Now I want to come back to this, to what I said that the central act of mindfulness is to notice without thinking. I'd like to bring up again a very brief little Zen story to Yeah, to give some attention to again.

[01:08]

Shui Do was entered a room to see Nan Yuan. And he entered without bowing. And Nanyuan said, you should respect the host when you enter. Now this could be taken since he's at Nanyuan's monastery or temple. He should bow when he comes in because it's Nanyuan's place. Yeah, and that's kind of an obvious surface of the story. But more he's talking about pausing, as I always say, pausing for the particular. Or sometimes I say pausing for the particular within breath.

[02:29]

Or I said last night, I feel some... You know, I... How do I express my sense of the sacred when I speak about each of you or speak about mine? Because, I mean, inside myself I want to bow each time I... see you. And that's of course the custom in Zen monastic practice to bow each time you see someone. And a bow that comes up through the body and through the hands and then you kind of disappear into the bow.

[03:48]

We could say it's a way of respecting the host. Your dogon would say something like unconstructed in stillness. So I'm again trying to describe the territory of practice and change or allow us to feel some change in our territory of being alive or, you know, So I'll repeat Dogen's unconstructed instillness. Which he says goes beyond realization. And what he means is

[04:48]

It's a practice that matures realization. And it's a practice based on enlightenment. And so anticipates enlightenment. So many practices are understood as both anticipating and maturing enlightenment. So unconstructed in stillness. Now, I've been trying to find ways to explore this with you for, not with you particularly, but some of you, for several weeks. What is this, you know, long before Zen, this practice of... knowing without a conceptual perception.

[06:27]

As I described it, it's like coming into the rawness of the present. But peeling the skin off an orange. You peel the concepts off the world. And this is also the pause for I feel like I'm back in the 60s. To notice without thinking. So when you notice something, you just notice it for a moment.

[07:28]

This is easy to do. But to develop a habit of doing it, this is, again, one of those... is again at the center of our practice. So whatever it is, you just notice it, And then you might think about it, but you just notice it. It's a kind of physical feeling. Thank you. And if you develop the habit of noticing without thinking, again, also thinking, but initially noticing something without thinking.

[08:58]

So when Shuedo came in the room, that's what somehow you come in with this pause for the host or pause for not discriminating. And you first have to try these things out a little bit slowly. But what you do is you end up developing a mental continuum of selflessness. Okay, now, you may have some fruitful questions about this, but self is a concept

[10:06]

that functions within consciousness. So self is a function of consciousness. It lives, swims in, lives in, functions in consciousness. And so when you notice without discriminating or notice without conceptualizing, When you start making a habit of that, you generate a mental continuum that is selfless. you feel the activity of self much less than you do in thinking mind.

[11:23]

Now, as I said way back, and I emphasized it in the Munchen seminar, We should learn to notice the difference between observing mind and observing self. Now, if you... If you have a sense of observation, of observing the world, we tend to say, oh, that's us observing, that's a who observing. Perhaps we could say it's more of a what observing than a who observing.

[12:42]

Now, observing self is drawing on, let's keep me for trying to say it in a brief way, but narrative relevance. Now, if you don't have narrative relevance in your knowing of the world, putting things into the framework of your personal history, You can be lost. So some people with brain damage of some kind can perceive things, but they can't relate it to memory. So it's funny, you know, I'm convinced, completely convinced, that the complexity of us human beings is to a great degree generated by language.

[13:48]

complexity of language. I don't think, and I think this research suggests this is the case, I don't think we're a human being just like we're always a human being and then at one point we happen to develop language. I think the development of language develops then the brain. And this is taken for granted in Japan. They, for instance, think you want to have as complex a language system as possible because the language system makes you smart. I read statistics that say the average IQ of the Japanese is 20 to 30 points more higher than ours.

[15:13]

Maybe we should all start learning Japanese when we're little. But they really objected to MacArthur trying to simplify things. and kind of base it on an alphabet instead of thousands of characters. And their answer would be something like, well, we probably deserve to be defeated, but we don't deserve to be dumbed down. In other words, most Japanese people think the war was probably a mistake and they were wrong, but they don't think they should be made stupid as a result.

[16:29]

Yeah, so joking aside, if language, the development of language and the interaction of the, as I've talked about often, the mother and the infant, Parallels about two-thirds of our brain size. That interaction parallels the development of about two-thirds of our brain size. Then we have a brain that develops through interactive relationships. And much of it is through language interaction. So it's an interesting kind of problem.

