I have to ask the inevitable question, does anybody here have no experience with Zen meditation practice? Two, three, four, five, six, seven. And did any of you have... Well, I suppose I should say something. I'll say a little something about Zen sitting. But perhaps those of you who don't have any experience, you could ask specifically. Rika or Eric, because he's good at sitting on a chair. Or someone else.

[01:05]

How is your foot? Is it getting better? And I'll try to say something about Zen meditation practice which will be useful to you, hopefully useful to you, even if you are somewhat experienced. And it's always useful for me at least to keep looking at things in a very basic way and that's characteristic of Zen teaching. And the basic outer posture is your backbone. And you could take a lesson from all these young pine trees and spruce trees out here.

[02:27]

Their trunk is quite good. So you want to have a lifting feeling through your back. And a relaxing feeling coming down through you. And you can sometimes get that lifting feeling by breathing in and holding and breathing in and holding and breathing in and holding a little bit and sort of lifting yourself up with your breath from inside. And the same lifting feelings in the back of your neck. Your tongue is at the roof of your mouth. And your legs, generally you want in such a way that it concentrates your heat.

[03:41]

If you're sitting in a chair, you can't do that. You want to sit some way, as much as possible, so your body is brought together. And the main inner posture is uncorrected mind. But you need a little inner posture to realize uncorrected mind. Unfabricated mind. And that is your breath. And there are many practices with your breath, but basically you're bringing your attention to your breath in various ways.

[04:48]

And your breath is a bridge between inside your body and outside your body. And it's the function of your body that you have some conscious relationship to. And your breath is also the main bridge in your practice, the main bridge of practice, in daily life. All of the developed practices of meditation assume your mind never leaves your breath. Now, that's not easy to do.

[05:54]

But it's possible. I think if you know it's possible and really not so difficult, it will actually be easier to do it. Now, the title of this seminar is The Transformation of Self in Western Buddhism. Is that right? Something like that. What's it say? In Zen Buddhism. Okay. The Transformation of the Self in Zen Buddhism. And I think we'll have to say, since we're all sitting here in the center of the West, in Western Buddhism, Now the practices I would like to give you, I think, are the eight vijnanas.

[07:32]

And do we have a blackboard or something like that we could have in the room tomorrow? Okay, an architect must have something like that, right? Because I think if I can write some of these things down, it'll make it much easier for you to remember them. No, no, tomorrow is fine. And, of course, I'm not going to go into much detail on anything this evening. But let's see. Buddhism is a kind of, how can we describe it? It's a rather large teaching. Developed over the last 25, 26, 700 years. And it develops out of a stream of teaching that goes back in India 3000 B.C.

[08:44]

or so. And there's probably been no major figures or development in Buddhism since the 13th century. So we're talking about a pretty ancient teaching that was then worked out in its possibilities over many centuries. So what pertinence, what importance a relationship does it have to us today?

[09:55]

Hmm. Well, I think it's the most useful sort of fundamental teaching to look at things. But for each one of you in the particularity of your life, it may not be the best way for you to go. Buddhism has primarily developed when it entered a new milieu and country. So in other words, Buddhism had a certain basic way of looking at the world and the human being, and that development proceeded till it kind of got as developed as it could be.

[11:05]

And then at that point, entering a new country, the new country changed So I expect Buddhism to develop, definitely change and probably develop in its entry into the West. So that we've got a situation where you have sort of a big umbrella teaching Buddhism. Then you have Then you have schools within Buddhism, and particularly schools related to China, to Korea, to Japan, to Tibet, and so forth.

[12:17]

And maybe those are smaller umbrellas under the big umbrella. Mm-hmm. And then Buddhism is developed, say, within Japan, how it works for each individual in relationship to these two umbrellas. Now, that development depends on the individual and the particular kind of country and time. And that's really not developed in the West. Now, in Japan, for instance, there are many things that are in Japanese culture and Japanese crafts and arts and so forth that relate the individual to Buddhism.

