Someone asked me, what are the ten powers that we chant? They are to know all knowledge of circumstances and beings, nirvanically, samadically and dharmically, in past, present and future. This can only be taught by a cosmic Buddha, so I won't be teaching it. So it's basically Buddhist politics. It's an early Buddhist idea of a cosmic Buddha, an omniscient, all that stuff.

[01:02]

And Zen cares nothing about it. We put it in our chant to show early Buddhists that we know what we're doing. So it's basically politics. So you should not take everything in Buddhism seriously. The same person asked me, why is it so rare and hard to realize and blah, blah, blah. When it's available... in every moment.

[02:05]

Well, that's quite true and it's good to notice that it's available. But there are 7.5 billion people in the world and not many of them practice the Dharma. I think we don't even represent a measurable percentage. Yeah, so it's rare. And it's rare that we're doing it together. Now, if we are going to know ourselves, we should at least know our psychological, personal processes. And we should know our phenomenal processes, how we know the phenomenal world.

[03:27]

And that takes, as we've been discussing, attentional skills. Now, of course, Buddhism would never really say, know oneself or thyself. Buddhism would say something like, as it does, know things as they actually are. I mean, strictly speaking, from the point of view of Buddhism, we're ingredients. Just one of the ingredients in a whole lot of ingredients. And we're the only ingredient that thinks the whole world was made in our image. But Buddhists don't usually think that.

[04:50]

We're just ingredients. And we're going to look at how we mix ourselves in these ingredients. Okay. Okay. Now, this is the last Tay Show, I believe, unless some of you want to stay on. Or at least you can come back sometime. So I thought somehow I should talk about the skills necessary to notice appearances because we're we're noticing practices to notice um

[05:54]

The inner processes of knowing. Praxis bedeutet die inneren Abläufe des Erkennens zu kennen. And it's also to know the outer processes by which we know phenomena. Or the inner processes by which we know the so-called outer world of phenomena. And they're the same skills. Now, noticing the five skandhas is a, we could say a process, an inner process. I could say notice the bodily mind continuum in which the world appears and we appear is, let's call it, an outer process.

[07:25]

Yeah, the world appears to us. Now, part of the five skandhas, some of you have told me you don't like the five skandhas. I don't think of it as a fan club or something like that. I don't like my five scundas. This is a scandal. I don't like my fingernails. I'm going to paint them red, but you can't paint your scundas red. Okay. Maybe somebody can.

[08:34]

So one of the secrets of the five skandhas is to notice them with sufficient particularity that you can slow down the experience of the process. Consciousness is based on the four skandhas. But it doesn't. They all happen like that, you don't notice them. One way to slow them down or to notice how you can slow them down is to notice how you notice things in the exterior world. Sometime in the 60s and 70s, before most of you were born.

[09:40]

Used to say somebody's coming down the street with a, what is it called, a slum buster, a radio. Oh, ghetto blaster. A ghetto blaster, a slum buster, a ghetto blaster. You can see my mind working. A slum buster, a ghetto blaster. And people used to walk around with him in San Francisco, in the ghetto where the center was, at full volume. Big radios. So sometimes from a far distance you'd hear something. And the form of the first skanda means also something that arises. And this word form in the first skanda also means something that appears.

[11:22]

So you notice some kind of signal, some sort of feeling, some sort of hearing. And then you begin to have some feeling about it. Yeah, still it's affecting you and it's now the first and second skandha. And after a few minutes, as the ghetto blaster gets closer, the slum buster gets closer. You realize you have the perception, oh, that's a slumber. No, no, that's a ghetto blaster. Yeah, and then you recognize, oh, yes, that's a song from a movie. So that's a perception, that you notice it's a song or it's a slum buster.

[12:46]

And then you have associations. You know what movie it was and that your mother liked the song or something like that. And then the name of the movie and Humphrey Bogart and your mother and all sort of float, become part of the texture of consciousness. And then the name of the film, and Humphrey Bogart, and your mother, and so on. All of this becomes part of the tissue of consciousness. So you, I mean, with that illustration, you see the process of the fire scandals happening to you. But a process like that is happening at each moment.

[13:48]

And the practitioner, the yogi, decides... to make themselves familiar enough with the process to slow it down and feel how you put a perception and consciousness and the world together. And they're called aggregates or constituents, and they aggregate. accumulate.

[14:50]

Okay. Again, all of these things make you feel in possession of your own life. Okay. All right, so now let's look at the mental continuum. Maybe we should call it the body-mind continuum, or maybe even the plural of continuum is continua, the body-mind continua. Again, I give you a bunch of words because these are not entities.

[15:53]

They're experiences, and we can attach various words to them, but the words are only signposts. And don't name anything real. They're real as processes, as change changes changing. They are real as processes, for example as changes that change. And again you are in this, as I said, no beginning, no middle, no end.

[16:54]

Now, I think that the noticing appearances is, you know, I speak about it as if you can all do it, we can all do it, and it's taken for granted that you can do it. But I think it's actually a more developmental process than we realize. In other words, right now you're all appearing in my sensorium. And I can know that you're appearing in my sensorium. Und ich kann wissen, dass ihr in meinem Sensorium, in meinen Sinnen, erscheint.

