Now I'd like to start again with any comments or questions, statements you might have. Yes. If I'm right, when I concentrate on something and let everything else go... And let everything what? Everything else go past. I'm doing just the opposite of seeing things as a... Yes, they are.

[01:03]

As a process. Yeah. So, if you concentrate on one thing, you mean... You're ignoring, excluding other things. Is that what you mean? Yeah. Once I was sitting at a table with some people. Again, years ago in the 60s. I've never sat at a table, sit, no. And... there was some song somewhere. Let's make up some song. I've always loved you or something. So we're talking, seven or eight or ten people were talking.

[02:09]

And in the middle of a sentence, I said, well, let's, and I've almost always loved you. In other words, I took a phrase from the song and put it into my sentences without saying why. And excuse me for... Sounding like a salesman. Selling Buddhism. You're not supposed to sell Buddhism. But all the meditators at the table came back with something. Yeah, but you almost love us. Because the meditators were listening and heard all the background too and brought it into the conversation and the non-meditators didn't. Because you really do develop a kind of field of mind in which you can focus and maintain the field at the same time.

[03:14]

It's one of the main aspects of the meditation practice. Okay. Sorry. Yes? In Buddhism, attachment, clinging, dependence, central meanings. Also in psychotherapy, dependence is a key culture, dependent on substances or relationship. Could you comment on this notion of dependence in two contexts and their relationship? That is, when you are a Buddhist, SPEAKER 2 It's a kind of basic question that is hard to answer simply conceptually.

[04:46]

And ideally, we could create a context here where we could talk about it. Because the person, you know, I'm really interested in, well, first of all, I'm really interested in how people who don't meditate can bring, use some of the basic insights and worldview of Buddhism in their life. So I'm trying to keep this one-day seminar more focused on that than on specific practice questions. But certainly if you're a practitioner, You are attached to your children.

[05:51]

I mean, that's normal. It would be terrible if you weren't attached to your children. And... Let's see if I can give you, try to give you two differences. One is, say that we just had lunch, there was a particularly good meal. You're looking forward to it. And this is so corny, but you know, I'll continue. Corny, you know corny? Schmaltzy. Hideski, yeah. Anyway, so you're really looking forward to this meal and you're quite attached to eating it. And then somebody comes by and whisks it away. And you say, oh. And then you become attached to the sunlight on the table.

[06:53]

A kind of attachment continues, but it's on the next thing. And I noticed, I told this story yesterday, because I met with Sangha practitioners yesterday. I had a particularly good... tea cup made by Hamada, who was a national treasure potter of Japan. And I used it, and it was on my desk. And my 46-year-old daughter, who was then about four, knocked it off the table and it broke in quite a lot of pieces and I remember I was quite surprised because I was trying to take care of it somebody had given it to me but I felt really nothing when it broke except that oh now it has to be cleaned up

[08:26]

So my sense of viewing the cup as an activity, I suddenly realized I wouldn't have felt this way before I practiced. It was an activity of using it, and I was drinking out of it, then it broke, then it was an activity of cleaning it, then it was an activity of repairing it. It's a different kind of experience. The job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. So I'll come back to that. But if, for instance, as we practice on each exhale and inhale, you practice a feeling, you bring the idea, of disappearing on your exhale. So you just feel, okay. You disappear.

[09:47]

And then the world comes back with the inhale. And then you kind of disappear. And you practice that in homeopathic doses. In other words, you can do it very few times, occasionally, and it begins to change the way you feel. a few times at a time, a little bit, and then it starts to change the way you feel. So if you spend more and more of your time letting things go, releasing things, disappearing on the exhale, when things change, You're just practiced at letting them go. And it makes a difference. It really makes a difference. Okay. That's enough. But I must come back to consciousness, I suppose.

