okay? A few minutes. But let me try to say something, a few more minutes about this. When you start to practice, you're mostly in here.

[74:50]

In the zazen concentration and a certain amount of new contact with your unconscious. Unless you really look carefully at what happens through concentration, There's not much effect on your world view. So in fact, most Zazen practice is related, is in here, Buddhist practice. And this down in here. Okay. Now, you can accept certain Buddhist views that you read or I tell you or something. Or better, you can accept them in the sense that you test them out through your own practicing.

[75:55]

Or if you practice this third state of mind of zazen regularly, it just becomes a habit you do daily. And you become familiar with it like in the boats of your day you're aware of the water around you. It begins to affect your world view. You begin to really see how the boats of your life are sitting in water. And how they're floating. But you still don't see much about how the boats are made. Okay, now what actually happens in practice is you begin to sense that the way your boat is made is affecting your meditation.

[77:02]

And is affecting the way you see the water. And the contact with the water. Okay, so what happens during the first years of practice? is you wonder what this boat is you're in. And you, maybe you don't like the boat you're in. But you clearly will think you'll drown if you get out of this boat. You're not sure you know how to swim. This may be an unknown liquid. It might be acid, like on the surface of Venus or something.

[78:12]

So you stay in your boat, though you'd like to change your boat. How do you change your boat? Okay, you find another boat that floats pretty well. Okay, so you find an inner tube. Yeah, inner tube? Inner tube, like inside the tire? An inner tube, people say? An in-ryphen. An in-ryphen. Or a rubber raft. Mm-hmm. And that rubber raft or inner tube is the five skandhas. Okay, so you sort of, oh, the five skandhas, that floats. And it's different than this boat. So you tie this inner tube securely to the boat. And climb into the inner tube. And then cautiously let yourself float away from the boat.

[79:30]

Do you understand? Then you look back at the boat. Look at the angle it is in the water. And look at the holes. Look at us taking in water constantly. Now I know why I can't sleep. It's those pumps at night pumping the water out. So you get so you can sit in the five skandhas. And if you want to repair the boat, you can pull yourself up, patch it up. And if you want to, you can climb back up on the boat and sail it.

[80:30]

And your job probably requires you to go to work in the boat. If you come to work in an inner tube, they probably won't like it. But after a while, you get so you can spend more and more time in the inner tube And you even feel this inner tube can change shapes. So you can make it look like the boat when you go to work. And the first few years of practice, probably I would say for myself, Well, I saw the inner tube or the ox pretty early on. But I was neither willing to ride the ox nor get in the inner tube right away.

[81:35]

But I would say I pretty early on sat down in the inner tube for a few moments. But even though I didn't admit it to myself, I thought it was a great accomplishment. So I didn't think it was a great thing, but really I did. So dachte ich einerseits nicht, es war was Besonderes, aber dann doch eigentlich. And I thought just that one time in the inner tube was good enough. Und dann dachte ich, also einmal in dem Reiben, das reicht eigentlich schon. But so mostly for years I stayed in the usual bulk and kind of let the inner tube float behind it just in case there was trouble. Und für einige Jahre... But I kept the inner tube in view. And I suppose it took me 10 years before I was most of the time in the inner tube.

[82:37]

So I would like to after the break Should tell you something about the five skandhas, the inner tube of the five skandhas. Because it's the best life raft you can have. And I'd like you to know about the five skandhas and this life raft. I would like all of you to know about this life raft and little by little you can start using it yourself it's up to you but at least you should know it's there doesn't mean you're getting rid of your main boat

[83:41]

Just means you're able to look at it differently. So this is the five skandhas floating out here. Let's see, we should draw it as a little inner tube here. It's a little inner tube that you're floating in here. So after the break, we will look at this inner tube. Thank you very much. That was an hour. It's now 4.35. Shall we come back at 5 to 5? 20 minutes long enough? Okay. But rather get acquainted with it the way you might with a new friend.

[85:01]

Who you don't know too well yet. But you're a little bit excited about getting acquainted. And this scares you a little. And you don't want to push it. You want to let this new friendship take its own time. So you kind of get up close and sit beside this person now and then. Without asking too many questions. You can share life histories a little later. Now someone, one or two or three people mentioned to Ulrike that they didn't want a new topic started so soon.

[86:06]

I hadn't thought it was a new topic. So it's good for me to see that it's a new topic. Really, since this is getting familiar with this, Maybe we should get familiar more slowly. Okay, now Olaf mentioned to me at break that this whole, this thing was a little hard to understand or get familiar with. So it's just a drawing. But let's, if you have any questions about it, maybe all of you had some, would you tell us?

[87:27]

I know it's okay, but... Yeah, but ask... Worldview. Okay, is that all right? Shall I talk about that a little bit? The main world view of Buddhism is that everything is changing. and that nothing has a permanent existence, nor an inherent existence. And that takes a really long time to get a feeling of what that means.

[88:32]

It's taken Buddhism a long time to get a full feeling of what that means. I would say it took at least a thousand years. So don't worry about it if you don't get it right away. It's pretty easy to understand initially. It's very difficult to see its real implications. What I talked about last night was emptiness.

[89:48]

And the meaning of everything changes is expressed in the word emptiness. Now, just to give you a little background, it might help you a little bit. A bit of what Herman and I spoke about at lunch. It was accepted in Buddhism that there was no fixed self. That's been accepted from the beginning. And then it was accepted also that the five skandhas, the life raft of the five skandhas, as another way to posit self through perceptual analysis.

[91:04]

What's also impermanent. Now, it's called five skandhas, which means heaps or piles. Because supposedly the historical Buddha first explained the five skandhas by piling five piles of sand or rice or something. So it means the five combinations or aggregates And you can make one pile higher and you can mix the piles.

[92:10]

Or you can make one pile. Now, most of us experience one pile because the actual fact of perception is very quick. Somebody, I believe, has slowed down bird song. And we hear chirp, chirp, chirp. Oh, my God. I wanted to hear it in German phonemes. Depends on the bird. Oh. Not Dickie Bird. So.

[93:08]

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