Okay, good morning. Okay, now you're all at least reasonably normal-looking people. So it makes me wonder why I'm trying to teach these things to you who look perfectly happy in your lives. And I mean, obviously, I think it's valuable and important, or I wouldn't be practicing this myself. Or trying to share it with you. But instead of giving you a specific teaching so much this weekend,

[01:10]

I'm trying to teach Buddhism as a world view. And the way I'm, there's really no precedent for trying to teach this kind of thing in Western culture. But in any case, Buddhism is very much, in its most basic practice, a description of the world. And A description of the world that is also how you exist.

[02:23]

And you base yourself, settle yourself into this description of the world. But you have to... But you have to locate this description of the world yourself. It can't come from me or from Buddhism. So, I mean, some of the description comes from Buddhism, but mostly it's a way to locate it yourself. Now I feel pretty funny telling you that our sense of self is imaginary. That's like telling somebody who just ran into a tree on a bicycle that the tree wasn't real.

[03:29]

Because we're constantly running into ourselves and hurting ourselves. Hmm. So... I think we have to go back to this, what I try to do is go back to this sense of the world as we can have a way of seeing this divided and a way of seeing this undivided. Now, I've been talking about this in various ways since the Sashin at Haus der Stille recently.

[04:37]

And I've been trying to feel out ways to talk about this with you. Now, as I mentioned last night, the eight Visñanas turned out to be the most effective way, I think, to talk about it. And to give you ways to practice it. But that's only one, you know, you can practice Buddhism without knowing about the eight Vijnanas. They are part of a larger view, which I'm trying to give you this weekend. In order to practice what leads to practice, and in order to practice, you need to look at your life carefully and be the kind of person who looks at your life.

[05:38]

And the kind of person that accepts the consequences of looking at your life. Okay. But then you have the problem of how do you look at your life? And so that's one of the reasons yogic meditation was developed. Because most of our world as we know it is, I could say, reified consciousness. Reified? Reified. To give something form and then to have that form keep reinforcing itself.

[07:01]

Can you say the whole sentence? Yeah. Well, let's just define that. Reification means to give something form and then that form keeps reinforcing its own identity. In other words, you keep calling something a tree, if you keep repeating it's a tree, pretty soon you believe it's a tree. So if we divide consciousness up into language and culture, That division keeps reinforcing itself. And that, at least the English word for that is you're reifying, reinforcing, or reifying consciousness.

[08:10]

Okay, is that idea clear? Okay. The practice of Buddhism is to un-reify, de-reify consciousness. So one of the ways to do that is to do meditation. Because you particularly... particularly the style of Zen meditation, which I said was uncorrected mind or unfabricated mind. To say unfabricated mind also means, unfabricated is a way of saying unreified or unreinforced consciousness. That's a little bit as if when you are sitting, you're letting whatever comes up,

[09:21]

And you're learning from whatever comes up. And you can learn a lot, and it's a kind of process, a psychological process. And it's a psychological process in quite a few ways. One is that the barriers or the line between conscious and unconscious begins to be not there. And then also the way we script our life And the conscious script we have and the unconscious script we have. You begin to participate more in those. Now you also have many memories that don't...

[10:44]

many impressions and memories that are stored in your larger body, that are stored in your larger body that have arrived, that have been accumulated as memories through your script. But you also have many memories which are not accumulated through your script. They've occurred outside any way that you can script them but you remember them, but you have no access to them. Now, the more you can practice a kind of wholeness, a wholeness on each moment,

[12:01]

the more you create the conditions which allow a larger access to everything you remember. Now, I said stored in your larger body. Because in this sense, memory includes, you know, if I look at you and I see your black shirt, that's part of my memory because your black shirt reminds me of many things. So this is the sense that memory is stored in relationships between two points more than the two points. Is that understandable?

[13:28]

Yeah. So here I'm trying to do this morning is to build up a sort of common vocabulary between us, among us. So this... Memory is stored in relationships, not in specifics. It's stored in relationships, not in specifics. For example, if you try to remember something, and you think, oh, well, and a syllable keeps appearing.