[13:26]

In addition to the practice itself. And it may be that psychology in the West will be the way the individual relates to these two umbrellas. So, I mean, Buddhism, I guess you'd say that Buddhism assumes its job is to be this big teaching, and exactly the way it relates for each individual in a new culture is sort of up to us to decide. However, if we're going to have Western psychology work with Buddhism, we have to understand what the dynamic of Buddhism is.

[14:38]

What the dynamic of Buddhism is. And if the dynamic of psychology is different, then the dynamic of Buddhism, we're going to have a problem, even though psychology does relate to our lives. Now the early model of psychology, you know, when Freud started psychology Well, we could say Freud started psychoanalysis. Psychology in some forms existed forever. But it's really what Freud did that made all the other practices and psychologies kind of like come alive or appear or be developed and so forth.

[15:59]

And he used psyche analysis or psychoanalysis And identifying psyche with the unconscious. And proposing what was at first a hypothesis that there's an unconscious. Now we take it, what was a hypothesis, we now take for granted, yes, there is an unconscious. I think probably the truth is somewhere in between. That the... unconscious as a hypothesis is a very powerful idea, but it may actually limit the way we look at human beings.

[17:07]

So I would suggest that during these three days, today and Saturday and Sunday, that you Not exactly take for granted you have an unconscious, but also not deny that you have an unconscious. Maybe pretend you're Freud, sort of trying to explain your life and saying, Jesus makes sense if I think there's an unconscious. Mm-hmm. Okay, and then the way he was going to do something with this unconscious and his psyche was he's going to analyze it. And from where was he going to stand when he analyzed? Well, his standpoint was what I think was called in psychology at the time practical ordinary mind, or ordinary mind, or something like that.

[18:24]

Or your ordinary waking mind. But... This is definitely not the approach of Buddhism. Now, psychology is not by any means Jungian psychology or Mendels or Hillman or people archetypal psychology is not limited to this early image of Freud's. But still, this image of psyche and analyzing ourselves and using our waking mind as the main vantage point is a very common idea for all of us. So you might also take a position, can the psyche analyze itself?

[19:33]

Or can the unconscious itself heal itself, if we're talking about healing? And also this psychology started out with the model that there were problems to be analyzed. And Buddhism certainly isn't about whether you have problems or not. You may have them, but that's part of it, but it's not all of it. And one of the senses was that if you can make the psyche more conscious and make these problems more conscious that in itself is healing.

[20:56]

But I think most of us have problems with which we're quite conscious that we don't heal just because we're conscious of them. But I think that it is true that a certain kind of making things conscious is healing. It's not just the analysis that's healing, but the making conscious which is healing. But then we have to ask, what aspect, quality, dimension of consciousness is healing?

[21:59]

Because, again, we know when we're conscious of a problem, it doesn't heal it. But the making something conscious in some ways tends to heal things. Okay. Some other basic things I'd like to bring up, which I didn't talk about here last year, in May, was it? Early May? Beginning of May, yeah. Some real basic assumptions that are behind Buddhism and all the teachings that have come out of India. And I spoke about this in Cortona and in the Sashina, At some point, these Indian guys decided that, yes, we have a waking mind.

[23:18]

But the waking mind doesn't know all of us. Because obviously we have a dreaming mind. And the waking mind is not so conscious of the dreaming mind. And even if you do, as all of you probably have sort of tried to remember your dreams, analyze them, when you try the very act of analyzing, they start slipping away. There is a way in which us upright creatures have to sleep. Perhaps dolphins living in a waterbed horizontally don't have to sleep. But the kind of energy that it requires to be upright and have two legs instead of four, horses can sleep standing up.

[24:41]

We have to lie down. whatever the reason, we do lie down and we do go to sleep. And when we sleep, we have dreaming sleep. And dreaming sleep introduces us, as you well know, to a world that doesn't entirely make sense in waking. I had a funny dream the other night. Like a comedian. A friend of mine was going to fly a 747 without being in the pilot's seat. First, the dream first started, he was leaving his first nice friend of mine who lives in Los Angeles.

