Well, I suppose to get us started, I should say something, but I hope you can give me, as usual, or as unusual, some feelings that you get from hearing about the Skandhas again. Yes, I remember. Ulrike has been very busy with her work in recent years, so I haven't seen her so often. Ulrike war sehr beschäftigt mit ihrer Arbeit in den letzten Jahren und daher habe ich sie nicht so oft gesehen. But many years ago she translated the five skandhas for me quite often.

[01:02]

Aber vor vielen Jahren hat sie die skandhas sehr oft für mich übersetzt. Ten times five is fifty times fifty. Zehn mal fünf ist fünfzig mal ungefähr. And I remember once we were driving along on the Autobahn, and she had a problem with form. What does form mean? Yeah, what's the dynamic of form, basically? So I remember I pulled over into a, I didn't even see it, pulled over into one of those rest places along the Autobahn. And she said that for her, maybe it felt like form meant dynamically, a signal. Right? I forget, something. I forget the street I live on sometimes.

[02:15]

You know, that's... And it is something like that. A starting point. Of course, form is emptiness, and in that sense, emptiness is a starting point for the five skandhas. But I think practically speaking for us, the sense, and you can also have form as the four elements, water, fire, etc., Since the Buddha himself, to the extent that we know, spoke about the five skandhas, this has been turned over and over for 2500 years.

[03:19]

And I don't think we should take it as received wisdom, but rather something we should turn over ourselves in our own experience. And those of you who have been therapists for a long time would have to know that the time of repetition and doing it over and over again begins to have its own wisdom and knowledge in it. So I'm getting us started in this turning in our experience these five categories. in all these two and a half millennium, they've remained pretty much the same.

[04:48]

You know, they get kind of petrified or concretized after a while. But I'm trying to look at them in ways that are practically useful in our own thinking, our own activity. And I was struck by Guni saying yesterday that for the first ten years of her therapeutic practice, I think you said ten, you weren't ready to look at Buddhist studies. Well, I'm glad I didn't meet you during those first ten years. Banished! Out of my sight, you Buddhist! So we spoke about associative mind, and started speaking about percept only.

[06:26]

And consciousness will lead to last. This morning when I was walking up, she greeted me very sweetly. She's had a lot of exposure to Buddhism in her first ten years. Purple socked one. Pink socked one. She understood exactly what I said immediately. She looked down at her socks. And I said that percept only is a kind of cleansing process.

[07:36]

And separating out the skandhas is considered traditionally to be a kind of purification or cleansing process. I suppose like you or Michael run a cleansing app on your computer at some point. My cold has decided it wipes my chest. I'm not entirely pleased with its decision but it's okay. Okay, so I feel I'm speaking about secrets. But secrets are right under our nose.

[08:51]

These are our experience, but they're not usually noticed as our experience. Now, we all notice the difference between being awake and being asleep. We all notice the difference between being awake and being asleep. It just happens. It does make a difference if we study the distinction between the feeling between the transition between waking and sleeping. And the distinction between consciousness and associative mind, associating mind as well, also just happens if you do zazen.

[09:57]

But it makes a bigger difference than just studying with sleep-waking difference. Bigger difference if you study this distinction, make an effort to articulate this distinction. It's the much of practice, one dynamic of practice is it articulates what's already there. Eine Dynamik der Praxis ist, dass sie artikuliert, was schon da ist.

[11:00]

But that articulation becomes like something in mathematics maybe, where you have an equation for something now that's just been there, and then the equation has its own effect in how it opens up other possibilities in mathematics. Here I'm speaking about the craft of practice and the effects of the practice as a craft. So it helps to have the conception of associative mind. It helps you notice more often, more carefully and more articulately the distinction.

[12:20]

Now the remainder of the skandhas you probably wouldn't notice just by doing zazen. At least for me, I needed the conception of the third skanda as perception or percept only, as I call it. Yeah. Yeah. To some extent, of course, it just does happen. If you get used to doing zazen, and you develop physical and mental stillness, and physical stillness is almost the condition, the real condition for developing mental stillness,

[13:47]

So as you develop this physical bodily mind stillness, which is one of the advantages of the sort of yogic chemistry of sitting. Advantages. Advantages, okay. The yogic chemistry of sitting. Yeah. Is that you hear Like an airplane or a bird, as I said yesterday. More isolated or more precisely.

