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Pause to Transform: Mindful Living
AI Suggested Keywords:
Practice-Month_The_Three_Jewels,_Buddha_Dharma_Sangha
The main thesis of the talk emphasizes the importance of mindfulness and the practice of pausing before engaging in actions, suggesting that true mindfulness integrates attentiveness and intentionality, allowing each moment to have its own space. This process requires establishing a posture and mindfulness to transform daily actions into wisdom teachings, as exemplified in the Diamond Sutra, where mindfulness is established post-activity, influencing the practitioner's state of consciousness.
Referenced Texts and Teachings:
- Diamond Sutra: Used to illustrate how mindfulness should be established through a sequence of actions, transitioning from performing daily activities to sitting mindfully, suggesting that the sutra's structure is intended to be read with pauses for reflection and completion.
- Mindfulness Practice: Emphasized as a multi-faceted approach involving both mental and physical engagement; the practice involves giving each experience its time and space, as analogous to the structure of the Diamond Sutra.
- Rinzai or Linji: Referenced to highlight practitioners' tendency to misinterpret teachings and the importance of experiential verification in Zen practice.
- Uri Geller Studies: Briefly mentioned in a personal anecdote to discuss the potential of the mind in influencing physical reality, linking this idea indirectly with mindfulness as a transformative tool.
Conceptual Theories and Notions:
- Mind and Body Relationship: Discussion on how consciousness and mindfulness extend beyond the physical body but remain intimately linked to it.
- Image Thinking: Exploration of using images as a form of thinking, in alignment with Zen practices and the concept of image-making in communication.
- Mindfulness as a Transformative Tool: Presented as a means of altering habitual consciousness, emphasizing its role in acting upon relationships with objects and people.
- Bodily Awareness: Practices for establishing body mindfulness are illustrated, aiming to shift habitual patterns to enhance mindfulness.
This summation encapsulates the discussion's central themes on mindfulness, providing a detailed outline for academic listeners interested in the application of mindfulness in Zen practice and its broader philosophical implications.
AI Suggested Title: Pause to Transform: Mindful Living
I don't think it's possible just to put the words together from your own experience of those words. I would suggest, for example, that you try to more intentionally feel situations rather than think them. We do it already, but let's make it more intentional. So there's a pause before each situation. which you allow your feeling to proceed.
[01:01]
And you allow your body to proceed. And then you let your mind in. You're thinking it. I mean, let's just imagine you go in that little room over there. You let your feeling go in first. And your body's close behind. And then you let yourself think something.
[02:02]
This requires a pause with each new situation. And this sense of a pause and leading with feeling and the body is part of the practice of mindfulness. And it's surprising to me how people practice a long time and don't get it. But it's really very simple, but you've got to catch it. Not run ahead with your mind.
[03:04]
Yeah, I think of, I mean, this is... Since this is a fresh example for me, I can use it, but it doesn't apply to most of you, since not all of you do sashins. We do what's between periods, and even not a sashin, you might do it walking kin hin. And at some point the bell rings to end Kinhin. Walking meditation. And you, so then we walk more quickly back to our seats.
[04:06]
So people hear the bell, and then they start walking quickly. Actually, usually they don't. They wait till the guy in front of them walks. It takes forever. But you're all supposed to start immediately. independent of what the person in front of you is doing. But you don't start until you pause. So there's a bell, and you're walking like this, right? And you wouldn't just then start. In Zen, this yogic style of being in the world, there's always a pause.
[05:26]
There's always a sense of returning to the source. So when the bell rings, you put your two feet together. Then you do a small little shashu bow. And if everyone does that little pause, then everyone can start at once. But once you get the feel of that, It applies to everything. But it surprises me how people don't get the feel of this in their bodies. Like you never hit the bell twice. You always hit it once and once.
[06:33]
That's a very different feeling. If you don't do this, you hit it once and once. Because you try to give each thing its own... I mean, I'm gonna wax fairly incoherent here, I realize. But I mean, if I can give you a feeling for this, it would be great. Yeah. So you give each thing its space. So if you're practicing, let's say you now are intentionally practicing mindfulness.