[14:37]

And you know that sound is part of what you're trying to remember, but you can't quite put it together. And you can sometimes use that, then something else occurs that seems unrelated, but it seems to be part of it. And then sometimes you forget about it, it'll pop up what you're trying to remember. What you've done when you do that is you've created a field in which that field activates a lot of things, and once that field is established, memories start appearing. And that field is... made up of two or three points.

[15:46]

Two or three points will capture it, and then you begin to feel the whole field. So already you have a... We're talking about a... method of memory retrieval. But that same sense of, that same method of memory retrieval can also be a method of perception. So that's one reason why, one good reason why Buddhism tries to get you to begin to develop field perception rather than point-specific perception. Okay.

[16:54]

So you, in practicing meditation, I said, it's also what we would call a psychological process. Because the more you establish a field perception, the more access you have to non-conscious and unconscious dimensions. And the more access you also have to other people's non-conscious and unconscious dimension.

[17:55]

Because access to yourself is very similar to access to other people. Okay. And I can't not mention also that the ability to sit still through whatever comes up is an important part of breaking through the reification of consciousness. All right, so meditation is in many ways a psychological process. But in addition to a process of studying the contents of consciousness, It's also a shift to, I don't know what language for this I can use, but a space perception or a field perception without objects in the field.

[19:27]

Okay, it's like you're moving from perceiving a specific thing and then you move to perceiving a field defined by a number of specific things. And then you move to experiencing the space between the objects. Okay. Now, This just takes time. Really, it's a matter of exposing yourself to it regularly.

[20:33]

And as you do, your energy changes. Because there's a tremendous amount of energy tied up in reified consciousness. Now, we could say the Buddhist vision is right now we are swimming in a sea of formlessness. And we are constantly giving that form. Now, we have to give it form to have any kind of complex life. If you live in a South Sea island and can nibble the branches of trees, you don't have to give your consciousness much form.

[21:35]

And when you're feeling a little funny in your stomach, you just go nibble. But if you have to store a bunch of those leaves for the winter, And protect them from somebody who'd eat them all in the summer. Then you've got to have a much more complex consciousness. And it becomes very real because it's what allows us to eat in the winter. So it's essential, but it's still kind of imaginary. It's an act of imagination.

[22:48]

Now, that's not negative. It's just an act of imagination. We could have decided to do something else other than store them for the winter. What I mean is we could have created a slightly different culture. But whatever we form becomes real and we have to live by it. Now you only don't have... We don't only have to store the leaves for the winter, we also have to get an education. Because you have to know how to count the leaves and distribute them.

[23:49]

So now you all run around trying to get an education and being late for school and late for your work and on time and so forth. and we could say this is a kind of reified light in other words you've created a kind of circle of light in which you live And we really do have to figure out how to survive in that. So part of the problem, though, is we don't realize what's outside the circle of life. And inside the circle of light. We only see certain things. Well, I mean, that's the basic sort of image or vision of Buddhism. Now, this is really a simple stuff.

[25:23]

But how do you keep your eye on something simple? It's very simple that you breathe. But if you can actually keep your mind on your breath through the 24, makes a big difference. So in a way, this practice is to try to keep your eye on, well, for example, impermanence all the time. And it's, I mean, when you say the word in English, tree, it makes it sound like an object. And what's really happening there is something more like tree. Well, can you say that in German? In English you can add an I-N-G to almost anything.

[26:26]

So I'm standing up here, Richard Bakery. So we have the relative world. And that's a code for the divided world. And the absolute is just a common way to say the undivided world. And in here, language occurs And self.

[27:49]

Anything that has culture, of course, anything that has form. Okay, now over here, we have something more like a silence. Non-self. Maybe, I don't know, emptiness. No. But the sense of the relative is that it knows that Language arises out of silence. And that self arises out of non-self. Now over here we could put the imagined, imagined. And here you really believe in these things.

[29:12]

You can't see anything. Well, sorry. And here you really... Self is really something you... You get completely... Ego. Ego, maybe. Okay. Now, I would like to rearrange this slightly. And put the relative here. The imagined here. And the absolute here. Because first of all, you need to see that something like this exists.