[10:50]

We're talking about mind. But someone else. You know, so many of you, all of you, look like you have such interesting questions inside you. You look like you have complex, interesting lives. Yes, there's one right there. Can we hear something about treating anxiety, personality disorders, and things like this? Depression. Depression. Depression. You said depression? Depression. Okay. It could have been regression, I don't know. Well, it's too general to say personality disorders.

[11:53]

That's a step to which kind and who's the person and so forth. Well, let's just, because if we could meet regularly, I could see if I could say something useful about it. But this is really your field as therapist, so you can teach me. Someone else? We were talking during the break, and I would like to know, what is the meditation technique, with which we can start a therapy, if we want to put our patients into a different kind of consciousness.

[12:56]

So, what is it that they are using, this meditation technique? In the break we had a conversation and I'd like to know what is this kind of meditation technique that we can use for putting the patient into another kind of consciousness or state of mind. Well, doesn't Freud say as a technique of free association is that the So Freud doesn't say that So you can assume that if you create a particular state of mind, And you can physically feel that state of mind.

[14:17]

It's a kind of embodied state of mind. You'll tend to make it likely, you'll tend to make the other person, your friend or client, enter the same state of mind. Yeah, so you can... now the When you're with somebody who's dying. One of the things that I would do, and is part of the practice too, is you adjust your breathing to the person who's dying. And there's also a certain way of putting your hands on the person, and just being beside them in the process. their bed or whatever they are.

[15:19]

But if you, without telling them you're doing this, you coordinate your breathing with their breathing. And then you let your breathing go with their breathing. And I've been with people dying quite a bit. And often they have panic attacks of some sort, you know. And it goes, and they get quite nervous, right? And you go with it, but you then kind of even it out, and you can even the person out right away, almost. And it's quite interesting, because you almost enter the mind of the dying, and you... And at the same time, your own living, more continuing to live mind, kind of draws them back into living and lets them go, etc.

[16:20]

Now that's a fairly simple example, because it's an extreme situation. But in all situations, we are extremely bodily tuned. Someone did a Well, let me say, if you take 10 or 15 meditators, and you hook them up, you know, with wires and all that, EEGs, you know, within about 10 minutes of sitting, all of their metabolisms are in sync. Okay. And synchronized. They're synchronized. Mm-hmm. But if somebody discovered this in the 60s, if they took a photograph of a group of people like this, the person who was doing it was studying it for some other reason.

[17:43]

Then what he found out? So he slowed the film down until it was extremely slow, you know, frame, frame, frame, etc. And what he discovered was in this ordinary lecture in an ordinary auditorium, In a few moments, a few minutes anyway, of the speaker speaking, the entire audience was moving in a choreographed way. I mean, people's eyelids were blinking in relationship to the person's hand moving and things like that. It's like all the grandfather clocks. Grandfather clocks? Tend to swing together in the same house. So there's an amazing... bodily resonance we have with each other.

[19:07]

And I think if I was a therapist, one of the first things I would do was establish a bodily resonance with the person and then open that resonance and let them open, etc. And I think good therapists do that, whether it's conscious or not, I'm sure they do it. You'd have to do it, you know. Okay. So that's one aspect you could do. One could do it. Okay. Yeah. To touch somebody bodily before he's ready to, he's in the state to be able to grab this.

[20:16]

Can you say it again? To touch somebody bodily. Yeah. Physically. Physically, yes. Before he's ready to receive this. Yeah. It can put him into a very aggressive state or can be harmful for the person. Yeah, that's true. So you're always waiting for permission. That's true. An invitation or a permission? Okay, someone else, yeah. If the question is if there is a relationship between this Buddhist view, to see things as a process, and between this Csikszentmihalyi's flow,

[21:27]

What kind of flow? You know, it's the flow. Csikszentmihalyi invented the flow concept. Yeah, this concept of the state of this flow. I don't know about it, so let me know. I think it measures the, you know, what sports people enter when they're there. Oh, in the zone. Yeah, and flow is a similar concept. Oh, okay. Yeah, um... Yeah, the phrase in the zone was created by a friend of mine, Mike Murphy. Yeah, there's a sense of which athletes or tennis players get in the zone, so to speak, if that's what you're referring to. Anyway, in the zone is a sports technique. And it may be similar to in the flow. No, it's not the same.