[07:48]
Yeah, okay, so that means you pay more attention. And that's certainly part of it. I have, you know, again, It's not, you know, I'm not just because I'm a doting father speaking about Sophia. I admit that that's a small percentage of it. This is one of the first times I've been separated from her, too. But really, mostly, it's just because it's just my current study, and I always speak about my current study. And also I'm seeing with much more informed eyes than my first two daughters.
[08:53]
I was certainly mindful of my first two daughters. observed them carefully. But I didn't have such a developed sense of how consciousness functions and so forth. So anyway, just to go back to a simple example. If I'm mindful of my daughter because the door is open, say, and I don't want her to go down the stairs, I have to either close the gate or I have to watch her real carefully.
[09:57]
That kind of watching is not really mindfulness practice. That's just being attentive. Good to be attentive, but we don't mean by mindfulness practice just being more and more attentive. mindfulness means noticing each thing in its own space giving each thing its own space Giving each thing its own time. Something like that. Again, that means you're bringing a certain kind of concept or structure into your mindfulness.
[11:17]
Yeah, so if I had breakfast with you this morning, first I had some tea. Quite good. But you have various things in the windowsill and stuff like that. So if I'm practicing mindfulness, I'm not just noticing those things. But there's a kind of attentiveness which allows a completion. So I look at, say, there's a little plant up on the left side of the window. I look at it. Until there's a feeling of completion.
[12:26]
Until I somehow almost enter the kyogai of the plant. I know I can't completely enter it, but I can get close to feeling I'm entering it. Now, is this completion coming from the plant? Well, now the feeling of completion at least comes from my intention to wait until there's a feeling of completion. A farmer next door to us drove his tractor into my wife and daughter the other day. They were inside a car, luckily. No one was hurt, but it really kind of, tractors are big heavy things and he was racing along pulling shit, you know, from the fields, you know.
[13:48]
Wham! And she was in the ditch at the side of the road and she was barely outside our parking lot. It was a funny experience because she just went downstairs. She just a moment ago had gone downstairs and said, I'm going to the post office. And then the phone rang. She said, I've had a car accident. I said, in the parking lot? Almost, she says. Anyway, that's all just to say they gave me a rental car while this is being fixed. This car's got a lot of electronic gadgets. And it's funny, when you turn the key off, you can't get the key out. The car has to do quite a few things before it lets you have the key.
[15:07]
Okay. The car has its own little pause. Like Xerox machines sometimes, copying machines or fax machines. They won't let you have the piece of paper right away. So those things are a little bit like Dharma practice. I don't know what it is. You wait until the facts. The plant, in your own consciousness, there's some process in which your own consciousness recognizes the plant. It's not thinking. It's some kind of sensorial observing.
[16:08]
A certain amount of information or Time has to pass before there's a feeling of, oh yes, okay, that's that kind of plant in that kind of pot. You're not naming it, it's just a feeling. You can stay longer. even like a painter and really begin to see it. I think of this woman, this Swiss artist who discovered all the mutated insects around nuclear power plants. The scientists said, oh, everything's fine about these things.
[17:27]
They just saw the insects the way they were supposed to see them. But she was drawing them. And she noticed when she drew insects, that's her specialty, near nuclear power plants, they began to have the little thing that comes out of their head slightly in a different position. And she began to notice the more she drew them, things were a little off all the time. But if you just looked, you didn't see it. Closer she got to the nuclear power plants, the worse the shapes, the more distorted the insects were.
[18:31]
So there's a kind that you can carry it to where you're really looking. Carry your attention to the point where you're really looking. So what I'm saying is there's stages of completion. But there's also initial stages. Where you feel something a kind of completeness in your looking. That kind of looking in the midst of a pause and a waiting is mindfulness practice.
[19:52]
One way of talking about this big field of mindfulness practice. And when you do do that, even a few times, It changes your own consciousness. Not only is there a process your consciousness goes through, but letting your sensorial consciousness Or awareness. Have its own kind of, have its own process. Giving it space for that. Giving yourself Your non-self space for that.
