As you know, most of you know, my constant concern is how to develop a non-monastic Sangha here in Europe. And quite a few of you are speaking to me about coming to the Sesshin, And as you know, Sashin is really something that exists as a kind of jewel in the setting of monastic life. And there's the life together leading up to the Sashin, there's the Sashin and the life together after the Sashin. And that's very different from doing a Sesshin where you arrive, suddenly sit for seven days, and then go back to somewhere.

[01:08]

So I'm I'm always thinking about sharing my thoughts about it with you of how to develop together a practice which is not monastic but in which we have something we do together in addition to sesshin. One of the reasons I'm letting the breaks go on for quite long Und ein Grund auch, warum ich einfach die Pausen hier denen recht viel Raum gebe.

[02:17]

Is that we're not here to learn something and so we're in a rush. Dass wir jetzt nicht einfach hier sind, um etwas Bestimmtes zu lernen und deshalb uns hetzen müssen. And it's important to me that you have a chance to talk with each other and so that's as important as our meeting together. So one thing I would like you to think about is doing a seminar or whatever we call this, like this, here where we... pretty much live nearby because that's the only alternative and we have lunch together. Is this a good way? Is this a good room? Should we do something else here? Et cetera. You know, this is maybe by the end of tomorrow you can give me some idea. So a question is also, is something like what we are doing here, in this room, where we are all forced to live close together during the days, where we also have lunch together, is that something that is useful for you?

[03:19]

And just let me know. See you tomorrow. And it took a lot of work of Monika and Götz and people from the Frankfurt, Wiesbaden and Heidelberg sitting groups and members. So anyway, it would be good to have some understanding with you whether, you know, what we should do next. You know, I'm always asking this question. I'm sure you get tired of it, but I need to know. And this year we're trying for the first time with some effort last year to look at koans as part of the seminars. The trouble with koans in a way is when you actually study them and don't just use turning words from them, you get very deep into Buddhism fast.

[04:38]

And maybe too fast for this kind of group, I don't know. Now, Drip asked a question, you want to ask me the question? Well, the best way actually is to read them pretty lightly. And not make any special effort to understand them. And if you read them occasionally, sometimes just like literature, like reading a poem or something.

[05:49]

Sometimes it'll catch you. And then you go read it more, spend more time with it. But what's most important is the repetition of presenting them to yourself, not trying to study them. So it's good to just get familiar with them so that they're like stories you heard about from your uncle or something. It also gives me an excuse to talk about certain things with you that I wouldn't talk about otherwise. I wouldn't have the ingredients or the excuse to talk about it. Like this little riff I just did on the unique breeze of reality.

[07:00]

I would never be asked to give a lecture to a group of people and take off saying all that stuff. I have to have some excuse to say these things. Either directly from your practice and us in some encounter, or in this situation from our all looking at a koan together. Now, is there... You know, I'm asking you... You can tell me now or later or any time if you want, but is this... Do you feel these things we've been talking about have been useful or too complicated?

[08:06]

I'm not looking for compliments or criticism exactly. I'm just looking for... you know, does this make sense? It's just, you think, Jesus. I mean, Buddha. Yeah. So, Deutsch... Yeah, well, that's good. I actually can't tell. Sometimes people come up to me and say, I didn't understand a word you said.

[09:10]

But you looked nice. I don't know if they say that last part, but I added it. No, I don't know. You had something you wanted to say? Thank you. I have a question concerning this oval, when I breathe. My consideration is that, on some level, it doesn't include my straight back enough. It's like the neck, okay? Okay, then try to draw your breath up your backbone.

[10:41]

So you exhale. And when it comes in, feel it coming up your backbone. And then develop that feeling more and spread it over the top of your head and down your front. It feels very good. Anything else? Yeah. I would like to add some questions to the group, to the Zamba issue. I'd like to turn to John. OK. For me, since quite a while, I've been trying to wait, I guess I get to. And it is very important for me now to realize that I already noticed that the whole afternoon the question is in me about what is going on with you.

[12:01]

So what does the word Samhita or community mean to you? After a community and how it should develop, what is your image of politics for you in the future? How do you feel about it? Und was für mich dann so ein wichtiger Punkt war, weil die Organisierenden in Seminaren oder Regionen sagen dann mehr, wie es eurer inneren Familie aussieht.