[22:33]

It's not the same, but it's similar, actually. Well, I'm sure it's related. Yes. Inside flow, inside... Drifting away. Drifting away. Drifting together. Inside drifting away, this is what he's saying. Ah, drifting away from what? Inside something. Inside drifting away, what he said. Yes. In the zone there's more spatial component to my feeling. In the flow is more time component. Yeah. Anyway, I don't know enough about it to answer. What are the terms that make the patients suffer?

[23:40]

Crime, self-knowledge, self-deception, forgiveness, change. What do you start with the terms of Buddhism? Crime, self-knowledge, self-deception, forgiveness, change. He didn't speak English. What can Buddhism do about these concepts like sin, guilt, self-badlash, self-accusation, forgiveness, redemption? You think I know more than I do. Yeah. These are the big topics of Western culture. Well, first of all, in general, in this culture, yogic culture which emphasizes seeing things as activity.

[24:56]

And isn't emphasizing identity so much. So that it's more that if you do something and you don't like it, or it's feels bad, you know, etc. If you really decide inside yourself not to do it again, you're pretty much free of it. You're not stuck with what you did because you've decided not to do it anymore. So, The difference between, and this is a so-called simplification of the shame culture versus the guilt culture. And yogic cultures are generally called shame cultures. And you feel shame about what you did. And they say that one of the basic old teachings is you can't practice Buddhism unless you're capable of feeling shame.

[26:14]

But if you feel shame and you say, I'm really ashamed of what I did, but I'm not going to do it again, you're more or less free of it. Guilt sticks to you and shame doesn't. I mean, we're all human beings, right? And surprisingly enough, we can reproduce with each other from all parts of the world. And surprisingly, we can reproduce with each other from all parts of the world. So basically we're very similar. Okay. But if you have slightly different ideas about what you're doing, it influences, it doesn't necessarily change you completely, but it influences the direction.

[27:25]

And if the direction of your life, say this is your life, right? And if the direction of your life is slightly different, after a few years it's very different. So slight changes that persist make a big difference. Okay. So let me say something about consciousness and what I call awareness. Now what I've tried to do over the years is find ways to speak about this practice. I mean, I found ways because I got stuck with the job because my teacher died.

[28:29]

I was hoping he'd be alive at least another ten years because I loved him so much and we had such a good time together. But I suddenly had to become a teacher. Okay. So I had to start saying something about practice. But what I knew sort of, but what I really found out, even though I already sort of knew it, is that the process of trying to practice with others develops your practice. So, and I'm also trying to speak, I made a decision not to use Sanskrit and Pali terms. Because if I use some Sanskrit and Pali, if I use technical terms from Buddhism, they don't mean anything to anybody.

[29:42]

So I decided to commit myself to only speaking about practice almost entirely, if I could, in English. So it means I have to create terms in English. Okay. which is also to create terms in the larger framework of Western conceptual thought. And I had to look at my own experience as a practitioner. So one of the things is that it was clear that there was some other kind of knowing that's not consciousness. So I decided to call that other kind of knowing awareness and make that a difference from consciousness.

[30:52]

Now, the word consciousness in English has in the middle of it scissors, S-C-I. S-C-I. And so the etymology of the word consciousness means to cut into parts. And the etymology of awareness means really to watch, but it's not so... Useful, but it's okay. Okay. Now, many people, for example, can decide to wake up at a specific time and wake up without an alarm clock. I don't know if almost everyone can do it, or only some people, but... A lot of people can do it.