[30:18]

Now, what happens is, if you have an insight, it's a poor experience or just an insight or a deep cognition, Or you may have some unexplained joy that comes out sometimes. Or you may have some sense occasionally. You just feel deep ease in yourself and you sense that everything is perfect as it is. And at that moment, the way you see your world, you suddenly feel quite free of it. It closes in on you right away. Now, there are two approaches here. One is you can approach it to try to deal with how it closes in on you.

[31:33]

Or you can also keep reminding yourself of the ease and joy you felt when you realized you didn't have to worry about all these things. Now, when you even have a moment of this ease and joy or feeling like on a nice spring day you're out of school, let out early or something. In Buddhism, you would call that an intimation of the Absolute. And then the toothache goes. And very quickly you forget you're in the blissful state of no toothache. But because of reified consciousness, you can't remember it.

[32:53]

So Buddhism says, how do you get yourself out of reified consciousness? You have to keep reminding yourself in various ways that consciousness is reified. Okay, so... You have here, let's say, an imagined self. And you have language. And you... Okay, I took on a practice for a while. for a couple of years, which was very important to me back in the 60s.

[34:11]

And many of you have heard me tell you about it, which is I repeated a phrase to myself, there's no place to go and nothing to do. particularly I said it when I was in the middle of doing things. So again, it's very much like the famous koan of Jungian and Daowu. And Jungian is swinging. And Daowu comes up and says, oh, you're busy. And Jungian says, you should know there is one who is not busy. Okay, so here is busy. And here is not busy. And here is sort of busy. So what happens is when you're in this world you only see yourself as this

[35:37]

And you don't know how to get out of being busy except to take a vacation. Or to change your schedule or something. And of course, that's common sense. You have to be able to think sometimes. But sometimes, if you've had this insight, you realize that right now, in the midst of being busy, I'm also not busy. But that's about as helpful as remembering you don't have a toothache. But you somehow try to keep reminding yourself. And if you're practicing Zazen, actually it becomes easier because you begin to have a feel for the present underneath what you're doing.

[36:50]

So you're busy, but sometimes you sort of sense that you're not busy. So what happens is, you're busy, these two things are working together. Even though you've had some insight or you've heard what I said and you really felt it for a moment, there is one who is not this, who had a physical feeling, what I just said. But in actual fact, the habit energy of this will keep bringing you back here. So this is a cognition. These three distinctions are something that you cognize and think about. Okay. They're also an object of contemplation. So, a division like this in Buddhism is meant to be understood cognitively.

[38:28]

It's also meant to be contemplated. And it's also meant to be practiced. Those three things in the traditional practice of Buddhism, all three of those things you reinforce them. I'm probably not writing large enough for you in the back, am I, Eric? Not quite, no. So you're trying to keep these three, you're trying to, the contemplation really means to keep this in view. Now, the standard, most effective way to keep something in view is to create a phrase. And to remind yourself of it all the time. And it's not too different than commercials. You know, Coca-Cola, the pause that refreshes.

[39:56]

No, here's the pause that refreshes. Or there was a soap, I don't know if it exists anymore, there was a soap called Doze when I was a kid, UZ. And the motto was, does, does everything. That was great. Does, does everything. And I never forgotten it, obviously. You don't just have to let advertisers take hold of you that way. You can also use Buddhism. So you find ways to encapsulate certain phrases so that they can stay with you at a kind of physical level. Perhaps at the root of your tongue before your tongue takes speech.

[41:13]

So you have the phrase, there's one who is not busy. Now, every time you say that phrase, because this is a dynamic system, this isn't a static system. And it's set up this way because to show the dynamism of it. In other words, I mean, all in all, this would be sufficient, the relative and the absolute. Or maybe the imagined and the absolute is sufficient. But actually, as an idea, you don't need three things. As an idea, you need only two. But as a description of energy, you need the three. Okay.

[42:24]

All right. So when you are feeling busy and completely busy, this has something to do with your energy. Then you also, then you remember there is one who's not busy and you feel a shift in your energy. Now, that kind of shift is extremely important. The ability to notice that kind of shift is extremely important in being able to practice. If you're so caught in reified consciousness, That when you, even if you remember one who is not dizzy, It's just an idea, it's just words.