[13:13]

Das heißt also, wenn du ein Schiff fahren willst, brauchst du keine Handwerker oder Leute, die es tun. Das Erste, was du brauchst, sind Menschen, die dir umführen liegen. I would like to talk to you tomorrow. So my question is to you.

[14:18]

You guys love the ocean. And what do we do? Can we talk about it tomorrow? Oh. Do you love the ocean? The sangha is actually sometimes referred to as the ocean. You swim and live in. Okay, anything anybody wants to say to what Beate brought up, or anything else? Yes. My feeling was yesterday when I came here and I met all the people I missed for some time, it is like a bath for people. And we people, it's like a bath. Are you getting clean air? I don't know. I just like it very much. I mean, I always have the same feelings.

[15:19]

But the other side is when I imagine, oh, in 20 years, I will still do the same. Meeting people once a year and having this feeling, and that I feel, you know, But I'm not really in that direction. I'm not going out here to kill. Monika, maybe you want to tell us that you are currently trying to find a building that we can maybe look at on Monday? Yes, I'm thinking about it. [...] A beautiful one of mine is in the direction of the north, in the middle of the valley.

[16:39]

And we're going to stay there until a good day. And maybe not at all deep into the house, maybe at some point. But the idea of such a house is already there. It grows, it lives there. A house also grows in many places. And maybe now is not the right time. But I think we should continue to look at it. We will look at the house. She talked about the house. You talked about that building that I heard about? Yeah. How many people here, can I ask, have been to Crestone?

[17:40]

Quite a few. We're having a session April 1st to 8th in the new Zendo, which should... Because we're not generally... I wasn't even sure it'd be ready. I didn't kind of widely invite people, so... There's actually space in the sashin if someone wants to come. In Crestone, a new broadcast has been built and it will be ready for the traditional April show that takes place from April 1st to 8th. There will be a celebration and it is a big broadcast where a lot of people have space. I have not yet stopped to invite people because I was not sure if he would be ready. But it looks like that and you are all invited. In some response to what, as I briefly have an idea of what Beate brought up, and as I said Friday evening, this is also Ulrike's concern,

[18:50]

Not just to look at traditional, institutional or yogic definitions of Sangha, but also to just find out how we would define practice together or spending time together. On our own terms and whatever we want. But one effort that Mike made at the Sufi camp asked me if he could publish a newsletter of some kind. If it doesn't wait for me to contribute something, it can come out probably more often. And Ulrike published a little piece in it last time or the time before?

[20:09]

Last time, I guess, yeah. And Peter Irxel is going to have a piece in the next one, who's been at Crestone the last... Three and a half minutes. So this is also one form of connection between us that's not meeting together. But in any case, I don't know what the answer is and I'm just here ready and waiting for your instructions. And all I can do is try these various ways of teaching, spending time with you and see what happens. Anything? Anybody want to bring something else up before we stop? Yes. Then the Dhammasangha has to train someone to be a teacher in German.

[21:29]

Yeah, I think you're all candidates for the next teacher. Because I think I can turn one of you into a teacher faster than I can learn German. Mm-hmm. Anything else? I'd like to look at these photographs a minute, just because they were brought up to me. Could you come up and explain what they are? And you can look during your time. And he's a botanist and took these photographs.

[22:52]

I got some hints and I can briefly explain what we did there. Here we have a leaf from a water farm. You can see here a four-leaf clover leaf. We photographed it here. The method is a high-voltage photography. The leaf is placed in the dark in the film and then a high voltage is applied for a short time and the leaf begins to shine. And we wanted to know if this lighting depends on the air, because the air is ionized. It starts to shine really strongly. We then photographed the same thing in vacuum. And this is the same plate here in vacuum. And you can see that it radiates even stronger. So these are effects that I can't explain. It is interesting, however, that these red areas, as you can see here and here, are dark in the vacuum. So it seems as if there is something in the thin leaves, which then also expresses itself in the vacuum.