[32:00]

And for some reason I always pick 6.02 AM when I use this example. 6.02. I usually get up at 3.30, but 6.02. So you decide to get up at 6.02, not 6, but 6.02. And you go to sleep, and you say, I'm going to wake up at 6.02. And you never know if it's really going to work. It works a large percentage of the time. And you sleep and then you say, well, I wonder what time it is. 6.02. Okay. So what knew this? What woke you up? It's not consciousness.

[33:09]

You weren't conscious during the night. Now I'm defining consciousness as that mind that wakes up in the morning and decides you have to do things. So I call this mind, which wakes you up at 6.02, I call it awareness. Now, one of the important aspects of practice is to really get a feeling for and a knowing about various states of mind. Okay. So also, another example, you're walking along.

[34:14]

You've got a bunch of Christmas presents in your arm. And some of them are glass. And you slip on the ice and fall. On the New York street. Crash. But, and you can't use your arms very well because they're wrapped with these presents you're trying to protect from breaking. And it doesn't always work, but usually you fall without hurting yourself. Somehow, you protect the presents, don't hurt yourselves, and somehow roll and hold everything. And so it's like that. This has happened much too quickly for consciousness. Much too quickly. But something knew exactly what to do and how to protect things and keep, I call that awareness. Now, what a friend of mine, Michael Murphy, who founded Esalen, discovered early on in his meditation practice.

[35:20]

Esalen Institute. It was his family's summer home and he turned it into Esalen Institute. He discovered he's one of the most natural meditators I've ever met. And he discovered that athletes, high performance athletes in particular, have very similar experiences to meditators. and he wrote a book about it called originally the psychic side of sports but later became in the zone And he often discovered that athletes didn't want to talk about it publicly because they were afraid people would think they were crazy.

[36:39]

And he finally got some athletes, when they were a little bit drunk, to talk about it. But the next day they would often deny it. But finally now, it's so well known in sports that these things happen, that big teams, football and so forth teams, have people that... teach people how to do this. And runners practice visualizing every step and then running in their visualization. These are basically yogic meditation practices or techniques. So these things that I'm talking about that come out through meditation Come out in lots of other ways too.

[37:40]

It's just Buddhism has decided to develop them for ordinary circumstances. Okay. You know, a man named Leavitt, Benjamin Leavitt, I think it is, in the 70s in San Francisco. Discovered that if you hook a person up to wires the person has decided to move his arm, for example before he consciously thinks he's decided to move his arm. So it's clear from the machines that this guy is already going to move his arm.

[38:49]

But it's about a point, a fifth of a second later that the guy decides, I'll move my arm. Okay, what he's really doing is not deciding, but editing. This physiological decision has been made before his consciousness receives the information. And when he decides to let it happen, he thinks he's made the decision. But he's actually only edited the decision. That makes sense. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Unbelievable. What? Unbelievable. Oh, it's true, though. This is true. Well studied since then. Okay. So... But awareness can know that before consciousness.

[39:52]

And the martial arts make use of this. The martial arts wants to know that the person is going to move before he or she consciously decided to. And this is a martial arts technique which they teach. And it comes out of this same culture. But actually we all know these things. It's just mostly our consciousness is not trained to let us notice it. It's trained to ignore it. Okay. Okay, so I tried to... I called this mind that appears that's not exactly consciousness, I called awareness. Okay. So then what is consciousness? I would define consciousness as the mind, the job of consciousness is to make the world

[41:11]

predictable cognizable conceptually understandable chronological and meaningful in terms of your personal history. Okay. Now using a tree as an example. You'd be very surprised if the tree that was there was gone the next morning. You expect it to be there. And in general, consciousness treats the world as predictable. And we couldn't function unless it was predictable. Okay. But of course it's not predictable. It's only relatively predictable.

