I'm always interested in how we know things. And that how we know things accumulates. One thing the Greeks brought to us was accumulated speculation. In other words, the world wasn't more like it was in, I believe, Egyptian times of dogma. Everything was a fact. Anyway, the Greeks emphasized more views on things which developed over centuries and keeping track of what was said in previous times. So there are insights in Greek times, Heraclitus, Parmenides and others,

[01:20]

Which are very similar to Buddhism. And it actually influenced me before I knew about Buddhism. But when I discovered the same ideas in a Buddhist culture and a yogically supportive culture, It's very different. Quite different. I sometimes think my main job is to give translators a hard time. I was translated in Austria recently by a South African, Durban-born Westerner who is now a Catholic priest in Austria.

[02:37]

He came a couple hundred kilometers across Austria to translate me, and he couldn't translate a single word. He knew all the words I used, but I put them in such strange patterns, he didn't know what was going on. Okay. Yeah, so anyway, so for example, it interests me that somebody named William Herschel, a German scientist in the 1700s. Anyway, he went to live in England and he was a composer and so forth.

[03:58]

And his interest in music led him into mathematics, which led him into astronomy. And in his own house, he, using horse dung, made a six-inch, I think it was, mirror for a telescope. Horse dung is horse manure. I get it. I just can't picture how he made it out of horse dung. He used it as the mold to pour the glass. And he changed the world. Is through this act or through his telescope? Through his telescope. He discovered Uranus, the planet, and all kinds of things that nobody knew about how the planetary system worked.

[05:15]

So we don't have electron microscopes and telescopes in Buddhism. We have no electron microscopes and telescopes in Buddhism. And I think that a lot of what Peter does depends on electron microscopes. No. On microscopes, but next generation, after electron microscopes. After electron microscopes. How do you do? And the city of Karlsruhe didn't understand about his microscope, so they decided to build a subway entrance under his laboratory. would have been a serious problem with his microscopes.

[06:20]

And he stomped his foot and said, move it, and they did. I mean, I conflated the story, obviously. But I asked him, how did you have the power to get them to change their mind? And he told me he was brought up in a Catholic culture. So I don't know. Anyways, now we're talking about Buddhism. So anyway, like Atmar mentioned yesterday about using the four elements as a way to notice yourself.

[07:31]

So we have the problem, the basic problem, how does the eye see the eye? How does the eye... Yeah, this eye see this eye. And I think a French psychologist in... late 1800s, I think, did a simple thing. He put a mirror up and watched his eyes looking at things. And he noticed that his eye, which he thought just was looking at things, But it was actually scanning all over the place. It's called saccadic scanning.

[08:32]

Yeah. And I mean, it's amazing no one had done it before or nobody drew any conclusions from it before. Well, I bet it's one of the easiest ways to explain that time, it's already past, it's becoming future. It's already past, it's becoming future. And it has no duration. No duration to talk about. But we experience duration. And one of the reasons we experience duration is the brain has to put this whole situation together from a complex process of visual and other forms of scanning.

[09:48]

So our putting it together, which is a process, we call the present. But it's not really the present. It's the presence of what we call the present. Yeah. So it's interesting that we think a certain way and then somebody does some simple thing with a mirror and it changes the way we understand the world. So the problem with how the eye sees the eye, you need a tool or you need categories of noticing. And Otmar brought up the four elements yesterday.

[11:04]

Which in Greek times were a way of explaining the world. Yeah, that was outside there. And for Buddhists the four elements were a way to bring the world into your experience. So it's a way of noticing yourself and exploring the body. And you understand that attention is not the same as consciousness. It's not just a concentrated beam of consciousness. I can be here and be conscious of this room. And I can move attention around. And in fact, I can go to sleep and bring that attention into my sleeping.

[12:27]

Now, if the word consciousness means anything, it's not the same as being asleep. And so, if you can bring a beam of attention into your sleep, and you can learn how to do that as you go to sleep, that's called lucid dreaming. Das nennt sich dann luzides Träumen. And you can explore your dreaming and stay asleep. Und du kannst dann deine Träume untersuchen, während du weiterschleust. Okay, all right.

[13:27]

Now, yesterday when Peter described dreams, hearing his keys fall, but not naming the percept as keys falling. From the way... From the way, I mean, excuse me for describing your experience. I hope my description is fairly close to what you say. So, from the point of view of Abhidharmic ways of looking at the mind, Abhidharma is an early form of Buddhism, which was the basis of the transformation to Mahayana Buddhism.