[24:12]

In the middle you can see two vine leaves up here. This leaf was heated in a fire, so an area was killed off, and you can see that there is no radiation here. And down here we simply photographed a beech leaf, here on the left, which has a strong blue radiation, and then we cut off the upper part, and at the moment a lot of red is emitted here. So I understand that. Would you say that things are here? No. What I understand is this is the same leaf. When you cut the leaf here, this red appeared.

[25:15]

And where the sin was cut, the same kind of red is there. He says it's not just a red that's produced by a computer assigning differentiation, but it's actually what's photographed as red. And this one's in a vacuum, and this one's out. Whatever the field is around the plant, there needs to be some interaction with the gas of the air. You know, I told some of you the story, and we talked about this at Crestone, is that I was in Brussels years ago, and this woman took some Karelian photographs of me. I have frequency. Anyway, so she took my hands and feet, actually. And there was a quite even pattern around all the fingers. And she did it because she uses it to study the body as if she were doing pulses for acupuncture.

[26:21]

Can I say that? I'm sorry. And also my feet. And she said, your feet are kind of faint. And I think one foot was less faint than the other. And so I said, well, just a minute. And I concentrated, and my feet in the next photograph brightened up and became even. And I just used the kind of concentration, as I described earlier, of joining your mind with your breath and concentrating on different parts of your body. So I saw not only a photograph of some field around my hands and feet, but I could affect the field around my hands and feet, and the effect could be photographed.

[27:34]

So I don't know, and I don't think you know, what this means. I have problems with my colleagues to explain, so I thought I would ask you. Are you able to influence this carousel? I've never tried it, I don't know. I would guess it might be possible. Do you want to say something? Now, this is not the... This is... I would say in traditional botany it's kind of excluded knowledge or no one wants to look at it. And why is it excluded? A little bit too Russian. I think it just continues over.

[28:49]

What? I think it's not excluded. Everybody has been talking from 1920 or so. It's very old. I mean, this idea about it. I think the scientific discussion about it is true. I don't know why, but I think there was a lot of research in it. I don't know what they were saying. How would you respond to it? You know how it works. In the area of the botanical garden, I don't know any color recordings, actually none at all. Only black and white recordings. It's a new type of footprint. I am well the only reason I'm bringing since he showed me the photographs and the reason I put them up here for all of us is that some field like this exists around all of us and it's

[30:25]

Not a matter of being able to see it, but some people can see it. What's more important in practice is letting yourself feel it. And there's a lot of differentiation in this field, and that differentiation can't be really understood just by seeing, it's understood by feeling. Und es gibt also sehr viel Differenziertheit in diesem Feld und es kann nicht verstanden werden durch Sehen, sondern nur durch Fühlen. And feeling with the whole of your body. Und eben mit dem ganzen Körper zu fühlen. And in this koan it's accepted that something like this is part of how we are actually connecting with each other. Und in dem koan geht es darum, dass etwas von dieser Art akzeptiert wird, wie wir alle miteinander in Verbindung stehen. Thank you.

[31:40]

So it's after six o'clock. So I'd like us to sit for a little while, maybe five or ten minutes. Then we'll stop for the day. What I'd like to do before we end this afternoon, and I also understand the Because you have to travel to end earlier this afternoon than you did yesterday.

[32:48]

Anyway, what I'd like to do before we end is I'd like to go through this koan with you. Unless you have some other idea, but at least I'd like to go through with it. To some extent to give you a kind of gloss of the column or a picture of the world the column is describing. Yes. Because the most intimate thing we share with another person really is the sense that we live in the same world. If you see the world as a given, like we're passively in this container, then of course we all live in the same world.

[33:54]

Of course, if you see the world as something more than a container, then that's what this koan is dealing with. I don't know if now would be a good time, but last night brought up this question of how we practice together. As we'd already talked about it some Friday night. So, several people spoke to me feeling that what we had talked about hadn't been responded to because we ended 6.37. So if someone has something they want to bring up about that, or you would like to bring up something with what we discussed yesterday with koan that made you consider, open the world,

[35:36]

If someone wants to say something, whether to address it or to address something else, what is the core of what you have learned, then I am open to answering that now. Yeah. Could you please say something about the last two line verse, carefully, to open the skyscrapers, he lets out the pre-spring on the branches. I think it also, in my impression, it also deals with the reading, but after thinking about it for some time, it was... It is benevolent. Something like that. There is the feeling that the last two lines, it is a very clear riddle, that it also has to do with the vines, but that it is here, perhaps, as it is written, something that is not good for you, perhaps, as it is not necessarily good for you, but I like it.