[42:18]

Because the tree might be gone in the next morning. And I know that There's some beavers that live on the Rhine near where I live in Germany, and they swam across the river and cut some guy's tree down on his lawn, and he was quite irritated about it. Beaver? Okay, so we need to also have the world conceptually familiar. Okay, I just had a cataract operation. Okay. Turns out they tell me I only had 40% vision in this eye. But the world looked completely normal to me. Because my brain is really making the picture. And my eye only has to give 40% of the information on my brain makes a complete picture.

[43:26]

That worked fine until I was driving. And then when the cars are coming and trucks and lights and everything, my eye wasn't giving my brain enough information to make a complete picture, and I couldn't see what was going on. Okay, so my eyes was trying to make the world predictable. Okay, if I, my eyes are closed now. If I open them, I see you all. If I close them, when I open them again, actually it's slightly different. Each moment is slightly different. So if I do something like that and I get in the habit of it, I begin to notice differences that are not... I begin to notice the unpredictability of things rather than the predictability of things.

[44:34]

So I don't want to go into this in more detail. But from the point of view of Buddhist practice, language functions in the medium of consciousness. Karma and guilt function primarily in the medium of consciousness. And what we call the self functions in the medium of consciousness. Okay. Yeah. So, for instance, you created a... And, you know, I really want this to be relevant to you as therapists or psychologists or whatever you are. And I imagine if I was a therapist it would be useful. If I don't know quite how to, right now, at this moment, to make this relevant.

[46:33]

So let me speak about what are called the five dharmas. Now the word from the practice point of view of Dharma, which I do use this word, it basically means to see things in units of experience. Because in fact everything's changing. And so, and what, and, And time, it's past and it's future, and the present has no duration. I mean, instantly it's past. So what is the experience of duration? The experience of duration is our experience of actually, what's the word for the scanning process?

[47:39]

There's a saccadic movement. The eyes are scanning, and the brain puts together a picture. And that scanning process creates a sense of duration. A duration, yeah. No, scanning process. Scanning, you look here, and you look there, and you look there, and you put the picture together. It's an Italian scanning process. Okay. So that scanning process can become something that you're participating in. You've slowed your...

[48:43]

mind and body down and you can begin to feel things happening. And the scanning process creates a sense of duration which you can actually expand or contract. I mean, we all know that childhood seemed like it was half our life. So a child, my daughter, lives in actually a different kind of time than I live in. Her eight years are my two years. Well, that's really a physiological process. It's not just limited. You can have the experience of childhood-like time as an adult. So this noticing the experiential unit of each moment is called a dharma. I'm getting myself in too deep here.

[50:05]

This is getting more Buddhist than I wanted it to. I'm sorry. And this is a flip chart made for four-year-olds. I'm going to have to, it's a knee chart. It's a knee chart. I only have one piece of paper. One piece of paper is probably enough. There's no hope. Let me just use this piece of paper for now.

[51:07]

If I need more, I need more when I come back. Thank you very much. Appearance. Naming. Discrimination. I'm checking up what I said in there. Right knowledge.

[52:10]

And suchness. Suchness, yes. Suchness. These are called five darmas. Yes, yes. I think this is actually useful for any human being to know, even if he or she is not a therapist. Or a practitioner. Let's say you're sunbathing or meditating.

[53:16]

And you hear an airplane. Immediately, you name it. And you may start thinking about it. Our center in the mountains in Colorado is about 2,400 or 2,500 meters. And the mountain behind it is 4,600 meters or something. And the valley below us, a thousand feet below us, is the size of the state of Connecticut. It's quite remote. Until recently the nearest grocery store was a hundred kilometers away.

[54:21]

So you don't hear much, it's very silent. But it also happens to be on a direct line from Los Angeles to New York. And regularly in the morning and the evenings you hear the airplanes flying. Okay. So you're meditating or relaxing out on the bench in the sun. And you hear the airplane. It's almost impossible not to think it's an airplane. But at the moment of noticing it's an airplane, you can sort of peel the name off it. So it's just a sound. And sometimes it's like the music of the spheres. The heavens are... Okay. So that would be interrupting the process of naming. Or you might think, That's a plane going to New York.

