Marie-Louise was just speaking to your sister in Creston. She's the director at Creston. And I don't know what they're talking about. They were speaking in some foreign language. And... But I... Jisha came and was dragging me to lecture. Excuse me? The Jisha came and was dragging me to lecture. She said there was no escape. So I asked Ulrike, or Marie-Louise asked Ulrike, his sister, if she'd like to come to the lecture. So we have this little tiny handset, so I put it in my sleeve. Hi, Ulrike. I didn't do it, actually. I don't know if it would reach to here.

[01:04]

I don't know if it's right to fill the Atlantic airwaves with a lecture. But the question is, would it be immediate consciousness? Yeah. So I thought maybe I could review a little bit what we talked about yesterday or try to sort it out so it's maybe a little clearer and review in terms of my own practice of looking at this and review in terms of what we know about, what many of us know about Buddhism.

[02:31]

Okay, so, When I, in the first year or beginning, anyway, of my practice... ...it suddenly struck me one day the difference between the kind of classical Greek or Plato's, perhaps, worldview... and the Buddhist view. And the Buddhist view might say, I mean, Plato might say that this is an imperfect version of an ideal form. Even if that's understood rather simply, it's still an

[03:49]

You know, it's a very particular world. To think that there's a perfect version of this somewhere, and this is an imperfect replica. This is just an old stick. It was originally a backscratcher. And now it's used as a teaching staff. Because as a backscratcher it can reach anywhere. So it became a teaching staff. This was Suzuki Roshisen. He gave it to me at some point. The idea that there's a science in the mind or some place, there's some perfect, an ideal version of this.

[05:19]

Yeah, but that's not the world I live in. Yeah. So it struck me one day that if I think of that in those kind of terms, Yeah, from the point of view of Buddhism, this is just as it is. We can call it Perfect if we want. And it might be less perfect compared to another one. But not to an ideal version of this. For example, these kind of sticks are supposed to stand by themselves. This one doesn't.

[06:33]

This is clearly imperfect. Okay, but so it struck me that the Buddhist version is that this is just as it is. And it's the perception of it that's perfect or imperfect. When I recognized that, I felt that I realized it. that the territory of Buddhism was in between me and the object. The territory of Buddhism is perception or how we know things. that the existence of these things is shit.

[07:45]

I mean, that's not the problem. The problem is how we know them. Die Existenz dieser Dinge, das ist nicht das Problem. Das Problem ist, wie wir sie kennen. How we view them, how we value them, and so forth. Wie wir sie ansehen, wie wir sie betrachten, wie wir sie wertschätzen, und so weiter. At first I... Okay, I got... I really got it that it's about perception and knowing. So that became the territory of my practice. Yeah, and I thought mostly this was then about mindfulness and alertness and such things. And I thought then it was mainly about mindfulness and alertness and things like that.

[08:47]

And Suzuki Roshi often said to us that we should be more alert. Because the Japanese people can't pronounce L and they say R. I kept thinking he was saying we have to be more arhat. So I started a study of Theravadan Buddhism. To see if I could become more of an arhat before I became a bodhisattva. But after a while I realized he was saying alert. An alert is good because it emphasizes energy. And mindfulness seems to emphasize awareness. And I remember in Sushin, the effort when you're not sleeping much and so forth, how to be alert, how to find some energy.

[10:22]

Yeah, I remember thinking, I'd get up in the morning, I'd say, gee, maybe I've got one candy bar of energy for the whole day. I didn't eat candy bars, it just was somehow the unit that measured my energy. So in my mind I'd break up a little corner, eat it in the morning and then save the rest till later. Okay. So I, you know, I anyway practiced trying to be more mindful of what was around me. And I just tried to notice things.

[11:39]

And I began practicing the five skandhas. And I began to see that you could notice things perhaps without associative thinking. And... Just perceiving things. So I practiced various ways trying to just perceive. And then I sort of tried to, we talked about yesterday, take the names off things. At some point I came up with a phrase like noticing without thinking. So I would try to practice with the phrase.

[13:08]

I would notice and I would see thinking start and I would try to find the place to stop that happening. Yeah, and that wasn't just in Zazen, but all the time I would try something like that. Then I began working with what I've talked with all of you about, most of you about, the three minds of daily consciousness. Which we could say is a pedagogical version of what we talked about yesterday. There's immediate consciousness. Just being here without thinking.