[37:27]

Yeah, or not. Yes. How is the relation between the granting and the collecting there? And with granting, it can be alternatively bettering there. How do you go about that? How do you go about that? It's really much more as ausgebogen.

[38:48]

You understood what I said when I took her question yesterday. . Well, yesterday I spoke about when you do zazen, certain physiological processes happen naturally. What happened in the course of sitting?

[39:58]

Your volumes changed somewhat and you notice your stomach and your body settles. But if you go to the next boat, and then, as I've said, you feel the more pulse of your metabolism becomes part of your consciousness. And what did you, Martin, remember about bread? Well, I was asking two or four questions.

[41:02]

What is the intention or the sense of always keeping attention to the bread? and the other one connected to that are in the situations where keeping the attention to the breath could interfere with what one is doing. So where the attention should be made stable by being I was asked yesterday what the meaning is, and the intention is to always support his attention on breathing, and whether there are any situations in which one should support the attention on breathing. Star Wars.

[42:05]

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Did you finish? I thought for two examples. Playing video games and having sex. They're very similar. They do have things in common. No, they're not similar. Tell him. If the world wanted one, send the video game.

[43:12]

You want to elaborate on your examples? No, I'm going to be too fast. Well, you know. Most of what I'm saying and what we're talking about, a good portion of it is similar to what we talked about before. For many of you, even if it's not similar and you haven't heard it before, you're still barely hearing it. And that's almost the same as having heard it before.

[44:23]

But in both cases, it's a kind, we're involved in a kind of ritual with medullary practice. In other words, it's like you're practicing and you're going through your day and you remember to pay attention to your breathing and the fact that you remember has some, of course, effect. And this is a kind of remembering together. And for some reason, when we remember together, You remember more deeply and more effectively, often, please.

[45:40]

So your breath becomes a kind of memory that, as the koan says, weaves in the patterns of spring. And so he brought this up to me yesterday. I said, it's the spread of breath. So when you're, I'm assuming, when you play a computer game, in my time we played pinball.

[46:40]

You didn't have computer games, but when you play a pinball machine or a computer game, you have to concentrate on it. You were saying that you needed to concentrate on it. And the difficulty with flipper was that they don't tilt very easily. Pushed it too hard, it tilted. He's somewhat a dolphin. Wasn't there a television program about Flipper? So We could say that when you're doing this pinball game or computer game, which my daughter plays, she's quite good at these, you have to be quite concentrated.

[48:16]

And you probably won't do so well if you start paying attention to your breath at the same time. I think this was your point. Of course. Well, you concentrate on your... The practice of mindfulness is to pay attention to concentrate on whatever you're doing fully. And so what Japanese Buddhist monasteries are really about is energy concentration. Did I say that already earlier? No. I guess I mentioned Belgium.

[49:23]

So meditation is part of it. And the way they use their energy comes out of meditation. But all in all, meditation is a small part of life in Japanese Buddhist monasteries. The primary emphasis is on doing everything with energy. So if it's right or wrong, we do it with energy. And if you make a mistake, you fall through on one side. That's the spirit of the Japanese society, actually, comes from this. Come to God. In simple things, you never see anyone ever back up in traffic.

[50:35]

You'll even wait 10 minutes for somebody to get up in front of you so you can go forward rather than back up and go around. Now, people do back up and exaggerate slightly, but the basic idea is always look forward. And you see it in in that traffic where somebody goes out, and they're halfway into a big intersection, and they've gone halfway into a red light. They don't back up. They just stay there, their whole car's rolling back. . So from this point of view, I think this energy thing can be overdone a bit, but anyway, it's an important part of practice.