[14:52]

And by hearing it precisely, you can also more clearly experiment, an essential, kind of essential experiment, to peel the name off what you're hearing or thinking or seeing. Robert Irwin, who's an American conceptual artist, I think he's still alive. I don't know him personally, but I think he's quite interested in Zen practice. But he's written a book called Seeing is Forgetting the Name of What You See. It's quite a marvelous book.

[16:04]

Seeing is forgetting the name of what you see. And that right there is related to like to hold to the moment before thought arises. So it's kind of interesting that percept-only mind leads to the moment before thought arises, before percept arises. You can't peel the name of the percept or your associations with the percept off the experience if you don't have the experience in a precise way.

[17:07]

So when you play around with percept-only mind, and if you do zazen every day, you know, 40 minutes is good, but 30 will suffice, sort of. You just, you know, you've got to do something when you're sitting there. Someone said to me in the last seminar, said, nothing is good for the dentist's office, you know, waiting for the doctor. And I think Elizabeth Bishop's most beautiful form, or effective form, but she's an American poet, is about sitting in the dentist's office and having a button just sitting there waiting, and everything altered.

[18:38]

The glue that holds consciousness together let go. Is that too much? Is that too much? Oh, shucks. Yeah, it's a poem worth googling, actually. So you said something about glue, that this experience was glue? Yeah, I remember. Let's see if I can undo it. I've known her a long time. This is true, isn't it? Yes. Yes. Yeah, I would say her experience was something like, in the midst of perceptions, the glue that holds them together as consciousness kind of dissolved.

[19:53]

So she suddenly had these perceptions very clearly. But she couldn't attribute him. Was somebody talking to her? Was it the dentist? What's going on? Yeah. And that tells us something, too, that the glue that holds consciousness together, we can also think of and use a different word to give it another look. We can say the medium that holds consciousness together. We can give this a different name and call it a meaning. Like air is the medium right now of the insects flying around.

[21:16]

So there's a field or a medium in which consciousness happens. And this physicist I've been reading recently, Carlo Revelli, wrote a brilliant but quite popular book, speaks about I've not forgotten exactly what he said, but I'll come back to it. Oh, yeah, I know. He said space is gravity. You think space is nothing, but space is gravity. So the space, the space is the glue of mind. The field of mind itself is a dynamic. So the five skandhas allow you to begin to discover a kind of tissue-like space that functions within each of the skandhas.

[22:42]

And we can apply or misapply the word ayatana, which means the field that appears between the object perceived and the organ of perception. No, the question you can ask yourself, did some Buddhist or Buddha or somebody just think all this stuff up? No, you can't think this stuff up. You can only experience it. You can only think about it after you notice it.

[23:49]

But you have to notice it. Thinking doesn't make you notice unless you already know that it's there to be noticed. So practicing and noticing the percepts in their distinctness, that each of the five physical senses has its own field, the eye field, it's not the same as the ear field.

[24:50]

An experiencing field of each sense, the feel and field of each sense, is also to experience the sense itself, not its mental extensions. Sorry, second part. It's not the same as its mental extensions. So, and then you find that as you are in this and resting in relative stillness of this perceptual mind while you're sitting, and one way to enter this is to

[26:09]

While you're sitting, let some sound. Crestone, the Los Angeles, New York flights pass right over. And a way you can do that is, while you're sitting, you sit so that you let yourself be surrounded by the sound. In Crestone, for example, it's directly above the flight to Los Angeles. Yeah, and really, if you draw a line on the map, it's directly over us, from Los Angeles to New York. But it's so isolated there, there's not many other sounds except that, now and then. But in New York, Johanneshof, the tractors go right beside the sender.