[21:20]
Not exactly your self which is noticing things. But you do have an experience of it. Something has an experience of it. And that in turn allowing that changes your own consciousness. Okay, so let's go to the beginning of the Diamond Sutra. It says the Buddha goes out begging. And we'll take a break in a moment. The Buddha goes out begging and returns from town and he cleans his begging bowl after he eats. And then he washes his feet.
[22:36]
And then he sits down. And then he establishes his posture. And then he establishes his mindfulness. And then he speaks. And scholars sometimes say, oh, this is a formula put at the beginning of every sutra or many sutras. But I would say it's not to be brushed aside just because it's a formula. It's a kind of alchemical formula.
[23:41]
It tells you something about where they think the sutra comes from. The source of the sutra is this shift from being in town and eating and having... cleaning your bowls and washing your feet. Just sitting down and establishing your posture and your mindfulness. You can think in that sense that the posture is almost like a lens. Which the experiences of daily life go through this lens of an established posture and mindfulness and come out as a wisdom teaching.
[24:46]
And again, each thing is given its place. Here's one of the most famous profound sutras in Buddhism. And what do they talk about? He washes his feet. Good. I'm happy for the Buddha. I'm glad he had lunch too. But the point here again is it's the proportion or the pause. He just ate lunch. He gave his attention to that. Then he just washed his feet. And then he just established his posture. So it's a rather interesting shift.
[25:57]
We all eat And sometimes wash our feet. But we don't then establish our posture. And we don't establish our mindfulness. But when you look at each thing and give it its own space without comparison to anything else in the world, and you change your mind, the kind of mind you have changes.
[27:00]
So the sutra is saying, okay, he has the mind of begging. But then by doing each thing in its own fullness, and then establishing his posture and then his mindfulness, he changes the kind of mind he has, changes the mind he had when he was begging. verändert er den Mind, den er hatte, als er gebettelt hatte. So this is also, if you read it with any sensitivity, also wenn du das mit Empfindsamkeit liest, it means, if this is the way the sutra was created, also wenn das die Art war, wie das sutra kreiert wurde, this is the way the sutra should be read.
[28:09]
And if you don't read it this way, you can't really understand it. So it means when you read a sutra, you should yourself go through a similar process, a little ritual. And then when you're composed a certain way, Then you read the first sentence. And you let that happen to you until you feel some completion. Then you read the second sentence. And then you read the next sentence. And they're written to be read that way.
[29:11]
I mean, the sutras are all written. It's a kind of literature to be read in a very specific way. They assume the reader does something like this. Much of our literature assumes a different kind of reading. But poetry is different from prose in that it assumes some kind of reading more like this. Yeah, that's enough to start out this morning. So let's have a break. For till 10 to 12, half an hour. Is that too long? Half an hour, okay.
[30:13]
We'll come back in half an hour. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating. So let's sit for a few moments at least. So let's sit for a few moments at least. She knows English so well, she thinks I'm speaking German. Oh.
[31:28]
So let's go back to how the Buddha is presented at the beginning of the Diamond Sutra. Again, he eats and cleans his balls and washes his feet. That's all translated. Yeah, fine. Washes his feet. But holding his body upright, actually we don't know how to translate that. It's usually translated as something like that, holding the body upright. But it's not that kind of activity. It's something more like lifting the body into uprightness. And I can suggest to you one way of doing that.
[36:01]
Yes, from one side of your body, from your sit bone. The bone you sit on. Sitzknochen. Sitzknochen. Okay, from there, lift, imagine a line, a string or a space, stretching from there to your opposite shoulder. Stellt euch eine Linie vor, einen Faden, zu der gegenüberliegenden Schulter. And lift across your body that way. Making space in your body as you go.
[37:02]
And then from the opposite sit bone, lift to the other shoulder. And making space in the body. And then go back to the first sit bone and lift up perhaps to the ear or the side of your head. Through your neck. So you're changing the way you habitually experience your body, doing such a simple thing. You're in a kind of fresh territory. Because we want to break through or shift our body habits. Wir wollen unsere Körpergewohnheiten durchbrechen.