[25:56]

And he'd been living at Crestone for a while. And he was ready to leave, and he was leaving by submarine. Now Crestone is high desert and there's no water. But, you know, it seemed quite normal for him to be leaving by submarine. It was a big plastic toy, expanded, and he and everybody were getting in. I said goodbye and off they went. And they were going to a regular land with air and everything, but it could only be reached underwater when they didn't surface again. It made perfect psychic sense to me.

[27:09]

It didn't make waking sense, but it made perfect psychic sense. And then there was some transition. The next part of the dream, he was going to fly a 747, as I said, without being in the cockpit. And I couldn't quite believe this. But the plane was taking off, so I got on it in my dream. You know, it's quite easy to get on when you're in your dream. And... So I saw him, he was standing in the back part of the fuselage flying the plane. So I went up into the cockpit.

[28:10]

Sure, there was a pilot. And yes, there was a pilot and a navigator and a co-pilot. And one of them was asleep and they had their feet up and they were talking, paying no attention to the plane. So then I went back to see what my friend Eric was doing. And he'd opened a large porcelain egg that was at the side of the plane. And all these luminous tubes were coming out of it. It wasn't clear whether they were coming out or coming from his stomach in. He was standing there very concentrated manipulating these things and totally in control of the plane. Anyway, as you can see, dreams don't make daily sense, everyday sense.

[29:23]

So dreaming consciousness can't be the way we can know the world thoroughly. So then there's a third, which is non-dreaming deep sleep. Now these Indians from India who were thinking about this thought that probably non-sleeping, non-dreaming deep sleep was when you were most new the world. But you weren't conscious. So you knew the world, but you didn't know you knew the world because you were in deep sleep. So they thought about this simple thing, which we all know.

[30:28]

We spend a great deal of time in all three of these territories. We spend a great deal of time in all three of these territories. And as I say, our life is actually founded in mystery. And you spend a very large percent of your 100 years in deep sleep or dreaming sleep or waking consciousness which doesn't know deep sleep or dreaming sleep. So they decided, we've got to do something about this. There must be a state of consciousness, mind or being, which includes all three. It was really simple.

[31:30]

They said, sit down and stay awake. And that's where Zazen came from. And that's how yoga developed this whole sense of a yogic consciousness. which includes deep sleep, dreaming and waking. Okay. Now, one other element. You Just to sort of get the basic ideas here.

[32:32]

When you go to sleep, you go to sleep. Or what do you do in German? I guess you go into sleep or something, right? Schlaf gut. Gute Nacht. And so in zazen, in meditation, you also go into zazen. Like if you, again, obvious example, if you lay in bed all night and you don't go to sleep, you don't feel rested the next day. But if you go to sleep, even for a few hours, you'll feel rested. So this transition between waking mind and going to sleep is actually more restful than the physical rest. So you've actually changed your consciousness in some way.

[33:55]

Something has changed because once you're asleep it's different than when you're awake. And I have a student who who has trouble going to sleep but also can't go into zaza no matter how much she sits she doesn't go into zaza her waking mind is always present and after Years of trying, I find it stopped doing zazen. It's crazy.

[34:57]

Okay, so we're also talking about a transition, because I'm trying to establish the ingredients we're talking about here. A transition where we go to sleep, where we're no longer awake. But in zazen, you learn to go to sleep, sort of, but you stay awake. Okay. I think that's enough for right now. This practice of knowing your consciousness, or being, knowing is okay, knowing your consciousness, which includes your body,

[36:18]

and the phenomenal world, this practice is the practice of uncorrected mind. And how we arrive at that through a deep understanding of consciousness. And a deep practice of consciousness. I will try to give you an understanding of that feeling for tomorrow. I actually want to teach you something. And so I'd like to... know as we go along, find some way to know whether you're getting what we're talking about.

[37:48]

And I think I'm talking to three audiences here. One audience which understands these things pretty well intuitively or through exposure but doesn't practice much. And another audience which practices and tries to meditate and also bring these practices into their daily life.

[38:48]

Is that loud enough? A little louder. And the second group may, you see when I speak that loud I hear an echo here, but I guess back there you don't hear. The second group may understand these things or may not, but they're trying to bring the extent that they do understand them into their practice. And it's much harder to understand these things in the context of practice.