[14:47]

Okay. Is that what he experienced was the difference between a percept-only mind... and a discursive mind. Yeah, okay. Now, First of all, he had to be alert enough or sick enough to notice it. But he noticed that there was a state of mind or felt a state of mind that existed where he heard things but didn't name things. Now, if you notice that, that's an insight.

[15:56]

If it changes the way you think from then on, excuse me, we'd call it an enlightenment experience. So an insight or a worldview shift is an enlightenment experience. And I'm mentioning this not to tell everyone that this wonderful botanist is enlightened. I mean, he doesn't mind. He didn't know.

[16:56]

He didn't know. But because enlightening experiences happen to us, or insights happen to us all the time, which could be enlightenment experiences. And I mean, when I look at it, this sounds a little weird, but anyway, let me say it this way. When I meet a new student or somebody who wants to practice, I notice how many bubbles are floating in their very personal space. And the bubbles are little insights trapped in a cultural bubble.

[17:59]

And some people have a lot of them. And you get them to do zazen and they start popping. Because stillness pops cultural bubbles. Somehow they're not supported anymore and they should pop all. That was funny. So when one of those insights changes the way you see the world, and penetrates into other aspects of your thinking and feeling and so forth, then we, in Buddhism, call it an enlightenment experience.

[19:07]

So what we have here is two, what happened to Peter were two modalities of mind. One is a percept-only modality and a naming or associative or discursive modality. And understanding that kind of distinction is at the center of the teaching of the five skandhas.

[20:22]

But I'm not going to talk about the skandhas today. We have nowhere near enough time. But I thought I might speak about the four marks in the five dharmas. That's nine instead of five. And I know yesterday what I said was much too condensed, I'm sorry. And it probably only made sense if you already know what I'm talking about. And whether you're willing to do what I was talking about for the next... or perhaps there are seeds which might work in you. Okay, so the four marks. Now, again, these are ways, categories,

[21:24]

which are the targets of attention, which help you notice the way the mind works. Now, I have no idea how everyone can see this, but you can just memorize it. Or we can open a door. There was a guy who used to walk up and down our street, Page Street in San Francisco, talking to himself in Italian all the time, holding his hat. And this was in the early days of electronic or electric remotes that opened a garage door.

[22:56]

I've seen in various cities, actually, several times, a number of crazy people who talk to their hand and walk along like this, talking to their hand. I would run the phone to this guy. And I would greet him when he went back up and down the street. And one day he saw me open the garage door with the remote. He said, How did you do that? How did you do that? And I said, well, you have this little gadget here. Would you want to try it? He pushed it and the door opened. He said, you mean you can open any door? So it is interesting how we know things.

[24:07]

Okay. For Marx. Oh, for Marx. Marx. Okay, a dharma. A dharma? A dharma is a locus of appearance. In very early Buddhism they tried to think of dharmas as something like atoms. The word atom means can't be broken. But very soon they realized there's no indivisible unit. And so it became an experiential unit. Because if the world is already always changing, etc., and is a non-graspable process, which is one way to understand emptiness,

[25:39]

Then what is the experience of an appearance? So Buddhism could be called, perhaps more accurately, Dharamism instead of Buddhism. Because it's about discovering the world through appearance. Now, I mentioned there's two modalities of mind, for example, percept only and naming mind. So I said, for example, there are these two mental modalities, pure perception and Discussiva Geist, but there's also it's a similar.

[26:53]

What was I mean? Actually, I'm sorry the Nanda guys, okay Which is in the 60s. I noticed that my body was making decisions before my consciousness Recognized the decision In the 1960s I noticed that my body made decisions before my mind made decisions. And I began to cultivate two different modalities of the mind. And one was the body has already accumulated all the information it needs to make a decision. And a German man named Helmholtz and a German man named Wundt, his disciple W-E-N-D-T, treat looked into this delay of the nerve impulse to the brain.

[28:13]

But the person who made a difference to me particularly was a man named Benjamin Leavitt. Who in the 70s in San Francisco published a paper about an up to half second delay from the body already knowing it's going to move your arm and your consciousness saying, oh, I think I'll move my arm. So the consciousness thinks it's made the decision, but it's only edited the decision. So once you notice this and you have the sufficient awareness, mindfulness to notice these things you can begin cultivating the distinction and Buddhism

[29:37]

Adept Buddhism is all about cultivating these distinctions. Which aren't accessible just to kind of bright people. It's accessible to anybody who really wants to meditate. Okay, so the four marks. If a dharma is a locus of appearance, it has to appear. One mark of a dharma is birth. The second is manifestation. The second is manifestation. And the third is dissolution.