[18:15]

And individually and as a field you appear in her sensorium differently than in my sensorium. Und individuell und als Feld erscheint ihr in ihrem Sensorium anders als in meinem. And in each of us, and there's this, and these are kind of presences or energetic fields that are overlapping. And in each of us. And these are presences or energy fields that overlap more or less. And you may think that even that's a fairly complex way to look at appearances. And since consciousness offers you none of this information, or very little of it, it's only offered to you by wisdom. And then through wisdom you can begin to parse your experience.

[19:16]

Yeah, to parse means I don't know, do you have the word in German? To parse a part, divide a sentence into its parts of speech and analyze it, or a poem into its, how it's written. That's called parsing. I think if you do coding, computer, it's called parsing when you analyze the parts of the Okay, so here I am sitting talking to you about practice. And Zen practice is pretty simple, really, if you have a few of these views. Yeah, a view is to know it's not knowing thyself, it's knowing this ingredient among other ingredients.

[20:39]

That's a view. And to really bodily recognize that can be an enlightened experience. So if you practice, if you sit, sitting does... Just the effort of sitting does a lot. But I really don't like when Zen practice and Buddhism is oversimplified. Join us, join our newsletter and we'll show you in 10 steps how to realize, etc. I mean, it's done.

[21:41]

I mean... To sit, just sit, you're not just sitting, you're stopping yourself in space and time. Also, du sitzt nicht nur, sondern du hältst dich an in Raum und Zeit. And then you're cultivating the attentional skills that develop from stopping yourself in space and time. And you need some suggestion about how to do this. And... And so much of it is picked up just by practicing with others.

[23:00]

Okay. Now, one of the ways to develop the attentional skills of appearance, which I just mentioned, some aspects of appearance, Is to follow a thought or a feeling or an image to its source. And this is taught to, you know, like you. Mythological, you know, it's taught, you know, go back to past lives, etc. Zen places no emphasis on past lives. Dealing with this one life is hard enough.

[24:12]

But it's quite useful. It sounds contradictory because what we're really interested in is the present moment. So why do we worry about following a thought to its source? Because it's a way to parse or understand or notice the mental continuum. Weil es eine Art und Weise ist, das mentale Continuum aufzugliedern und zu bemerken. Because appearances appear in the mental or bodily mind continuum. Weil Erscheinungen im körperlichen Geist continuum erscheinen.

[25:13]

That must be obvious to you. Das muss offensichtlich sein für euch. Well, it's obvious to us, but to really feel ourselves in this continuum... takes some wisdom and tension. Following a thought to its source is a As a skill. Takes a while to learn. But, you know, I should have told you this in the first day because then you would have had seven days to work on it. I'm sorry. This is my way to get you to come back. Next session we'll, you know.

[26:21]

A prequel. Okay. So something occurs to you in Zazen. And generally, when we want to do this, it's often a thought that disturbs us. Und normalerweise, wenn wir das machen wollen, dann ist es ein Gedanke, der uns stört. Or it's a comparison with someone else or jealousy or anger or something like that. Oder ein Vergleich mit wem anders oder Eifersucht oder Ärger oder so. But, you know, it can be any mental formation, but usually it's more interesting at first at least to follow... Why do we have this hostility towards such a person? Or why was I hurt by what that person said? Oder warum hat es mich verletzt, was dieser andere Mensch gesagt hat?

[27:38]

Or why am I falling in love? No, we usually go forward with that, not backward. Oder warum verliebe ich mich? Aber damit gehen wir normalerweise nach vorne und nicht rückwärts. So you feel something, some kind of irritation or hostility or any mental formation. Or you say, where did that come from? And then you try to, what thought preceded that? And for the sake of simplicity, I'll say thought. I could say image or whatever. Feeling, emotion. So what mental formation preceded that? More emotional formation. And at first, you're lucky if you can go back one or two steps. But if you continue this practice, you can usually go back quite a few steps.

[28:56]

Sometimes back to earlier in the day or even the previous day. Something that happened this morning. created a certain mood which then made you more sensitive to something at lunch and so forth. Again, you can get quite skillful with this. So skillful that you can go back to bright spots in your memory when you first crossed a street or when Mrs. Marshall in the third grade did such and such, you know.

[29:58]

Du kannst das so gut können, dass du dann zurückgehen kannst zu hellen Flecken in deiner Erinnerung, zum Beispiel als du das allererste Mal eine Straße überquert hast oder als Frau Marshall das und das gemacht hat. And then if you really make those clear spots in the past clear and you can stay with it. Und wenn du diese klaren... Make them vivid or clear or physically present to you. You can feel to some extent that you can actually go forward through the day or backward through the day and back to the next day. You can even see the desks in Mrs. Marshall's third grade class. And her daughter, Sandra, who was in the same class. And her daughter, Sandra, who was in the same class.