[39:51]

Well, actually, it's easier. But realization of them is required, not just understanding. And that realization is easier, but the understanding may be harder until realization is there. And I guess there's a third group here who may not be that interested in Zen Buddhism or practice. But you have your own practice, your own way you want to live, and somehow these things are interesting to you. And they perhaps stir up how you think and make you think more in fresh ways about the way you live your own life.

[40:54]

So assuming that since I know some of you, quite a lot of you, since assuming that that's our three audiences here, I'll try to speak to the three of you. But as I go along, if you have something you want to interrupt me with or bring up, that's okay. Now, I don't want to inhibit you. But I'd rather it not be just random speculation.

[41:57]

Or the first thing that comes to your mind. I'd rather you let it cook in you a little bit. But if you feel it physically, say something. And mostly I think you understand that. But sometimes it's too easy to talk, everybody starts expressing their own views about things and we don't get anywhere. So how can I say that without inhibiting you? If it's, as I noticed teaching in Europe, if it's a French audience, it wouldn't inhibit you. German or Swiss, it would probably inhibit you.

[43:00]

Austria, I don't know. Okay. Now, I'm going to present these things, but I don't want to present them in a coercive way. In other words, I'm not saying these things in a way that this is the way it should be or this is right or something like that. You know, I may present it with that feeling, but my larger feeling is, you know, each of you has to discover your own way.

[44:00]

Now, let me say something about Zazen. And also, since you... I gave such a brief description of Zazen yesterday, if some of you have something you'd like to ask, you can ask me. Yes? No? I noticed, I think three of you are sitting with your head quite far back. And that may be a personal way that you found to meditate that works for you personally.

[45:10]

Or it may arise out of some teaching. For instance, I know Sufism teaches sometimes that you sit with your head back. But in the Buddhist, Taoist, Hindu yoga sort of world, you virtually always sit with your head and your backbone in a line right up to the back of your head. And mainly because of the relationship to thoughts and images and how your energy works in this posture. So you can sit as you wish, but also if you want, you can try this for this weekend, if you want to see whether it makes work for you.

[46:21]

So if you were trying my way, I should try this way during the seminar. Actually, I have tried it some, but not as much. This seminar, I thought, well, after the seminar, I'll try that for a while. Because you don't really know how something works until you spend, I don't know, 50 hours in the territory. Or at least 5 or 10. Now, my sense in the past doing seminars has been to present the teachings in a way that could be useful to you over a period of a year or so between my visits.

[47:30]

And most of what I presented, most of you were too unfamiliar with for me to get to really find out if you understood. But now I feel that it is possible to find out how you understand things. Okay, let's see what I would say are the main ingredients of practice.

[48:45]

I'm only learning how to become a teacher, leave the black one. Ich bin noch ein Anfänger bei dem Versuch, mich als Lehrer zu betätigen. Und das Wichtigste in der Prioritätenliste ist das Gelöbnis. I'll kind of make that as open as possible. Because the sense in Buddhism is, even if you don't take a Buddhist vow, you should take some vow in your life.

[49:57]

But you can't... Can you read that? non-coercive, inclusive life choice. What is non-coercive? You're not forcing yourself, not forcing something on yourself. I have many such coercive vows. And if you practice in such a way that you're forcing it on yourself, your practice won't work very well. Unless you were assigned to a monastery at 14 and you have no other way to get your food.

[50:57]

Um... Okay, next might be cellular stability. I can't spell, sorry. I can't spell your greatness. I'm not sure that's right. I made up too many L's.

[51:58]

Cellular stability. Now, again, this is, you know, after teaching for quite a while, I tried to look at what works in people. And this is definitely one of them. And I don't know any other word. It's just a phrase that occurred to me. It's not a traditional Buddhist term. But for instance, in Tibetan Buddhism, the beginning practice is 100,000 vows. No matter how well you understand teaching, there's a real difference between somebody who's on the other side of the 100,000 vows. I don't... It's not exactly... Easy to say what happens, but something happens that you can't understand.