[27:19]

So if we mentally extend our noticing to the tractors, we might say, hmm, tractors are out, it's probably going to be a nice day because they're going to be haying. But if you peel the name off the tractor and the haying, those metal extensions, it's a kind of wonderful science thing. So just residing in, inhabiting this percept-only skandha, opens up so many possibilities, like peeling the name off the person. Now, in consciousness you really can't do that because all of the precepts have come together to make a picture which the brain actually has made.

[28:37]

And you can't peel the name off the brain, it's too late. And then you can feel the distinct field of each sense. And then once you really get a feel for it, now I have to say very often, all, so you can, let's, we'll start, okay. Are you ready? Almost. I'm almost ready too. No, I'm not ready at all.

[29:39]

So you can get the feel of the field of each percept. And you can begin to feel them as some other percept comes into the field of knowing. You can feel its different oscillation. Each I mean that Tragborunche teaches that just to attribute a different color to each ayatana, but I would just say there's a different oscillation to each field of each person. And once you get to know that, You can feel it.

[31:18]

Then you can begin to feel it in consciousness too. The percepts have their own, it's like three-dimensional chess or something like that. Perception has a field in which, I mean, consciousness has a field. It's made up of these various things, and you can begin to feel them as constituents simultaneously and not just a brain pattern. Okay. And what I was going to say a moment ago when I forgot was I have to say very often that all mental phenomena have a physical component. I would not have to say that in Japan or China. The idea that you point out that mental phenomena have a physical component.

[32:20]

So the idea that you have to make it clear somewhere that mental phenomena have a physical dimension, but are there any other news? I mean, it's just taken for granted. The physicality of mind is taken for granted. And when you take it for granted, then when you learn something, you learn it assuming that the learning is part of a physical process. Okay, so now let's look at the second skanda. Which I define as non-graspable feeling. So the experience of the ayatanas of each percept, percept-only mind, the experience that...

[33:45]

each percept also arises from a field and establishes a field. Then allows you to segue, Segways? It's a currently fashionable word, meaning it follows into, it leads into. Okay. Segways into, I don't like the word too much, but ubiquitous now, so I'll use it. Segways in... I forgot to stop. Well, I did too. It segues into the field of the Ayatana, segues into Nagas field. Yeah, and in that sense, too, then the non-greifable feeling opens you up to everything in its all-at-onceness, which is also a way to define form, the interrelational all-at-onceness.

[35:25]

Yeah. The interrelational all-at-onceness becomes, when we notice it as humans, becomes a feeling. And you stay with that feeling before naming arises, or percepts arise, and then percepts begin to arise in that field. Now one of the points in making these five distinctions is that it again allows you to notice them And... And...

[36:31]

And it allows you to notice them in a way that lets you slow them down. Because consciousness happens pretty much instantly, like sending an email. It arrives as you push the key. So how do you undo that instant arrival of consciousness' scene? Zazen is basically a way to, in a sense, let yourself down in a bathysphere. In a what? That's one of those things. You go down in the ocean to build a bathysphere. I never did that. I haven't either. I do not work. I don't.

[37:59]

Excuse? Oh, yeah. I should have told you that. Okay, it's like you're going down in the sea of consciousness and you begin to see different depths. And you have to develop the zazen that lets you do that. It's really hard to do. It's basically impossible to do in consciousness. You have to slow down your own mental and physical processes. And resting in a kind of stillness without names. So begin to notice your own experience. before it gets brained in the consciousness.

[39:11]

Okay. Yeah. Oh, it's exactly when we're supposed to take a break. So, please tell me something afterwards about whether this feels accessible or makes any sense. Yes. What is the difference between What is the difference between conscious perceiving of these processes and consciousness? Did you have to ask such a difficult question?

[40:16]

It's quite a good question. All right. Can we look at it after the break? I could say something, but it might take another hour. I don't know what would happen to us. Thank you for being here. Thanks for translating. You're welcome. This area, doesn't it have the name the Siberia of Austria? That's what we're building up to today.

[41:21]

But it's also called that because it was the Russian zone. It's living up to its name, but not up to its Russians.

[41:34]

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