[38:17]
Since our consciousness has claimed all the parts of our body, many of them. Weil unser Bewusstsein sich viele Teile des Körpers angeeignet hat. So now lift from the opposites and run up to the other ear and side of your head. And then lift from both sit bones simultaneously or successively. Up to the crown of the head. Begin making space in the body. And then let all this kind of relax at the same time.
[39:18]
As if this invisible inner structure you just made, as if this invisible inner structure that you just made, manufactured, created, is what's supporting your body. And you can let go of your shoulders and stomach and back and everything. So the Buddha, when he held his body upright, he was actually doing something like what we just did. Then he established his mindfulness. That's what we should talk about. So I'd first though like to see if any of you have something you'd like to bring up or mention or ask about.
[40:38]
Please, you know, I hope you have something. Maybe not now, but you don't expect me to do all the talking. Yeah, I'm going to flap my lips together for hours. You can do it for a few minutes now, Annette. I need that kind of help. Yeah, good. My state of mind depends on the posture of the body. Is this always so, or can it be also mind without the body? Deutsch, bitte. Well, the first statement you made I would say differently. Your state of mind, a state of mind, a mode of mind, is always in some relationship to the posture of the body.
[42:20]
So it doesn't depend on the posture of the body. But does the existence of mind depend on the existence of a body? That's a different question. What do you think? Why do you ask? There's lots of things we don't know. Why do you ask this particular thing that we don't know? Because you said yesterday you feel the audience in your mind. So the mind is not only in your body.
[43:30]
That's true. But even if the mind is larger than the body, it doesn't mean it's completely independent of the body. You want to say something? Well, I don't, you know, that's a... For the most part, 99% of our life at least. And almost all of Buddhist practice. At least Zen Buddhist practice. We can assume there's no mind without a body. But what Buddhism would do is rather than extend the concept of mind, extend the concept of body,
[44:51]
So that if I experience you in my mind, this is my body. Then you are part of my body. And that's basically the shift that Buddhism makes in trying to talk about these things. But one of Linji's main complaints, Rinzai or Linji, main complaints, is that practitioners tend to take the outer elements of language and make up their own ideas. And that's not a good direction to go in in practice. If conceptually, you know, you play with the doorknob, And it suggests certain things.
[46:36]
You go back and see if it actually opens the door. If it doesn't, then probably you let it go. In other words, Buddhism, at least practice it as I know it, lets go of any idea that you can't experience. Now, there are certainly many things I experience now that I didn't experience when I first started to practice. I just notice more gradations of experience. And satisfaction. Such words. The experiences are not contained in the words.
[47:53]
So the degree to which experiences are far more subtle than the 800,000 words in the English dictionary, It's apparent to me now. And there's new possibilities always. It's not just new gradations, it's new kinds of noticing or experience. But just because there are many things I know now that I didn't know when I first started to practice, doesn't mean that I assume I'm even concerned with the things I don't experience yet that I might in the future.
[49:01]
But it does make me aware of how limited my experience is. So the very fact of how... more developed my experience is than it was at the beginning, makes me aware of how limited my experience is, that I'm always thoroughly aware that I'm seeing only part. And that's actually the practice of... When we think of it that way, that's the practice of a Buddha.
[50:11]
That's not right exactly. That's... I'd have to call it something like Buddha awareness evolving practice. Because if I say a practice of a Buddha, I'm not a Buddha. But Buddha as a practice, not as an entity. That evolving awareness evolves through knowing how limited one's experience is. And the idea of a Buddha is that it's always something more than your experience.
[51:28]
So, we also say just now, what is, is Buddha. Yeah, but we can also say, just now what is, is not yet Buddha. Both of those are not facts. If you treat them as facts, then you're in some kind of world of entities. They're both attitudes. And they're attitudes which have different kinds of fruits. So if I say this is a glass, that's not true. If I say this is not a glass, it's not true.