[14:13]

But just noticing and feeling the world. As you might, as I suggested, like practice it taking a walk. As you might, as I've suggested, practice it taking a walk. without thinking about the trees and the pastures, letting them brush by you with their own presence. And then when you notice things in the immediate area, still rooted in the present. Now, then if you start thinking about it, you have to make a phone call. You're immediately in a conceptual world. then you can feel an energy shift.

[15:40]

And one of the big differences is once you're in a conceptual world, you're not nourished by the immediate present. And it's funny that wilderness or nature or something nourishes us in some way. I think just hearing the wind the last few days is something nourishing. I love Japanese houses for that reason. Because they're designed to have no sharp inside-outside distinction.

[16:51]

If this was a Japanese building, these windows would be sliding. And there'd be a deck outside that. And then there'd be another set of sliding doors. And then there'd be a deck outside that. And then there'd be a garden. And you can just open these in various ways and you get the wind coming in, leaves, and so forth. And it works surprisingly well for bugs. Because if you don't light the interior with electric lights, The bugs tend to, as it gets darker, they tend to fly back out.

[18:09]

You can keep the house quite open and really feel like you're camping out. So why does even a few leaves in the garden in a big city help us? I think partly because it's beyond our thinking. I mean, a whole city is relatively simple compared to a leaf. We can make a city and think it out. We can't really make a leaf.

[19:15]

So I think it takes us out of the house of consciousness. And also gives us a feeling of, I would say, wilderness. One nice thing you have in America that you don't have in Europe is you have wilderness. Here, even these beautiful forests are pretty cultivated. So there's at least in some places, like Crestone, you really have a feeling of being in the wilderness. Some of us here, including our two new Sunday monks, are going to be at Creston pretty soon, this coming practice period.

[20:20]

And Yudhita will be there, and Nicole, and... You'll be there. I'll be there. What the rest of you come? Gate 5 at the Zurich airport. I'll meet you in Denver. You can come for a couple of weeks if you can't come for the whole practice period. But it's three months or two weeks, nothing in between. But there you do enter a different pace.

[21:30]

The monastic life is a different pace. And the wilderness awakens some wilderness in us. The wilderness outside the house and garden of consciousness. So now the classic or usual example of borrowed consciousness, conceptual consciousness. Yeah, as I know Dieter or Judita pretty well, but I don't know your birth date. I should know.

[22:38]

You can tell me later. But you have to tell me for me to know it. I can't derive it from the immediate situation. So if I know it from being told, I know it in the framework of a conceptual learned consciousness. What a date means and so forth. Yeah, this is a very useful kind of consciousness. This consciousness is very useful. But we get tired from it. We're not nourished by it. We have to produce energy to keep it going. Then we can burn out. Or at least be exhausted at the end of the day.

[23:54]

Unless you find some way to stay in touch with this wilderness. Now, how can we do that? So, you know, starting out with just this sense of the territory of perception, of knowing. Exactly what is the territory of perception? Virtually everything we know starts with perception. And then, based on perception, we have the edifice, the edifice, the building, the edifice of consciousness.

[24:59]

But consciousness is very exclusive. And it pretty soon wants to control everything. And part of that control, as I've spoken with some of you about, gets identified with ego and with self. And this is my house of consciousness. And it better be better than your house of consciousness. And it's more full of borrowed consciousness than yours. I know that Dignaga lived supposedly from 480 to... And you don't.

[26:13]

Dieter does. Dignaga. So, this house of consciousness kind of... gets identified with ego. It becomes our house. And then consciousness wants to control perception by having all perceptions named. Now it's good to notice this process. How can you interrupt this process? So I start looking at Chandrakirti and Vasubandhu and Dignaga and those guys.

[27:23]

Nice guys, you know. Actually, they must have been extraordinary. Like English, the ancestors of English, the main ancestor of English is Shakespeare. Yeah, he brought really French and German together in what we call English. Yeah, the early English was much closer to German. And he had some unbelievable ability to keep distinctions in his mind. Yeah, I like to point this out because it's interesting. Some people say, really, Ben Johnson wrote this.

[28:24]

Shakespeare. But if I remember correctly, Ben Johnson used something like 8,000 words. Shakespeare used something like 40,000. It means he can keep that many distinctions clear. Most of us can't do that. Well, these Chandra Kirti and Dharmakirti and Vasubandhu and Dignaga, you don't have to say all their names, were all people who could do things like this. They are the ancestors of what we're talking about right now.