[30:58]

When I do this, I feel like a real teacher. You know, I've never had pedagogical training, but you're supposed to put things on the board and stuff like that. So... Okay. Disappearance is disfit. Now that's dissolution, disappearance. Now that is knowledge. Das ist wissen. It's a way of bringing attention to the world in your experienceable world. Can you say that again? It's a way of bringing attention to your experienceable world. Okay. Now, why did they choose the word birth instead of appearance?

[32:02]

Because the word birth emphasizes that it's a rebirth, it's a new moment. It's not just an old moment that you're noticing, it's a new moment when you notice. So Chinese Buddhism, which likes the idea of an inner nature and Buddha nature and so forth, has a basic teaching about original mind, which some Zen teachers buy into as there's an original mind, you're going back to pure original mind. But really it should be, and I don't know what distinction would be in Sanskrit or something, but it's really an originary mind, not an original mind.

[33:11]

An ursprung hervorbringende Geist. Finally, okay. Because at each moment you're creating the world. Okay. So, birth is usually used. And I'm always interested, and unfortunately I don't know German, but I'm always interested in, do the words I'm using, does their etymology support the use I'm putting them to as Buddhist terms? And in this case, mani means hand, manual. And fest means struck or done or sealed. So it means something like handwork or done. Okay. Now, we actually, as a description of the world, only need these.

[34:31]

Yeah, I know, I understand. Because, in fact, in this atomic molecular world, et cetera, things appear. and manifest have some kind of duration. And then they dissolve. So you don't need disappearance. It's a wise disappearance there. Because you do it. So this is a human practice. You're not just letting the world appear, manifest and dissolve. you're hastening the process.

[35:54]

So the practice of the parents means the practice of also wiping the slate clean and letting something start anew. Now, how do you practice with this knowledge? It takes a while to integrate an insight with the within the weave of your cultural and personal experience. It takes a certain time to weave in this cultural tissue and its own experience, which is largely already woven by your culture and your wishes and so on. One of the things Zazen does

[36:54]

is by slipping out of conscious and associative mind, which Freud discovered associative mind by people lying on a couch and telling him etc. about themselves. And Freud also recognized this associative mind by putting people on a sofa and telling them about himself. And he discovered that associative mind knew things that conscious mind didn't know. So he said, oh, there must be an unconscious which knows these things consciousness doesn't know. That simple insight changed the world. Everybody thinks what history has done, etc. Hierophies are written.

[38:14]

But unconsciousness, much too limited term in the Buddhist framework, we use something like non-conscious, which includes, etc. I don't want to go into that. So yesterday I mentioned mental postures. So you take birth as a mental posture. And into your already woven fabric And ideally, by practicing zazen, you're always unweaving the fabric. The threads become magnified. They become magnified. You can see right between the threads. And you can begin hooking some threads out or weaving other threads in.

[39:22]

So you weave in the fact that everything at each moment is being reborn. And you do that really for... I mean in my scale of practice you do it for two or three months at least. I look at Monica and I see her being born. And after a while everything you look at feel it renewing itself or being renewed. So this is a kind of menu. This is the first course. And then the second course, you say, oh, it's just a manifestation.

[40:27]

It's not graspable. It's just a manifestation. And then you start working with this one. It's all ready. You try to grasp it. You keep trying to grasp it. It dissolves. And you're in the next moment. And then after a while you start practicing releasing. You're always receiving and releasing. Okay, so now the five dharmas. It's a version of the same thing. So the five dharmas are appearance It's up tassel.

[42:05]

But it is shining. OK. Appearance. And there you're practicing. And here, this is more of a practice. The previous is like knowledge that you integrate into the weaving of the moment through holding a mental posture. And here we're not emphasizing birth so much, but just things appear. And what's the first thing we usually do? Which Peter did after a few moments. We name it. So, there's an appearance and we name it. Then, what's next? We discriminate. We discriminate.

[43:28]

Discrimination. So, something appears, you name it, and then you start thinking about it. And this five dharmas is a teaching from the Lankavatara Sutra. And then we have right knowledge. Then comes... Or wisdom. And then we have suchness. Suchness is the goal of all practice. I could probably make a fortune. The five easy steps to all knowledge or something like that. To have a best seller all you have to do is say the five this or the seven that. And then numbers of people buy the book. Okay, so the point of this list of five targets and why they're called dharmas is each one is a locus of appearance and can be noticed and noticed separately.