[52:02]

So if you're going to do a computer game, you do it fully and you don't pay attention to your dress. But when you really reside in your breath body, and you're no longer bringing your mind to your breath by your attentions, Then there's no separation between your concentration and your breath. And in Aikido and sword fighting, etc., when you do everything with your breath, you're not concentrating on your breath, your breath and your movements are completely jointed. So when you're in the initial time of practice of developing your silent unity of breath and mind, it probably takes 10 years.

[53:10]

It doesn't happen overnight. But if you come back to your breath and you keep your mind to practice mindfulness, it does happen. But until then, in the initial years of practice, your breath is sort of on base. It's your resting place. And of course, as you brought up yesterday, you do concentrate on various physiological

[54:16]

Any aspect of your body and mind, you can concentrate. But none of them can cover everything due the way breath can. So it really is home-based in your practice. But again, it's no different than entering zazen and leaving zazen. It's like that feeling of when you go into zazen, how you gather yourself. You go out of zazen how you grant yourself, let go into the...

[55:32]

We're going to sleep and waking up. But this kind of pulse is present, as I said yesterday, in very tiny detail. And like Basically, in Zen, you don't try to control or balance things. You just notice. So you just, in a sense, notice this pulse of gathering and granting in finer and finer detail. I have a supplementary question on the topic of breathing.

[56:50]

Is it really good to breathe out of the body, for example from the outside, and of course to feel the breath as something that really exists in the body, whether it is that the spine rises up and down, or that the back or the stomach opens and closes? I have another question regarding the breath, which is, is it really important to visualise the breath outside? For me it feels more natural to visualise the flow of my breath inside the body, like in spine, my stomach and so on. Yeah, but to... I'm not saying do any one thing. That's definitely a big one. very fundamental practice. Take your choice. But I may have planted a seed.

[58:12]

I mean, this sense of granting and grasping or granting and gathering, it's also detachment and integration. The feeling of being detached, independent, the feeling of integrating yourself in such a way. Yeah, at first they're separate, but more and more as you get in fine detail, detachment and integration are the same activity. OK. Yeah. One of the main things in this koan is to find your seat.

[59:22]

And this means to find your seat on your cushion, and I think in a deeper sense it means to find your true self somehow. And is there a connection between finding your seat, or that relationship, finding your seat, and finding your place in the world, or finding your profession, or finding why you are born in the world? I know I'm born to find my true self, but what have I to do with this world and what is the meaning of my being here for my people? So it's their connection. For your people? You mean your family, Germany, Europe? Yes. I think, for example, the Red Indians, when they go for a vision quest, for example, and there was not only the purpose to find themselves in a deeper way, but also the question, what brings us back for my people?

[60:32]

And is there this connection? Yeah, a similar connection. You want to say that Yes, my question was whether there is a connection or how the connection is between finding my place on the cushion, which probably means finding my true self or making contact with it, and what is my place in the world, or what is my task in the world, or what is my job or my profession in the world. Well, I think it's We're on shaky ground, or it's a little tricky, when we try to bring in, you know, maybe what American Indians, Red Indians do, and so forth.

[61:45]

Is that what Indians are called in Germany, red Indians? Yeah. Tell me. Redskins. How do you distinction from Indians from India? Indian Indians are Indian, red Indians are Indian. In America now, you're supposed to say what's politically correct is Native Americans. I think it's a contradiction because they're not Americans really. I never met that Italian. Because we don't... My guess is what they mean is to bring back to their people a certain kind of experience that you've shared with your friends or that you go deep sea fishing for yourself.

[63:12]

I think what brings her to her people is a kind of experience of herself, so to speak, when you go fishing at the deep sea, into yourself. And? Uh... But I think the Indians share in Buddhism that you enter into the phenomenal world in some way and bring back the secrets of the phenomenal world, but not something spiritual. Exactly. I believe that in the Indian world, with Buddhism, the world of phenomena is in a certain way intertwined. And these secrets bring them back to the normal world, and that's what I'm talking about. I love to take special care of myself. It seems to me your basic intuition is right, which is that this practice, and to really fully have the energy of this practice, you're doing it for others as well as yourself.

[64:25]

You can't really make this practice work if you give yourself over to an outside yourself. So to give yourself over to outside yourself is to be the easiest and fullest is when you have a sense of doing it with and for others. Now, But when you have the sense that to find the meaning of why you're born or your fate or what your life is, this is a peculiarly definitive Western idea, not a Buddhist idea.