[17:44]

What does it mean in Zen to stop discriminating? Well, there's still an interactive knowing, it's just not tied to conceptualizing. As Dogen says, thinking, non-thinking. Or thinking through non-thinking. So this is again, in practice, you simply have to find a way to develop the habit of noticing without thinking. Again, I always feel I have to say, doesn't mean you don't think. It just means that your, let's put it, your initial mind feels before it thinks.

[18:57]

And by this habit again you develop a mental continuum that doesn't discriminate. A mental continuum that is, you know, like the kind of nest or ground of thinking mind. But thinking mind keeps resting back into non-thinking. And I would say a mature practitioner doesn't go from thought to thought, but goes thinking into non-thinking, thinking into non-thinking.

[20:01]

Yeah, and you can tend to, as I often say, it's not like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, it's 1, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, like that. Yeah, there is, if you write the numbers on something, there is a space between the numbers. But because noticing is attached to attention, because attention, noticing and conceptualizing are closely connected. Because noticing and conceptualizing are closely connected. Our mind tends to conflate all these things together. To reduce them to each other.

[21:28]

Like we don't really hear separately from seeing. Seeing and hearing, all of our senses become kind of one field of sense. We don't feel the separateness of each sense. So, for example, we see and hear in a field that we do not consciously see separately and hear separately. Yes. To notice or feel your mind in this sense of instead of one, two, three, four, five, it's one and there's a space. So the mind, there's one mind in the space and another mind in the number. Yes. Okay, so it's almost like the mind is like the page and discriminating mind is like the letters or the numbers.

[22:43]

No. So we are asking the question, what is mind? So I've got host mind and various things. But what we're talking about is two different things. kinds of mind that co-arise and are in dialogue with each other. And one can disappear into the other. And mostly, for most of us, unless you meditate, you're pretty much trapped in consciousness. That's where your identity functions and that's where you win or lose the game and where you feel anxious and so forth.

[24:00]

Yeah, and it's hard not to feel that way because your whole identity is in this space. kind of trapped in consciousness. Consciousness is no longer a tool I mean, for a practitioner, consciousness is a tool. But also non-discriminating mind is a tool. I remember when I was first practicing, I knew a young man. I don't know what's happened to him. He's no longer a young man. That's what happened to him. But he was a pure mathematician at Berkeley, at the University of California, Berkeley.

[25:06]

And I don't remember how we met, but we discovered an interesting... The pure mathematician of the kind he was has to think what hasn't been thought before. He had to think into where no one's thinking had ever penetrated. Because in order to get his Ph.D., he had to solve a problem no one had ever solved before. So among the world he lived in, people knew you had to think about it through non-thinking.

[26:25]

So he very clearly gathered all the information he could about the problem, everything you'd think about it, and then he waited for something to happen. He waited for another kind of thinking to surface. Now, I know architects who work this way, for example. They look at the site and they look at all the aspects of it. Then they maybe go to sleep or something, you know. And the building begins to design itself. It just appears. No, I don't think all architects do this. I don't think all architects do this. You have to talk to all architects. I know a cuckoo cooked this way.

[27:30]

I know a cuckoo cooked this way. [...] I remember in the Sashim that Coco Hartman was our... our dohan, and there was a cuckoo outside in the sundown. Do you remember that? And Coco was there, and it would go, cuckoo, and we'd go, cuckoo, cuckoo. But this cook, he was, you know, one of the best cooks in the United States, and he would just... He visualized a dish. And then he would cook toward the image.

[28:34]

So this is another kind of thinking non-cooking. Cooking non-cooking. Anyway, this is a different kind of thinking that some people know. And practice simply assumes, often calls it, first order mind or most, yeah. Yeah, something like that. I don't know words for it. Okay, so how do you get yourself in practice? How do you enter into the craft of this practice? Is what I call pausing for the particular. Or it's helpful to pause with your breath for each thing you see.

[29:50]

And you begin just by simple things like that, you begin to do very subtle things. Because when you pause for the particular, or you notice without thinking, you are, or let's say, pausing for the particular within breath, You're again developing this habit of joining mind and breathing. And joining mind and breathing is another one of these centers of practice, constants of practice.

[31:12]

And joining mind and breathing transforms mind. So if you want to make practice a substantial part of your life, you find a way to always feel mind and breath together. And you come into a kind of Fullness of mind. Where you can feel you're speaking on the telephone, as someone say. And you can feel, if this is a person's practitioner, or perhaps somebody who's in love with you, or you might be in love with them.