[52:34]
Both are just ways of looking at this. Because we're not talking about this mouth and this person saying this is or is not a glass. If I want to think this is not a glass, that might make me Doesn't mean that the water falls into my hand. So it's a statement. Which might be fruitful to think of it as not a glass. It's like I looked at Norbert and said, not only a Norbert. If I look at Norbert with that feeling, that's different than saying, oh, only Norbert. So we're talking about what happens when you shift an attitude, not talking about the object.
[53:40]
This little riff is all to suggest the texture of mindfulness practice. Something else? Anyone else? Yeah. How long do I establish it? The whole sitting period or only still a feeling of stability is? Yeah, it's a good question, but just for a moment or a few moments, that's all.
[55:11]
As long as you want. When you go out to get in your car. You can get in the car and get out, get in the car and get out, get in the car and get out, but sometimes it's nice to drive. So it's like that. You can get in the driver's seat and establish your mindfulness, but at some point you start the engine. But when it feels like it, you stop. I like to see here, she said, the usual way we live It's like winding your clock. It goes, but it doesn't tell you the time. Until you set the hands. And setting the hands is like Sajjan.
[56:13]
And you begin to know what time it is. Okay, someone else? Yeah. I have a question concerning to establish the posture. Sometimes I have pictures, inner images which arise and accompany this process, like for example a tree. I wanted to know whether there are some rules of which images are useful. Yeah, let's leave the second part out.
[58:02]
First part, yeah, it's great to think or to think in images. And some people do it rather naturally. And other people start to do it through practice. But it's definitely a way of thinking. But the thinking isn't tied to language. And I think, and I think, I image, I think, I'm stuck with English, I think that This works best when you trust the images. It appeared from somewhere. It's like in a dream. You can't sort of say, hey, Let's redo this dream.
[59:12]
I don't like that image that came up. Image that came up, you can say I used the wrong word in the sentence. It's not good grammar. I forgot the right word. But you can't say I used the wrong image in my dream. So thinking in images is closer to a mind you can trust. And recently I used an example, what I called an Apache talk. And recently I used an example that I call patchy. Apache Indians. Apache, yes.
[60:16]
What were you going to translate it? Well, I didn't know. Apache of Indians. There's a tribe of Indians and over there there's a whole patch of Indians. I like how you call, what we call Sioux Indians, you call Seahawks. Like the shoes, sea ox? To us it sounds like a friend of a whale. A sea ox. There's a sea horse and there's a sea ox. I've seen a sea horse. I've never seen a sea ox. I've never hoped to see one. Okay. So supposedly, the Apache Indians think of conversations, a conversation is a series of images. Also die Apachen, die denken über eine Konversation als eine Folge von Bildern.
[61:22]
And the purpose of the conversation is to institute, start an image-making process. Und die Absicht von einer Konversation ist, den Prozess von einer Bilderfolge zu initiieren. So, for example, say that we had to discuss something. We would discuss it partially in language, but partially in the images that came up. And then we would not try to come to a decision in the conversation. We would think this is an initiatory process of image developing. And then we'd come back together this afternoon or tomorrow and we'd see where those images went. I don't know if they had some structure of number of days until they tried to bring the process to some kind of close.
[62:44]
But this is very similar to Zen Buddhist way of thinking. Koans are exactly this kind of process. Koans are usually interlaced with images. which start an image-making process in you. And when you come back to the koan after a certain period of time, you know, days or weeks, You find that there are images in other places in the koan which relate to your fourth or fifth generation image. So it's a kind of layered writing in which some of the layers are missing and you have to supply them.
[63:53]
And life is sort of like that. It's not a stage play in three acts. A lot of the acts are missing and you only find out about them later. Okay. Yeah. So that's really, much of practice is entering images into the body-mind stream. And clearly one of the images that's implicit in my image there was a mountain. And I've occasionally seen the leaves coming out of your ear. It's possible.