[53:18]

And maybe in Zen you could say there's a difference between having done 20 sesshins and not having done 20 sesshins. And there's a big difference to having really done one or two. And you can see it in people. There's a kind of brightness in their cells. And there's a kind of physical stability, some kind of stability in the inside level. And that makes possible a lot of the teaching that what I'm calling cellular stability makes that possible.

[54:18]

Now, you can get that through a life crisis or a mindfulness practice, so forth, but generally it's a demanding physical practice. And the most basic of all the practices that I've been using is mindfulness. No, there's many, many. This covers everything. But in the simplest sense, it means bringing... It means not straying from your awareness in your 24 hours. Or at least being committed to not straying from your awareness for the 24. And that's where the vow comes in.

[55:27]

Because in various ways, if you make a vow, Even if your practice is incomplete or just, you know, the vow is working in you at the same time. So discovering your vow is really important. What can you in your life say, this is the way I want my life to be? In a way that concludes your life, doesn't exclude things, but still is something definite that you can feel.

[56:34]

Now, in Western psychology, which I think we have to talk about a little bit, There's a lot of words, self, soul, psyche, spirit, script. And Buddhism, those different words aren't so important. Because Buddhism divides the world into relative and absolute. And what I call divided,

[57:48]

It's a threat, okay? You can't see we're over there, can you? Oh. You don't have your glasses with you? Anyway, if you want, any of you can move those in. Except poor Davy has to stay by the machine. I'm causing trouble. Okay, now this division is, particularly since Nagarjuna is almost the total emphasis of Buddhism. So, words like self, self, script, psyche probably, exist on this side.

[59:31]

And archetype. And spirit probably. Okay, now Buddhism has on this side emptiness and so forth. And it has the idea itself, right? And it also has ideas of the five standards. And the eight vijnanas. The basic picture is that Buddhism attempts to bridge these two worlds with a form of self. That's not very hard to understand, but you have to be clear about it.

[60:51]

Now, one thing that's different about Buddhism, Asian culture and Western culture is as far as I can tell, and it might... Go ahead. As a moderately well-educated, but not professionally educated in psychology individual, In the West. In the West, me. If as I stick to a certain profession or a certain philosopher, you can sort of get these words clear. If I stick to a certain philosopher, Kant, or I stick to Jung, you can sort of get the terms clear.

[61:54]

But as soon as you go from Kant to Hegel or Jung to Kant, you start being... There's not an agreement on what these terms mean. Individual, person, and so forth. Now, one difference in... Buddhism is these kinds of words in the Asian world have been very thoroughly thought through, and there's a general agreement in what they mean. And one of the differences, I guess, has been more emphasis on a stream of study and wisdom than on innovation and creativity.

[63:16]

So the tradition in Asia is to be as creative as you want, but that there's always an emphasis on that creativity should also develop the past. And not reject the past. So you don't have philosopher A, C rather, philosopher C saying, philosopher B and A were wrong. You're much more likely in Asia to have philosopher C write a book and pretend philosopher A wrote it.

[64:28]

I mean, that's often, often these sutras and things, you find out much later people wrote them and they attributed them to earlier people. So it's quite a different attitude and it creates a different world. Now, the word psyche is the Greek word for breath. And the word spirit is the Latin word for breath. And I think the word soul is a kind of Germanic, Anglo word for what animates the human being. As far as I know, no one's ever worked out exactly what the relationship between spirit, soul, psyche and self is, are.

[65:46]

Right. Now, it's interesting that the word psyche is also the story based, has the story of psyche being loved by Eros and united when they overcame Aphrodite's jealousy. And so somehow this uniting of Eros with Psyche became a kind of personification of the inner person. Und die Vereinigung von Psyche und Eros wurde etwas zu dieser Personification of the inner person. Die Personifizierung der inneren Person.

[66:52]

And because the story seems very important in Western culture. Und eine Geschichte scheint in der westlichen Kultur sehr wichtig zu sein. the story of Christ, the story of Psyche and Eros, the whole use in Jungian psychology, the archetypes based on myths. I think Hillman says that the story and the archetype allow the energy of the human being to sort of come alive through these things. And so the chaos, I think he uses the word chaos to find form through story. No, I'm not here... pretending to be a psychologist.