[43:34]

And you can't notice an energy shift that goes with it. It's really difficult to practice because you can't find the territory to practice outside representational thinking. Okay, so this is a kind of subtlety, being able to listen to yourself and take small distinctions as real. And in the six parameters which I may speak about, the third one is patience. And patience means the ability to let something speak to you. It also means the ability to endure, but more subtly, it means the ability to listen.

[44:45]

To endure. Okay. So, you're very busy, and you remember the one who's not busy. Or you remember that as a possibility. And you feel an energy shift. Okay. Now, at this point, if what you've done is distracted yourself with the Zen story, that's a kind of repression or putting aside or avoidance. Now, there may be something that's actually disturbing you. And you have to deal with it. You can't deal with the things that are disturbing you always by saying, oh, this one is not busy the hell with it. I can just see you at your job.

[45:58]

Your boss says, you're right, there's one who's not crazy. That's you. Why not? Okay, so what's important to notice is that there's an energy shift and that you can actually move yourself into a different kind of energy. Then you can still do the things that were making you feel busy. Okay, now, this is the topography of consciousness. Okay, you have something that is, let's call it a cause.

[47:14]

Can you see that, Eric, that big of a mouth? And the cause is producing anxiety. Okay, the cause can also produce the reminder that there's one who's not busy. Now in Buddhist practice, you tend to separate these three things. So this is the cause or the situation. All right. So you remember the one who was not busy and you relax in some way and you keep doing the situation. But you've shifted your sense of your identity out of this so much, and you're more resting here.

[48:37]

It's a little bit like if you were, imagine you were an ocean or a lake. Or you're in a boat and it's being tossed around by the waves. And as long as you're in the boat and it's tossed around by the waves, you're rather nervous. But if you remember, you're not only the boat, you're also the waves. You're causing this very situation. You're down underneath the boat. But then you remember you're also the water. Not just the waves. And the water down deep in the lake is very calm. So you can begin to create a situation here in which the water and the boat and the waves are all one, but you don't just have the point of view of being in the boat and disturbed.

[50:07]

Now, the other direction you can go is to move toward the anxiety. Okay. Now, the anxiety has its own past, present and future. Does that make sense? What I mean is that the anxiety isn't just caused by this situation. You have a history of being anxious in certain situations. Now that idea is expressed in Buddhism, which is firewood is not the past of ashes. We say fire is fire when ashes are ashes.

[51:07]

Feuerholz und Asche ist Asche. Now, the best example I've come up with that many of you have heard is pig is not the past of pork. Das Beste, was ich bis jetzt gehört habe, oder was mir eingefallen ist, ist zu sagen, dass ein Schwein nicht die Vergangenheit von Schweinefleisch ist. Pork has its own past, present, and future, which is that our history as Europeans to eat a lot of meat. So we've imposed our human history of meat eating on relatively unwilling pigs. So in that sense, Pigs have their own past, present and future, and pork has its own past, present and future. Okay, so when you emphasize, when you move into the anxiety and identify with the anxiety, Your recognizing anxiety is part of your identity, so not just caused by this.

[52:32]

Now, the general movement in Buddhism is to see things as a whole. And that's really meant to see the parts together. And to see the parts together means first you have to see the parts. So there's a tendency in Buddhism is you don't just see this. So gibt es die Tendenz im Buddhismus, nicht einfach nur das zu sehen. But you see this. Sondern so. Now, we could say in the beginning there was the mark.

[53:33]

Wir könnten sagen, am Anfang war die Mark. Nein, ein Markenzeichen, ein Strichzeichen. Entschuldigung. Entschuldigung. The quality of the mark is that it's not very differentiated from the patient. But when I You take four marks and make a box. You begin to have a territory inside here. And you begin to reify and you begin to sort of bounce around in here. And you forget... that this and this is the same.