[65:15]
Okay. Okay. We're supposed to stop at one for lunch, is that right? Some minutes before. Okay, and the restaurant's expecting us around 1? It's just downstairs. Oh yeah, and it's a Kurdish restaurant. Not like English food, Kurds and whey. So I'm just joking. Yeah, Marie-Louise likes Kurdish food very much, so she is quite excited that we're going to a Kurdish restaurant.
[66:16]
So mindfulness is not just attentiveness or attention. But it's a way of acting. It's a way of acting in relationship to objects. Yeah, you can say it's an act, a mental act or an act through attitudes or through concepts. But it's also a physical act because there's this sense of a pause, even if it's very, very short.
[67:45]
And the pause has a physical quality. So mindfulness is a way of acting in relationship to things. And to people. And it's also a kind of tool or shovel. And this is a kind of tool, a shovel. Yeah, a shovel. Maybe I'll learn some German. Shuffle. Like if you were planting a tree. Because mindfulness isn't just a way of observing a tree.
[68:51]
But in a sense, it's a kind of gardening. It's a kind of planting of the tree. And mindfulness is also a kind of wagon, something that carries something. So when you begin to be mindful of the body, it's not just like you're observing from outside. You're not just looking at the garden with your mind. The mind begins to dig up the garden. So when I bring attention to the body, my body, the body, It's not exactly the body.
[70:08]
But it's definitely not my body. My is a word in... a pronoun, an English pronoun which... relates to the idea of self and possession. I don't possess my body through a self. Anyway, when I bring, and excuse me, all these little word games I do, You know, it's not just that I like fooling around with language. It's that I want you to realize that I'm trying to talk outside of language.
[71:11]
I try to use it, but I'm trying to... Really what I'm saying is in between the words. And that is actually expected that someone who's been practicing does that. Because you want to constantly convey the feeling to the listener that what you're speaking about is only partially carried in the words. It's a little like you had something quite big that was invisible, but it was sitting in three or four different wagons. The wagons are like words. But what you've got sitting in this is much bigger than the four wagons.
[72:21]
It's always falling out of the wagons, too. So when I'm speaking to you, I'm trying to suggest something like that. So this, when you bring attention, when attention is brought to this body, that attention isn't just like, again, from the outside. For one thing, it's the attention of the body itself being brought to the body.
[73:23]
It begins to plow the body. Penetrate the body. Like a gardener might stir up the soil so he can plant things. So wie ein Gärtner den Boden durchwerken würde, um... And mindfulness is much like that. So as I said, I guess last night when I look at Sophia while she's asleep, and when I bring attention to her, a certain kind of attention, that certain kind of attention makes her turn her head and hand toward me. So that attention is penetrating her body.
[74:26]
And it's not just outside air. It's plowing her in some way, too. No, just to, you know, why not? It's like bending spoons. which I've done a number of times. And it happened by chance. It's something I'm not interested in. But I was coming out of Russia in 1979 or 80 or something like that. And I stopped in Cambridge, England to see some friends.
[75:42]
And there was a conference of psychics or something going on. And I was walking down a hall in one of the buildings. And the door opened, they said, oh, we want somebody who practices Zen in here. We're bending spoons. So I said, okay. So I went in. I had... I don't know. I knew about Uri Geller and a whole bunch of stuff because he was studied at the Stanford Research Institute by people I knew, actually. But still, this kind of thing is not something that interests me. I prefer chopsticks anyway. So anyway, I went in and so... Would you try, right?
[76:58]
So I know I've done quite a bit of dousing in my life. So, you know, you douse with a spoon first and I found one. Then I found that... The first thing I decided was, if I don't believe it's possible, I can't do it. I know if I have an attitude that it's not possible, it won't be possible. But since I didn't believe it was possible, I couldn't also believe it was possible. So I had to suspend and have no attitude at all. So I did that. Then I noticed, feeling the spoon, that at certain points it felt soft and warm. Then I noticed that That was a particular state of mind I knew quite well.