[32:21]

You can feel their whole body in their voice. Because when breath and mind are connected, the whole body is present in what you're saying and doing. Then we can talk about mind as a physical presence. Now maybe we could call this the fullness of mind. But I can also speak in effect about the essence of mind. So I'm trying to again talk about mind from the point of view of this question, talk about practice and mind from the point of view of this question, what is mind?

[33:28]

So essence of mind, you know, when you just feel things without conceptualizing, This mind present without conception. And we can call that essence of mind. So, okay. Now, this kind of practice, of course, is rooted in developing possible, most possible through developing mindfulness practice. How does your mind rest in the world?

[34:41]

The main way to develop that is having the mind rest in the breath. And the overall teaching of mindfulness, the best teaching of mindfulness, is the four foundations of mindfulness. And the first is mindfulness of the body, which includes mindfulness of the breath, mindful of your outer activity, and mindfulness of your interiority, feeling mind throughout the body. Now, I'm not going to try to... teach that today, of course.

[35:55]

But just to point out that we could spend a whole seminar on mindfulness of the interiority of the body, mindfulness of your outer activity, and mindfulness of the breath. But these are practices which both notice the mind and develop the mind. They're like gymnastic exercises which might develop the body, these develop the mind. And the second practice of mindfulness is mindfulness of the feeling, of feelings. And this means bodily feelings. And this is where we discover a body-mind, feeling of mind as bodily spirit, as the body.

[37:11]

And the third is mindfulness of mental formations. Mindfulness of the mind, but it really means mindfulness of mental formations. Yeah, this is like mindfulness of anger or whatever. And how you, by being mindful of anger in the simple way, now I'm angry, now I'm more angry. Don't try to change your anger. You accept the anger and just notice it. This is one of the entries into mindfulness practice, like the breath is another entry. You really just follow the formula.

[38:24]

Now I'm, boy, now I'm angry. Now I'm really angry. You just, of course you'd like your anger to go away maybe if you're about to break the dishes. But in general, you just accept the anger and notice it. And here, what are you doing? You're noticing without thinking. And what you're doing, of course, is you're generating a space that's not caught up in the anger. It's very much like host mind. You're finding a way to stabilize yourself in host mind or stabilizing yourself in a wide field outside the anger. And you have this power now, because you've learned still sitting, to feel as angry as you want and know you don't have to act on it.

[39:47]

Once you've broken, which is the main way to do it, is still sitting. Once you've broken the automatic connection between thinking and feeling and so forth and acting, You have a tremendous power to explore in depth your emotions. You can be as angry as you want or even as crazy as you want. And find it's occurring in a big space. But establishing this big space is not so easy. And I'm trying to find various ways to suggest that this big space we can call fundamental mind.

[41:18]

Fundamental mind. Fundamental mind. Grundlegenden Geist. I thought we had probably had a German word already. Grundlegenden Geist. Fundamental Geist. Or host mind. or big mind, or imperturbable mind, because eventually you actually develop an imperturbable, virtually imperturbable mind. This is one of the real fruits of mature practice. And it's also what Dogen means by unconstructed in stillness. Stillness is to know the stillness of the world.

[42:44]

Like I often have said, a tree is moving, but if you look carefully, the movement is all in the framework of stillness. Even in the wind, the leaves and things are always... trying to return to stillness just like an ocean wave is trying to return to stillness. So you begin to feel in the midst of activity you feel the stillness out of which the activity arises and returns. So the stillness of the outer world and the activity of people supports the stillness of mind. Now say you're in a group in a room with a bunch of people.

[44:07]

That happens to be where we are, isn't it? But let's say that we're out there, everybody fighting for teacups. And you're talking to someone. No, you're focusing on this person. But the more you have the habit of non-conceptualizing, A mental continuum of non-conceptualizing. A mental continuum of selflessness, a relative selflessness. And we can say something like observing mind or a field of mind is there.

[45:08]

in which you can feel all the people simultaneously, and individually, even while you're concentrating on one person. And that ability begins to open you up to a feeling of a mutual mind that's present among people. Which can be measured biologically, but we generally don't feel it mentally. If you imagine yourself in a group of animals, I don't know, horses or... You can feel this kind of... But if you're in a group of people, you don't feel it so much.

[46:38]

Unless the group is doing something like you all like or something, I don't know. But generally, we don't really let ourselves go even with a group of people. To lose our... I mean, we fear losing our identity in groups. And you can replace your personal identity by a group identity, and this is quite unhealthy. But if you have this sense of a wide, non-discriminating mind, as your fundamental mental continuum, then you don't lose your sense of a location at all, but you feel the wider location.

[47:50]

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