[54:47]

Buddhism is trying to find ways to keep reminding you that this and this is the same. And you think this is simple, but it ain't. I mean, it's simple, but it's very hard to do. In other words, if you could really do it, 99% of your problems would be solved. And then the last 1% should go to a very good therapist about it. So the situation in Buddhism is you keep, okay, you've got this, all right, this is our culture, our language, but you kind of take it apart, so you're reminded. Okay. So when you have a situation like this, you tend to separate it into its parts.

[55:52]

And you identify with all parts. You don't just say, ah, this situation is causing me anxiety, I'm going to change the situation. You say, geez, I'm a person who's anxious a lot. And when I avoid that anxiety, I get even more anxious. Why don't I just recognize I'm an anxious person? Let's see what anxiety is like. So you identify with your anxiety. And you go in and you explore it. Boy, it's terrible in here. Yeah.

[56:55]

And pretty soon, in the middle of your anxiety, you begin to see, oh, it's a little wider over there, and it's not so fancy here, and so forth. And in a sense, you begin to be able to walk around in your own anxieties. And then you can remind yourself there is one who is not anxious. So you can make a shift this direction. And of course, this and this are quite similar. But you see, this is just a little example of working within your own consciousness. Okay, now, when you do this, you also notice that there's a kind of qualitative shift from here to here. And you can, in this situation, being just now you've identified with anxiety in general, then remind yourself of the cause.

[58:12]

And when you remind yourself of your cause, you see how the anxiety takes a certain form and it shifts you into trying to do something about it. But now you know the energy field of the anxiety. And you can sometimes let that generalized anxiety be less and it only be cause specific anxiety. In other words, by being willing to be in your anxiety, you begin to see the topography of your anxiety. And some of it's generalized and some of it's cause-specific. And none of this you're trying to get rid of. Now, of course, on one level you want to get rid of it. You'd rather get rid of the two things.

[59:32]

But before you go to the dentist, You just better learn to live with your toothache. So on the one hand, you are trying to get rid of the anxiety, but at a deeper level, you're just accepting. This is what being a human being is. And strangely, that acceptance brings you less in here and more into this. Okay. Now, so you're busy, you remember the one who's not busy, and then you immediately forget it. So you go back to here.

[60:52]

And you're mostly here. And then you're practicing. You do zazen in the morning, say. And you feel this territory again. And every time you do this, there's an energy shift. So you're gaining energy, you're strengthening yourself over here. You're both strengthening and maturing yourself. So you come back and this time you go over here more and it's more like this. So you keep reminding yourself and you go back and forth. And each time you do, you have more of a sense. You begin to inhabit both these territories. And every time you go back this way, you have more energy. Every time you stay here a while, you lose it.

[61:57]

And if you don't practice meditation or something, you can lose the ability to get back across this line. Because this territory tends to keep reinforcing itself. Okay, so what happens is when you can keep doing this, which is practice, you have created a pulse of seeing yourself as busy, seeing yourself as an optimistic. There's a lot to do and there's nothing to do. And when you do that, you're beginning, this pulse is beginning to generate a different kind of basis for your personality.

[63:17]

So in this place, in this place, you're kind of stuck. And when you go back and forth here, you begin to have more of a kind of different feeling. And actually, you'll find if you do this, your muscles get more soft. You're not so rigid. You're creating a basis of turning around. It's a little bit like I used last night the image of a magnetic current. And here, the magnetic current is constantly keeping you in here. But if you begin to have this as another pole for this battery, The current starts going back and forth here.

[64:29]

And the more you sense that, the more of another kind of energy is developing. And when it's sufficient, you'll break through. So it's considered that these two things in a relationship, practice relationship, create the energy required to break through to realize the absolute. So to create this as a clear cognition, Which is really not so easy. Because although I can give you in various ways a sense of emptiness or the absolute or the undivided, the nature of the undivided is it has no mark.

[65:34]

We say it's the emptiness of emptiness. Emptiness just means it has no mark. And there's no way you can get hold of it. You can get a hold of this and this. In fact, this and this are identical. The only difference is this has an intimation or knowledge of this. So... Through a clear cognition, you begin to move here with a knowledge of this. Durch eine klare Erkenntnis fangen wir jetzt an, uns dahin zu bewegen mit einem Wissen vom Absoluten. Then you reinforce that cognition by constantly keeping that cognition in view, which is contemplation.