[45:01]

Die bemerkt werden können und aber auch getrennt voneinander oder separat bemerkt werden können. Okay, so let's say you're doing zazen. Sagen wir mal, ihr sitzt zazen. And you hear an airplane. Und du hörst ein Flugzeug. And in Crestone, it's so remote, that's about all we ever hear is airplane. And it's almost always, not always, the flights between Los Angeles and New York. They go right over us. If you draw a straight line on them. In the morning and afternoon these planes go by. People drinking orange juice and looking down at the mountains. And there we are. Now during Zazen you can name that. That's an airplane. And you can discriminate about it and say, oh, that's the morning Los Angeles flight.

[46:29]

Or you can interrupt the process. You can interrupt the process and stop it at naming. Yeah, you know it's an airplane somehow. And if it happened to crash into the meditation hall, you'd want to know. So some part of your mind remembers in some corner of your mind, if it crashes into the Zendo, I'm getting out. But mostly you just hear the sound. And it becomes the music of the spheres. And it's amazing. We're in these immense mountains. The mountains all along, they're about 4,500 meters.

[47:31]

And we're at about 2,500 meters. And one airplane makes the entire sphere of the sky vibrate. And it's funny, if you take the naming away you hear it as a kind of cosmic music. As soon as you name it deflate it, conflate it Conflate is to condense.

[48:40]

Deflate is to take the air out. Okay, so you learn from that. There's a kind of bliss in just hearing it without meaning. There is simply a blissful feeling when you only hear it without giving it a name. And that is why through practicing you can cultivate a mind that does not give a name. So things just happen in front of you and you do not give it a name, it is simply great. But if you name it, then you start discriminating about it. That can't be the Los Angeles flight. That must be the flight to Alamosa. But now you're cued.

[49:44]

Oh, look at me starting to discriminate about it. And you cut it off there. And that decision to cut it off is called right knowledge. And when you cut it off, what appears is the feel of the world. In Buddhist terms and Peter's terms. is to just notice the world as a process. Suchness is the name for the world as a process where it's all equal.

[50:45]

That's a process, this is a process, this is a process, and there's an equality in that process. So suchness is a word for the experience of the non-graspable world of process. It's a non-graspable world of a process. Or it's an experiential world for wisdom. And of course you can break the natural process we all do. At appearance.

[51:48]

So Peter discovered by accident And it's interesting that maybe that they were keys which can open any door. And he didn't worry about whether they were opening doors. He just heard the sound. Okay, so that's enough. I think I overstayed my shared time.

[52:48]

But, of course. Number four of the four marks. You said that disappearance is something you do intentionally, consciously. The problem that I have with this fourth point is that I have this really a founded knowledge that this stone is still there even when I don't look at it. So if I have this 150 pound stone in front of me, I close my eyes, it's completely no information.

[54:06]

I can't see it, hear it, smell it. I still have lots of foundation or basis that it is still there. Yeah, of course. And I wouldn't do any bet about that. That's still there. Yeah, well, that's a famous story of the stone being kicked in England by... Somebody said, Barclay said, the world isn't real. And what's his name? Wrote a dictionary. He kicked the stone and said, blah, yeah, look at my hurt foot. There's this famous story, I think, from Barclay, some Englishman, who said, the world isn't real. And then, probably someone else said, then kick the stone and tell me if the world is still unreal.

[55:12]

The knowledge that the stone is also an activity. As any geologist or any observer can see. It's just in a different time frame. is a kind of separate practice. The four marks are a practice of your own sensory. It's not so much about the world disappearing. But you're letting the... Locus means to locate something.

[56:15]

To make it stand for a moment. So a Dharma is a process of locating, sensing and releasing. And what's important from a practice point of view is that you release it. As I said when I looked at Muriel yesterday, and I know when I turn and look at Peter I know she's still there she's not still there the way a stone is still there thank goodness that will be in 80 or 90 years but excuse me for saying that to such a young person but I know she's still there but

[57:20]

I'm letting her disappear. And by letting her disappear, I look back and she's different. And maybe if you look at the stone and then close your eyes and then look at it again, maybe a ladybug is on it. So you're letting your own perceptual, sensorial process release. Okay. So, yeah, I think we should take a break. You guys are very good at having questions at the last moment. But it's very good. You talk to a Japanese audience and nobody has questions because they don't.

[58:33]

But they do. So since I love the sound of the bell, let me ring it. But I'm not going to make you sit against your will. But generally we start with three hits and we end with one. And there will be an infinitely long space between the third and the fourth. And there will be an infinitely long space between the third and the fourth. You can let go of naming of all discrimination and just settle into the sensation of aliveness

[60:19]

Disappear into the sensation of aliveness. Getting used to this fundamental way of being. and get used to this fundamental way of being? I think it meant at least one infinity.

[61:21]

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