[55:50]

And my friend who lives in both New York and Los Angeles, maybe he's up there ordering an orange juice right now. That's discrimination. That's thinking about, that's discursive thinking. OK, right knowledge. means you're aware that everything is changing and activity and so forth. So it's your second chance to interrupt the discrimination. And if you interrupt the discrimination with right knowledge, we have what we call the Buddhist term translated into English suchness or thusness.

[56:53]

Which means that you feel the momentariness of everything, of each thing, without thinking about it. So you know it, but you don't think about it. And that knowing And feeling the momentariness is another word for emptiness. And it's called suchness. Okay. Now, say I come in this door. You can practice with your initial state of mind. And I do this. So I open a door. It's a threshold. Or in English, it's an end trance.

[58:04]

So you step across the... Yeah, you can't pun like that in Hungarian, probably, right? You have different puns. I'm getting very attached to my translator. I walk in, I open the door and I don't think anything. I just feel the space. You could call that suchness or awareness. And then I come in and I think about what I have to do. That mind also allows appearance. Okay. Now, I use the example of the stick. Once you are identified with the field of mind rather than the contents of mind, things don't exist as entities, they exist as appearances. They appear to the senses.

[59:09]

Yes, it's also a an airplane crashing into the meditation hall. But, oh, it's an appearance. Well, this is a serious appearance. Because it is in fact an appearance in your sense, in your sensorium. So you experience it as an appearance and then you release it as an appearance. So you receive the appearance and you release it. You learn a kind of thing of receiving, accepting, releasing. And this also enters you into the momentariness.

[60:10]

Okay. Now, we know things in other ways than consciousness. Now, as a... I think the martial arts term of soft eyes. You use it in... If you feel that you're seeing is at the back of your eyes. It's a physical feeling. You see the field rather than the... contents which are named and discursively thought about. And Mikael, who's a pretty experienced martial artist.

[61:12]

And also an artist. I think he will say that if you're thinking about it, if you're practicing martial arts, you may get hit over the head. But if you just feel the field, And when you feel the field, you are sliding into a mind we'd call non-duality. Because you're feeling the field, and you're part of the field, and you're not saying, that's separate, and that's over there, etc. Now, you can practice this without doing zazen, without doing meditation. You can use the physical sense of soft eyes, where you can just get used to feeling situations rather than thinking situations.

[62:23]

For instance, right now, when I'm speaking with you. I tend to pay attention to a particular. Your shoes, which are quite interesting, the way the straps go. So I go from a particular to the field of you all at once. And then I go to a particular. Oh, your shoes are quite interesting, too. Or, you know, Whatever the particular is, your glasses, your fingers. And then I go back to the field. And by doing that, without thinking about you, I have a feeling of being connected with you and speaking within that connection that's not the same if I'm thinking. Okay, okay. Now I'm sort of wandering around here and what I'm talking about.

[63:36]

We should take a break in a few minutes. We should have taken a break before. When you go to sleep, I'm just using this as an example of Something you can notice and study which is not the same as meditation. Okay, so you're trying to go to sleep. Or you want to go to sleep. And meditators in general can go to sleep instantly, almost. You can take five minute naps or, you know, if you're married, your wife is in the middle of a conversation with you and you say, I'm going to sleep. come back, I want to finish my sentence. Because you get experience of letting consciousness go. Well, The distinction between awareness and consciousness.

[64:45]

So you don't identify as you're going to sleep, you don't identify with the consciousness. And I think that's why people count sheep and things like that. In cartoons at least. Because you're doing something that's repetitious. You're not thinking about each sheep. You don't say, oh no, that's a cute sheep. So you shift your attention Now attention and intention function in both consciousness and awareness. And you can think of these different minds as having different viscosities. So in dreaming mind In the viscosity of dreaming mind, dreams float.