[66:46]

Und diese Erkenntnis, die bestärken wir dadurch, dass wir sie also immer wieder im Auge behalten, und das nennt man Kontemplation. and keeping it in view and then beginning to practice it, getting a sense of, like, the energy shifts, so then you can use that energy or identify with the energy, then you're practicing. So contemplation is to keep in view, and practice is to begin with... Actually, contemplation is to keep in view. And practice is to begin to see the topography of the situation and then act within this more subtle topography. And if you do that enough, you begin to de-reify consciousness. Now there's tremendous energy in your reified consciousness.

[67:56]

It glues a whole civilization together. And we build nuclear weapons to hold out of that glue. So it is just tremendous energy. So you have to keep reminding yourself, reinforcing the cognition, the contemplation, the practice, In ways that change your energy so that you can begin to shift to here. Okay. I think that's about as clear as I can make this. Does anybody have any observations or reflections on this?

[69:13]

Come on, you can't all have nothing to say. We need a few seconds. All right. One thing I'll say while you're thinking is the self, which is here... I gave you the other day the five skandhas. The five skandhas are a substitute for self. The five skandhas try not to be here, but to be here. And here. In other words, they go across this line and... Is there a relationship between these three categories of the three bodies of the Buddha?

[70:47]

Well, that's what I'm going to work on in Münster next week. But the Dharma, there's three categories of Buddha. In fact, there's a koan I'm using, a phrase, a koan I'm using a lot these days, which is, which, which, of the bodies of Buddha does not fall into any category. And Dongshan says, I'm always close to this. Now, what he means, we could also phrase the question is, In what way does the world not fall into divisions, into categories? And he says, Dung Chan said, oh, I'm always close to this. Which means he's living somewhere here. So you can't, as long as you're alive, be free in peace.

[72:22]

But you can live closer and closer to here. Okay, now Dharmakaya Buddha means the Buddha who lives here. The Sambhogakaya Buddha is the body that experiences this and this. And the Nirmanakaya Buddha is the body of Buddha which, experiencing this and this, manifests in this world. In other words, you know this, but for the sake of everyone else and yourself, you keep appearing here. But the sense of these three bodies of Buddha and why they're called Buddha and not ordinary person is they're born from here. Which isn't just a kind of fanciful idea.

[73:36]

It means you don't have to base where you live here. You can base where you live here. Thank you. What is disease? Disease? You mean mental or physical or any disease? Mental. But let me say that the overall attitude of Buddhism toward disease is that disease is a necessary part of our life. As I put it very simply, without disease you wouldn't have an immune system.

[74:37]

Without an immune system, you couldn't leave this room. Okay, so there is mental... Well, let's say there's psychological... I suppose Buddhism would say there's psychological illness and mental illness. And maybe consciousness illness. Now, mental illness, I suppose we could say, is... genetically your chemistry is messed up. Psychological illness would be your story is mixed up.

[75:38]

And consciousness illness would be you don't know how we actually exist. And Buddhism has aimed itself primarily at what I've just created these terms, consciousness illness. Because it's an illness we all have. And it's also the illness of culture and civilization. Psychological illness, Buddhism doesn't have much to say about. And that would depend also on each culture, because each culture has its own psychological, its own story, its own illnesses that come out of its own story.

[76:54]

For instance, if the Japanese live in the feeling skanda more than the perceptual skanda, they're going to have a little different way in which psychological problems manifest in them. So I would say that Buddhism creates a big umbrella and then smaller umbrellas for each culture that it happens to be in. And then how each individual relates to his own individuation within that culture comes as much from the culture as from Buddhism. So, basically, I don't see any problem at all in... Well, let me start again.

[77:56]

I don't feel like some Buddhist teachers do, Asian Buddhist teachers usually, that Buddhism covers everything. And if I have a student or apprentice who I'm seeing regularly, and he needs more than psychological advice, he or she needs a trained therapist, not just psychological advice. I send that person to a therapist. I'm not a trained therapist. Now, I know how, to some extent, to precipitate changes in the way person's consciousness works. But I'm not experienced in precipitating psychological changes in people.