[68:06]

It would be interesting for me sometimes to do a seminar with several psychologists and try to work on these things and make them clear. Or make them not clear. I'm not that attached to clarity. The word psychedelic is interesting. Because it means to make, delic part means to make clear. And so it means, psyche means sort of life breath. So psychedelics make the life breath clear. And those of you who may have taken psychedelics, I don't know if you'd agree with that. But they give you the sensation things are clear sometimes. But it's still... Anyway, that's enough to say.

[69:38]

Now, if story is, story archetypes and so forth are an important element in the Western character psyche and certainly in some of its psychological approaches. And through your story you find yourself even if the story is fiction or fantasy. And again, Hillman says that the mind and the story is essentially imagination and fantasy. The strong feeling in Asia is to free yourself from story. That's again a quite different position. Now I'm trying to make these things clear because you can't understand anything unless you can see differences.

[70:41]

If your general reaction is, oh yeah, I know that, groovy, you don't understand anything. How do you translate groovy? Of course, having a sense of your own story on this side of the picture is really important. So I think Eric Byrne uses the sense of script is that much of your script is unconscious and you want to discover your script.

[72:03]

I often use the word script in talking about Buddhism. And it's not so important to me whether the script is conscious or unconscious. That's the job of this side. And that's an important part of practice, but really practice is aimed at getting on this line, the line between the absolute relative. Okay. Whether your script is conscious or unconscious... and so forth, is something that happens on this side. And that's important in Buddhist practice, too. But the emphasis is always moving toward being on this line between the absolute and relative. Okay. So, one of the... I'll say a couple more things and I think we should take a break.

[73:35]

One of the dimensions of Zazen practice when you're practicing uncorrected, unfabricated mind is that you begin to know yourself in a more inclusive way than usual. And the simple picture is, there's quite a bit you know about yourself consciously, And you put that together in a picture of yourself. And there's the things that don't fit the picture you don't pay attention to. Now, this is a commonplace idea. Since Freud.

[74:51]

But in Buddhism, the emphasis isn't so much on that you don't want to know them, so you've made them unconscious or repressed them. But that you haven't been able to know them. Now, you haven't been able to know them for two reasons. One reason is your script is not inclusive enough. Another reason is these happened in a perceptual frame that's excluded from the way you store information. In other words, things have happened to you, but you haven't noticed that they've happened to you. So you've not repressed them, you didn't even know they happened, so why repress them? In this category of experience that you have had but haven't noticed, and which occurs right now, so it's not unconscious, it's just non-conscious.

[76:15]

is far more important than the unconscious. So this is one reason why psychology in the West may work very well with Buddhism. Because the work with seeing your conscious script seeing how you script yourself unconsciously and dealing with what you've repressed and so forth And using, you know, transference, resistance and all the techniques of psychology, association. Amplification. All of those things may be useful to work with, with a psychologist actually.

[77:41]

And you may want to, if you know something about those things, you can actually bring those basic attitudes into your zazen practice and see how you appear to yourself. And in the practice of uncorrected state of mind, where you try to get a state of mind that's affirmative but not critical, affirmative and not critical, accepting and observant, observant but that non-interfering observation.

[78:55]

And again, this kind of mind, I think it's best to say that it's actually a kind of physical sensation that once you get it, you can stay in that place. You can begin to just let all these things appear, including things that you say are unconsciously scripted. or parts of yourself that, as I say, float in the sticky stuff of time, float parallel to you, but you have no way of getting them. But when you in meditation shift from a temporal dimension to a spatial dimension, the sticky stuff of time becomes available to you.

[80:07]

Okay. So that can be the work of Buddhist practice or the work of psychology or both together. Then the next step is, which is more Buddhist, is to get outside your script, conscious or unconscious, and see yourself outside your script. And then the next step is to see yourself in the context of wholeness, And the next step to see yourself in the context of emptiness. To throw your scripts away.