[29:37]

In Zen, such people are called the sweating horses of the past. It made it easier for us. So... At some point I sort of tried to understand better this relationship between the roots in perception and the edifice of consciousness. Yeah, and... Yeah, well, so let me say, using Sophia again.

[30:50]

And I do it partly because we were all infants once. And I think to use her as an example gives us access to something close to our own experience. So I notice that she notices things. And she notices us. First of all, activities. And not so much entities. And then she notices the aspects of things.

[31:54]

So I'm taking care of her in the morning so Marie-Louise can go to Zazen. And so we were looking through a book she has. Wir haben also ein Buch zusammen durchgeschaut, das ihr gehört. Yeah, I think you may have given it to us. A lot of stuff with German names under it. Tools and things. So I'm trying to learn German a lot. Screwdriver. There's a pair of skis, which you pronounce... She? She? It looks like ski to me, but, you know, you should know. And she looks at it and she says, hee-haw. And I realized that skis looked like the donkey's ears that were across the street.

[33:05]

We had a donkey across the street for a while. No. Yeah, I said, well, it's not exactly a hee-haw. It's a she, I mean a ski. And she looks up and she says, flugzeug. Actually, she says, what does she say? Zeug or something. What? What does she say? Fugzeug. Yeah, fugzeug. And I look, I don't see anything but a vapor trail. A what? Vapor trail. A condense-stripe. And I realize this is exactly like Dignaga and Vasubandhu's example of where there's smoke, there's fire. And I notice that it's exactly like Pashubanzus or Dignagas' example, where there is smoke, there is fire.

[34:15]

Or actually they refine it to where there's... Smoke, there's fire, but where there's fire, there's not necessarily smoke. Okay, so where there's a vapor trail, there's probably an airplane. She's right. But she's in immediate consciousness, really. She's not much in linguistic consciousness. Now, this is a kind of, I don't know, again, I'm making points that aren't so necessary, but it's a kind of concept to see the ski tips as ears. It's a kind of... A concept. So when Dignaga says, perception is perception without conception...

[35:16]

Now, that's when I started working with that. I'm not just working with mindfulness means being more aware. Now I'm trying to figure out why the heck does Dignaga want me to perceive without conception? Okay, but isn't The vapor trail, a kind of conception of, or the skis, a kind of conception of ears. So I have to refine my idea of conception. Okay, so now I'm back sort of where I wanted to get to. We have a... My practice of mindfulness, our practice of mindfulness, from just being more alert or aware,

[36:54]

can be refined into this double or let's call it parallel perception. A parallel perception of the object and of the mind that perceives. Okay, so The practice at this point is to develop the habit of parallel perception. Okay, so now what is the... Okay, and what are you perceiving? Okay. You're perceiving the dual nature of every object.

[38:02]

There's a parallel perception of the dual nature of every object. Okay, so what is the dual nature of every object? Now, again, I hope this is useful to you. I don't really know if it is, but at least we're entering the territory of perception. Let's notice the territory of perception. Because it's the basis of how we know. Okay. The dual nature... is the immediacy of the object of perception, and what can be known by inference.

[39:14]

And Vasubandhu, for example, makes it clear that if you just know about smoke, that's not the same as really knowing fire, seeing a fire and seeing the smoke produced. And what he's pointing out there is the difference between actual experience and conceptual consciousness. actual experience and conceptual consciousness. Now, very often somebody will speak to me in Doksha about some experience they had that they might have read about 50 times. but they have an actual experience of it.

[40:28]

And they say, I know it now. It's not the same knowing as reading about it. When you know it, you never forget it. And when you know it, it shifts your life. Can't just pass by in the house of consciousness. It changes the foundation of the house of consciousness. Suddenly your living room faces the sun instead of the... the... away from the sun.

[41:37]

There's that kind of difference. So this is inference rooted in actual perception. This is inference rooted in actual perception. Inference is like where there's smoke there's fire. Where there's a vapor trail, there's an airplane. This is so clear to Sophia that airplanes and vapor trails have the same name. And what we're struck by, what I'm struck by watching her... ...is the immense capacity infants have for inference.

[42:40]

Foreseeing patterns. She sees patterns that connect all the time, using Gregory Bateson's phrase. Okay. So when we see something, we see its immediacy and we see its patterns. And when we're outside the house of consciousness, we're closer to actually knowing, if not seeing, the immediacy. And umidisi means you see the uniqueness of each thing.

[43:52]

You see and experience uniqueness. I think when you're really feeling painful and the bell hasn't rung,

[44:16]

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