[79:14]

I know there are therapists who are better at it than I am. So? To me, I think that these things need to work together. Now, when a therapist is really dealing with a person's world view or how they live in their consciousness, then I think such a therapist may may be able to learn something from Buddhism, or there may be techniques within Buddhism that can have therapeutic value for that. Okay, thanks. I think it's about time to have a break. Let's have one more question.

[80:30]

Please explain the term energy a little more. Okay, I'll come back to that because it's certainly not scientific energy. I'll come back to that. So I'd like us to take a say, 15-minute break. Well, let's say 20 minutes. I was going to do something else, but let's have a 20-minute break and then come back for a little while and then we'll go to lunch. Mm-hmm. Now, your questions help me a lot.

[81:38]

And I need a lot of help. You know, I'm always experimenting with how to teach Buddhism. And I really don't know how to do it without your help. And this year, I started a little bit last year, I've been trying to go slower and make things clearer partly by writing on this board. And I'd also like to know if this kind of approach is helpful. Now, you asked about energy.

[82:41]

Yeah. It's a term which covers a lot of territory in Buddhism. And it really means The term is necessary because it means you can do something with it. You have maybe energy. You have consciousness.

[83:47]

You have energy and you have awareness. You have energy and you have and there's the energy of the karma of specific acts and there's karma of the way you view the world and that action Your actions that are karmic or your worldview that's karmic can also be described as energy. Now, there's also the word that you may be familiar with, merit. When your actions here are karmic, they accumulate and tie up your energy.

[85:08]

And you can say that karmic actions are this. Now, when you begin to accumulate traces, accumulate memories, memory, we don't have any words for it, accumulate the effects of your actions, that lead you in this direction. then we call it merit. And this tends to be more open-ended and releasing action. When mostly karma... when your actions are karmic, they're depleting you of energy.

[86:37]

And when your... Now, the six paramitas are generosity, conduct, patience, effort, energy, concentration, and wisdom.

[88:05]

Now, generosity is an expression of oneness or relatedness. Now, when your basic instinct is generosity, It means you're sharing the world. And by that, you're creating a world in which you live that way, in which you exist that way. You're creating a shared world inside yourself. So in a sense, we can say Now, when you do that, that's an act of merit, not just of karma.

[89:08]

So, when you share with people this vision, that's when you're most generous. So in a sense, you're sharing this with people. That's really what generosity is. And when you do that in your conduct too, and you create the pace which allows you to be in contact with the pace of the world and the pace of another person. Then you begin to start being nourished by what you do. Your relations with people nourish you.

[90:10]

Now, this is a very big distinction in practice when what you do starts to nourish you. And you begin to have the state of mind where you recognize that you're doing something within a state of mind that's nourishing you. When you do that, you begin to work with your energy. Because you don't get food just three meals a day. You're getting food all the time, and that's energy. That's why these are the six perfections. Or the six ways to move toward wholeness. So when you practice this way in which you're nourished by your activity, Then you have the energy and effort necessary for concentration and wisdom.

[91:35]

Now, consciousness is technically loaded consciousness. Now, maybe after lunch I'll show you what I mean by that. The thing is that to begin to discuss Buddhism at this energetic level, you have to know certain things. And one of the basic things you have to know is the five standards. So probably I have to find a new way to teach them. I'd like to be able to teach them until everyone in Germany knows them.

[92:38]

Each of you have an obligation during the next year to teach the five skandhas to at least three people and then post it. To make my job easy. Awareness you could call unloaded consciousness. So energy is also that awareness, when you have an experience of awareness, you can translate it into energy of you. So the word energy is used in lots of different ways. But central to it means you can... It's very close to the idea of I or identity in Buddhism.

[93:53]

Because we can say more directly, I have my energy. And that's more basic than saying, I have my identity. Now, a certain energy is given to us at birth. I'd say that's more fundamental than identity. And that's shaped into identity. And in each culture in a particular way.

[94:35]

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