[78:13]
It's a state of mind I only know through meditation. I don't know it through ordinary activity or college or something like that. So when I found, when I stayed with that particular state of mind I already knew, which seemed to have some correspondence to the metal, the darn spoon bent. That's quite amusing, actually. And I went all the way around once, And a spoon is like this, right? There's a spoon part, and there's this flat part where the handle is, right? So it bent this way.
[79:17]
But it also bent this way. That's much harder. So it bent, went around once, and it bent this way, and went around a second time. Hmm. Yeah, so that was, you know, and then the last thing I noticed that was impressive. Well, there are a lot of psychics there who are getting mind-saving, face-saving bends. Face-saving, you know the expression? You're embarrassed and you do, you know, you're, trying to save your face. They were psychics, well-known as psychics, but the spoons weren't bending. Some people were really out there.
[80:29]
I don't know what kind of power they got. They'd hold a fork and the spines would go in all different directions. I'd say, whoa! So I would take my little spoon over near them and it would bend more. So I found that the presence of other people in a certain state of mind, made the spoon bend much, much easier than I could make it. So once I was in a big event with Ulrike Greenway, In San Francisco.
[81:45]
And she's a scientist and she also thought you can't bend spoons. But she wanted the experience. She wanted to see if it was possible. So we were at this big dinner party, a big event at a conference. Yeah, a friend of mine put together, and for many years I went once a year to this conference. The State of the World Forum it was called. So it was a kind of nice feeling with about a thousand people in the room. And something happened where everyone felt together. So I thought this is a state of mind here, not just of the world. I could feel it, so I said to Ulrike, now try it.
[83:05]
I gave her a spoon. Strangely, you have to kind of do this outside your own mental space. You have to put it behind your back or... Not to hide it, but hide it from yourself. And with a slight pressure, the spoon bent completely. She was amazed. Okay, so my own experiments, I know I come from a very scientific family. They don't believe in anything. God went out a long time ago. But everything else, too. Yeah, so I'm a real skeptical kind of guy.
[84:13]
So it's taken me a long time to say, hey, this is simply, in my experience, a fact. Somehow mind penetrates metal. And I know a guy who's named Zahn, actually like a tooth, I guess. I never knew that his name was like a tooth till now, but yeah, his name was like a tooth. And he was chairman of the Department of Applied Science and Technology at Princeton University. And he is Ben's boots. He didn't tell any of his colleagues until he retired. And then he wrote a book about it. But he said that...
[85:14]
The metal, if you study it, it's as if it was changed at a very high temperature. Much hotter than you could hold in your hand. Er sagte, dass wenn du den Löffel in diesem bestimmten Zustand hältst, er ganz heiß wird, so dass du ihn fast nicht halten kannst. It doesn't show the structural change of stress, it shows the structural change through temperature. Er zeigt nicht die Veränderung wie durch Brechen oder Stress, sondern wie durch Veränderung von Temperatur. So what kind of world do we live in? Mind can penetrate metal. And mind can penetrate each other. Not ordinary mind, but certain kinds of mind penetrate. And most of the kinds of minds that penetrate are outside of our consciousness. They're not only outside in the sense that we're not conscious of them, usually, but they're different minds than consciousness, the structures of consciousness itself.
[86:46]
But if we can keep certain minds outside the structure of consciousness, we can gently use a certain kind of consciousness to observe them. And an understanding of all that, some kind of knowing of all that, is the background of the teaching of the practice of mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way of acting in relationship to things. And it's also a kind of tool or shovel, it does things, a plough. And it also carries, it conveys things. And it creates a creative, transformative situation.
[88:17]
But it's like a little transformative bubble inside, in the middle of all your habits. And practice is to make that little transformative bubble and then keep it alive, sustain it, and let it mature and begin to affect us. Okay. So that's a preamble to discussing the first foundation of mindfulness. So since the Kurds are waiting for us,
[89:18]
Let's sit for a moment and then... You know, I was told that Norbert Jungler made this, you too, I don't know who, made this reservation at the restaurant.
[91:58]
But it's not a required part of the seminar. If you want to eat somewhere else or something, that's up to you. I spoke about it as if we were all going to eat there, but I don't know if there's room.
[92:19]
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