[65:54]

In the viscosity of consciousness, dreams sink out of sight. Sort of like the stars sink out of sight during the daytime. The stars are still there. But because of the light of the day or the consciousness, you can't see them. So your dreams sort of disappear in this unconsciousness. Now there's two main ways to get the dream back. If you can remember some... Yeah, go ahead. If you can remember some little aspect of it, take hold of it, pull it back, or you can let the dream go, but create the viscosity of dreaming mind, and the dream will float to the surface, sometimes about ten minutes later in the dream, or a little bit later in the narrative of the dream. So it's clear that the dream is going on, even when you're not conscious, even when you're not in non-dreaming deep sleep, the process of dreaming is going on, like the stars are still there.

[67:20]

So there's dreaming, sleep, There's the activity of dreaming and unconsciousness and so forth. And it's going on even as the dreaming sleep goes away and consciousness appears. Now if you change this consciousness into a dreaming sleep, the dream surfaces at another location in the dream. So it's clear that what we call, because we don't have an idea of unconscious in Buddhism in the same way as you do in psychotherapy. That's for day after tomorrow. So, okay, so now you're going to sleep. And you can begin to notice your thoughts. Consciousness is turning into like dream fragments.

[68:26]

Some little things appear that... Okay. If you take hold of one of those, it will help you go into sleeping. Now, I find that there's a little shudder. Shudder? A physical shudder. When I go from conscious mind to dreaming mind, it's marked by a little shutter. Now, you all know how difficult it is to fake sleeping. At least if you have children. Okay, so you go in and your kid is pretending to sleep.

[69:26]

You know it's took completely away. Because you can feel the consciousness on the breathing. It's not involuntary breathing. And unless you're really skillful, it's very difficult to fake involuntary breathing. To voluntarily fake involuntary breathing. Involuntary breathing is involuntary. So you know your kid's asleep or not asleep. Okay, so now you've shifted the mind and this is really, you can just practice this and you don't have to be a meditator. It's kind of fun. It gives you something to do as you're going to sleep. So there's consciousness. And you can feel the difference between the viscosity of sleeping mind and waking mind. And you can let go of consciousness, but stay in the knowing of awareness.

[70:29]

And you can follow, with awareness, you can follow over the shutter into your sleeping. And then you can have a kind of knowing or consciousness all through the night. And then you do all you're dreaming is lucid dreaming. So you can attach awareness to the process of falling asleep. And that awareness can stay aware during sleeping. And people involuntarily discover this in Sashin sometimes. Sashin is the seven day sitting we do.

[71:41]

where you can be asleep all night and you can know who came in the room, what they said, somebody can talk to you, and you can stay asleep. As long as... At least you can stay asleep if it's not too discursive, the conversation. If the simple questions you can say, yes. If they ask you, what's your philosophy of life, that wakes you up. Yeah. So... And similarly you can practice with what happens when you wake up. And there's a distinction between waking mind and consciousness. So you're asleep and you are aware though that you're going to get up soon. You're aware that the alarm clock is going to go off in a few moments.

[72:57]

And you hear the little click that means it's going to ring in a few moments. So you turn it off before it rings. You don't want to wake your wife up, you know. And so you, but you decide to sort of stay asleep. So you're in a big space that we could call waking mind that's not yet filled with consciousness. And that big space that's waking mind that's not yet filled with consciousness, we can also call awareness. Okay. And then consciousness starts to creep in. I've got to actually make breakfast. And I've got to make that phone call before so-and-so goes to work.

[74:03]

And then the kind of sphere or unbounded space of waking mind is filled with consciousness. And then your body and mind are different. So a lot of this is developed through being able to notice things as appearance and not as entities. And learning to interrupt the habit of naming. Okay, I think now we should name a brick. I'm sorry, I got so tangled up there, I... We should have had a breaker.

[75:05]

Thank you very much.

[75:06]

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