[65:30]

But that's not what this koan says because this koan was written for somebody else. And we're trying to see if it can also be for us. So what kind of world do we imagine this is when there's a sense of fate or you have an identity you have to live out? I think, I don't know, I think you could demonstrate that when you imagine fate, You are in a world in which there probably has to be a creator god.

[66:50]

I'm not saying you feel that way, but I think that's where the idea comes from. Because from the point of view of Buddhism, Your future and your life is a surprise. And there's no meaning to why you were born. You just happen to be here. Who's going to assign the meaning? We're here, I suppose Buddhism would say something like you're in a meaningless world. but we give meaning to it. So as Cohen is trying to say, maybe we should talk about it a little bit here.

[67:54]

This is a good point to do so. Closing the door and sleeping is the way to receive those at highest potential. This isn't just to find out your fate, but rather to receive yourself. We don't know what this will result in, but at least you'll receive your highest potential. Now, we're all bystanders, bystanders who aren't sure we agree or not. Now on the second page, page four of your Xerox.

[69:18]

In the second paragraph of the commentary, it says, continuously creation rubs her loom and shudder. One thing Ulrike mentioned to me driving up here was that every village has looms and shuttles and weaving door. What is it in Japan? So weaving in Japan and China is just everyone does it. It's not something that's only done by England or something like that. It's not industrialized. It's a local craft, a highly articulated craft in half the households of every village.

[70:50]

So the sense of the world from the point of view of Buddhism, is some kind of weaving is constantly going on. And each of us is part of that weaving. And there's no big weaver in the sky doing the weaving. No, it was all the weaving done a long time ago, and it reaches, you know, moths eating the fabric. The weaving's going on all the time, and you're part of the weaving.

[71:50]

Okay. But when you're outside the weaving, You are the victim of the weeping. I thought you were the winner when you are outside of the weeping. No. But if you get out of it, isn't it something like getting out of the karma? Sounds good.

[72:53]

What I mean by outside of eating is then you are passively living in the world or you have no control over your world. Or you're late in the world. The weaving is mostly done by the time you notice what's going on. Okay, so what would be outside the weave? I can imagine to be the weaver, but not the thread. When I'm thread, I'm just... Yeah.

[74:02]

Yeah, well... If you live in an abstract world, when you are... As soon as you're in ordinary conscious mind, or divided mind, or comparative mind, or conceptual mind, or you're living in generalizations, you're outside the being. . Anyway, if you were outside of your own world, That's what you said.

[75:12]

That's what it says here. It says, if there's a bystander who doesn't agree, come forward, but you can't blame him either. You can't blame him because he and she, they're in the weaving, whether they like it or not. But this is the difference between just breathing and paying attention to your breath. You're breathing all the time, but you're outside your breath even though you're just breathing. So we could say this another way, how do you breathe with the world as it's being created? And as soon as you think about it, you're already in the past.

[76:24]

This is the basic idea, right? Got that? Okay. I'm not saying this is true. I'm saying this is the Buddhist view. And the experience of the world for those people who practice yoga. Okay, so... So, and it says here, are different names, mother of evolution and creator, whatever they are in Chinese, I don't know, are different names for the creation of beings. Same sentence. Now, this

[77:28]

Okay, just go on, because Buddhism is a foreign religion in China. So it was always dealing with the fact that it's replacing or better than or different than Confucianism, Daoism, which were more indigenous. So here Buddhism is trying to distinguish itself from Confucianism and Taoism, which are based, it says here, on one energy. Now, I don't know how that relates to Confucianism, but in Taoism, Taoism is, at least Taoism of the period of this book being written, involves a developed sense of the chakra system.

[79:06]

Which historically, though it's not clear, may have come in its systematic form from India, as well as Buddhism did. But there is a kind of chakra system that people just recognize, and it's in Christianity. And if you look at the layout of cathedrals and so forth in the old days, they're laid out on a chakra system, imagined and built. But as a teaching for individual practitioners. Okay. So they make a distinction here and say Buddhist tradition is based on one mind.