[81:09]

And that's pretty much the territory of Buddhist practice that I'm describing here. Now up there I have the first three things, the vow, cellular stability and mindfulness. And those are the territories of practice. So the cellular stability really means physical practice, zazen and so forth. Am I speaking loudly enough, Sebastian? Okay. Hi. I was talking to you. How are you? And... Mindfulness is the realm of mental practice.

[82:25]

But mental practice in Buddhism includes the realm of consciousness. And consciousness is distinguished from the contents of consciousness. And mental practice includes will or impulse. Or intent. And in fact, you might often even say that in this category of mindfulness, intent is actually more widely descriptive than mind. Now I'm saying some of this not to be definitive, but to get you to think about these things.

[83:26]

Okay, so what unites these realms of physical practice and mental intent practice is the vow. Das ist das Gelöbnis. And the vow is actually also the resolution of what kind of world you live in. Und das Gelöbnis ist auch das Ergebnis von der Art Welt, in der wir leben. And the physical and mental practice are the discovery of what kind of world you live in. Now, in both physical practice and mental practice, you need an anchor. You need a base. Now, if you're going to practice uncorrected, unfabricated mind, And you are going to be not only in your script, you have to have some way to live or locate, to exist, or you float around.

[85:07]

And if you don't have some place to locate your sense of existence, you'll be quite frightened. And in fact, you'll just be caught up in the stream of things and you won't see the stream of things. You don't see the stream current often if it's a very strong current until you put your hand in it or rock in it and you see, oh boy, that's a strong current. So we see the current when we have some anchor in it. As we see the sun on the pine needles and the leaves. So the anchor in physical practice is primarily sitting still.

[86:36]

The physical feeling of being in surety of being able to sit still. And the main anchor in mindfulness practice, in mental practice, is your breath. Okay, so this idea of being able to locate yourself in a different, locate yourself somewhere, is essential to Buddhist practice. Now, I believe NLP, neuro-linguistic programming, like Arnold Mandel's work, and other people use this idea of switching channels. I don't know if I would use it... I don't know if the Buddhist sense of this is... I know it's not exactly the same.

[88:05]

But it's an idea that is common now, and it wasn't common in the, you know, 50s when I was studying psychology. But this idea of being able to change your location or the territorial being is necessary for Buddhist practice. Please tell me later if my writing stuff down like this is helpful to you, because it's part of the experiment. So we had to pull the territory of... which we could call script and representational thinking.

[89:24]

And conceptual thought. and dualism. Okay. Now, Buddhism wants you to stop identifying with these things.

[90:24]

Now, there's a little bit of difference between calling it representational thinking or script or conceptual thought. There's a little bit of difference between calling it script or representational thinking or conceptual thought. And each one gives you a little different gate. So, for instance, in comparative thought, you try to limit your comparing all the time. This is good and that's bad. So, if you stop comparing... Again, I have to say this for... Always. To stop comparing means you don't stop comparing always. You stop comparing for a while. For instance, you might decide to, for one year, eat the first thing that your finger touches on the menu.

[91:28]

Zum Beispiel ein Jahr lang könnte man jetzt üben, wenn man in einem Restaurant ist, dass man immer das isst, worauf man jetzt mit dem Finger zeigt, zufällig auf der Speisekarte. So you don't say, should I eat this, should I eat that? And you eat whatever it is. Also sozusagen blind Versuch, Finger auf die Karte, Augen zu, und es wird bestellt. Yeah, decide to do it for a year, six months or so. Or every other Saturday night, I don't know. And depending on your budget, aim for which part of the menu. Depending on your budget, you aim for the left side or the right side of the menu. Or you decide not to criticize any movies for a year. What did you think of that movie?

[92:48]

Now, you actually need to do something like that just to kind of get the feeling of the territory. It certainly doesn't eliminate thinking. It eliminates a certain kind of energy in your thinking. Okay, and then conceptual thought is much bigger than just comparative thought. If you're going to get out of all this dividing things, dualism, Usually this is just generally locked under dualism. You have to have some other place to live.

[93:37]

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