[31:17]

I like that. It's kind of interesting. You know, it gives you something to do during Sashin when your legs are dying. It's interesting. Were your legs hurting while I was watching Mrs. Marshall's Sandra? Okay, so this is a skill, and it's taught usually, referred to as going back to past lives, etc., And it was a very strongly pointed out part of the Buddhist enlightenment experience as it's recounted. Okay. So I see that I can't get very far in this, but I will continue for a little bit. So what do you notice first? You're beginning to follow these things, and usually you'll come back to something that triggered it.

[32:20]

And after a while, if you do this with many thoughts, many mental formations, you begin to get an inventory of the triggers. This is knowing thyself, I guess. The selfie triggers. And usually there's four or five that are, whenever they appear, you know that it's downhill from then on. So, okay, so now you're developing an awareness of the mental continuum simply by following a thought to its source. So as the mental continuum is going on, which is called the phenomenal world,

[34:01]

You are more and more aware of the process happening as it's happening. And you even become aware of in which skanda the trigger occurred. and you get so you can catch the trauma the trigger which sometimes is traumatizing As it happens. Usually, by the time you notice you have a headache, what triggered the headache was ten minutes earlier or two days earlier. Zum Beispiel wenn du merkst, dass du einen Kopfschmerz hast, dann ist häufig das, was den Kopfschmerz ausgelöst hat, liegt zwei oder mehrere Tage zurück.

[35:19]

Aber wenn du den Auslöser in dem Moment, in dem er stattfindet, fängst, you can often cut off the traumatic reaction or whatever immediately. Now, what you're watching when you follow a thought to its source, you're watching the mental continuum or psychological continuum as it appears through non-attentional mind. So you're able to observe the sequence of mental formations what led to the present feeling, emotion, thought, or whatever. But that's a non-attentional mental continuum.

[36:33]

Oh, attentional. Non-attentional. Non-intentional. Okay. Yeah. And so what you begin to see is there's cookie cutter or view cutter. Cookie cutter, you know, means view cutter, right? So we have view cutters that impress views on the mental continuum. Okay. I suddenly feel I'm getting too complicated but this is really simple you have to get used to doing it yes the triggers can be in can they be in different skandhas any skandha any skandha It could be somebody running into you with a motorcycle.

[37:51]

Which is not coming from inside. It happened to me once. Elia Kazan is the director of On the Waterfront and East of Eden and so forth. His son was a little younger than me and in college with me. Elia Kazan's son, Chris Kazan. And I dropped out of college and had gotten in the merchant marine and was just coming back from the Near East and the ship stopped in Boston. This is just an anecdote, obviously. Yeah, and I was with my friend Earl who just died a few months ago. And it happened to be Thanksgiving. So we had went to some kind of diner, restaurant, I don't know, and had turkey.

[39:02]

And we couldn't eat it all, so I took one of the turkey legs and stuck it in my sleeve. And I came out of the restaurant, and here comes Chris Kazan. I didn't know who it was at that time. I mean, I knew him, but I didn't know. On a motorcycle heading straight toward Earl. He was rather drunk. Not Earl and I, but Chris. And the motorcycle suddenly turned right toward me and came right at me. And I did what I couldn't do now with my cane and my, you know, I jumped up on the motorcycle, put the front wheel between my legs.

[40:08]

I grabbed the brakes and braked the motorcycle. It's like something out of a movie. Then I did something that I can't do with my back foot anymore. I jumped on the motorcycle and had the front wheel between my legs. And then we ran right into a car, except that I just stopped the bike, without breaking it, about the time we came up to the fender of the car, so we didn't dent the car. And now Earl was suddenly 50 feet away. I went racing across the square. backwards and he looked in horror thinking I might be dead so I pulled the turkey leg out of my I saved the turkey leg I said I saved the turkey leg

[41:18]

And I gave Chris kind of a hard time. The next day I walked into Hayes-Bickford, which was a cafeteria and square. It was a kind of cafeteria. Nowadays it would be called Starbucks. Yeah, and anyway, there was Chris bragging about his event to his friends. And I ran my mask up and I went up to him and I said, you could have killed me, you idiot. So these events, like e-mail events, don't have to come from the skandhas.

[42:43]

Or it happened in the skandhas as soon as it ran into me. Okay, so let me just give you a summary, what I might say, pre-anecdote. And if you... She'll put it on the website to sign up for the sequel. But if you begin to be really familiar with the non-attentional... mental continuum then you can start seeing what happens when you bring attention to the mental continuum and bringing attention to the mental continuum means that you know it's always also mind which is also part of bringing clarity and preciseness to to the mental continuum then

[44:13]

the moment-by-moment appearance, which arises, which I call ADC-ing, this is my own, A is appearance, D is durative, and C is ceasing. So all Appearances, they appear, they have duration and they cease. And it's called a dharma when it has a fourth mark. There's three marks, A, D, C. And when you add disappearing, that you intensely erase it, that makes it a dharma.

[45:29]

When it has three marks, it's just the way the world is. When it has four marks, which is your relationship to it, it becomes a dharma. So the appearance within the mental stream or the body-mind continuum is a process which allows you to be actually engaged in immediacy. In this reciprocal world. Okay. So that was the first part.

[46:37]

I think that was a teaser. It's also because I'm sad that we're just going to separate soon. Thank you very much. May our existence be equal to death for every being and every being.

[47:10]

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