[80:24]

Okay. And then they try to relate the one mind to energy. And here they're trying to give you a picture, a dynamic picture of the world as they see. And this original energy is still created by mind. And all is contained in the imagery field of the repository consciousness. Now, we can't go into this in some detail because we'd have to practice the Vijnanas and so forth, but I'll try to give you a sense of what this means.

[81:27]

The alaya vijnana, or the repository consciousness, is a sense that everything that ever happened to you, traces of it remain in you. It's not an unconscious, it's more of a non-conscious. In other words, as I would say, unconscious is an unseen but active part of your conscious mind and personality. So it may affect your actions in ways that you don't, like a current rising to the surface, but you don't notice the current, it just affects what you do.

[82:41]

And it may affect you through things that have happened to you that you can't remember. But there are unconscious elements that are tied to your definition of self and so forth. They're part of your story. Yeah. The non-conscious isn't part of your story. It may or may not be. It's just the millions of things that have happened to you. And the dots have not been connected. But if you sing a certain song, have you seen those movies where they sing a song and the ball bounces from word to word?

[83:59]

So if you hum a certain tune, it brings up associations and connections with that tune or that whatever. So if you start to practice meditation, meditation is a certain kind of tune that brings up experiences that support your meditation that you hadn't noticed before. Certain insights you've had that you've seen the world a certain way. But it hasn't affected you because it's outside your story, so you haven't been able to make sense of it. So this is the sense of the imagery field, and it's images often not words and things.

[85:19]

It's an imagery field of the repository of consciousness. Now, this imagery field is your most, at the level of being which you are most one fabric with the phenomenal world. Does that make sense? It's the level which you're most, you're not editing the world according to your story, it's just the world is happening in you. And that's where the most of the connections are. Okay, so how do you enter the alaya-vijnana? How do you activate the alaya-vijnana outside your store? And the bigger story of how we exist when we're connected with everyone.

[86:41]

Well, most simply, you do zazen some every day. Now, this is a rather different idea than enlightenment. So this is more like you might have realization, actualization, implementation. These are different kinds of ways to talk about enlightenment. . Enlightenment generally is when you recognize at a very deep level how you exist outside your story.

[87:47]

And there's a turning around as if there's, it's almost like maybe there's a weight of identity in your comparative conscious mind and story. And when you're enlightened, that experience is that weight comes out of that. Or that weight shifts to, we could say, your breath, your imagery field or something else. Then your story and perceptual experience becomes very light and fluid. And you feel very free. In fact, you feel, if the weight is really dropped out of it, you feel completely free and open.

[88:59]

And you couldn't care less what your fate is. But whether anything means anything or not. Okay. But that's not the same as this call is talking about, which is how to function within this other sense of reality and awaken the imagery field of the repository consciousness, which is not the same as enlightenment. though enlightenment may be the gate to letting it happen. I was just sitting here wondering if I was giving my better half to more of a sentence.

[90:11]

This is my better half. You're my better three quarters. Well, I've worked in the mathematics today. Okay, so I, one song, say, with me in the book. Is one song fun? It's one song, I mean like one song. I, one song. say this is the very source of the Tsar Dong school, the Soto school, the lifeline or the lineage of Buddhas and ancestors. Okay, so this means This is emphasizing that this kind of mind that connects you to the phenomenal world and everyone else in the sense that all of us share in a common subtle body right now in this room.

[91:43]

entering this weaving which connects us to each other and to the phenomenal world. And connects us in much the way that right now we share a subtle body that's in each of us. We're living right now our own body and to some extent a shared body. And if I don't think about it with comparative consciousness, I can actually feel it in my stomach. And in my breath. But activating this kind of consciousness is how you know your teacher and how your teacher teaches you.

[93:03]

And knowing this kind of consciousness connects you with the lineage back to Buddha's. Now let me point out something that I pointed out before, worth noting. There are 70 people in this room. Or just about 70. And if I tell you something, and I spend 10 years telling it to you, Probably. You'll be able to tell it even better to Michael. No, I always tell you once and you tell, but I spend 10 years. And you spend 10 years with Michael and Michael spends 10 years with Eric and so forth.

[94:06]

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