I'd like to see where we can go today. Send this photo. And we also have to kind of wind down into our usual life. sometime this afternoon. So I would like to know not when you'd like to leave, which might be now, but when you have to leave this afternoon. Who has to leave what? Four o'clock, three o'clock, five o'clock? You have to leave at four? Anyone else has to leave as early as four? You do, okay. Yeah, well if we continue, but the thing is all the esoteric stuff is from four to five. No, no, I promise you won't miss anything.

[01:08]

So we'll wind down or wind up. It's funny they mean the same thing. I'd like to talk about friendship, but then again I think since we've talked about mind and gotten some taste and I think together we've found some feeling for mind, I think now it would be useful for us in our practice and our discovery to speak about self, but I would not speak about self as a thing, but rather as functions.

[02:20]

As a thing it's rather confusing, but as functions I think we can begin to practice with it. Now, the problem I think we face and what we have to do is separate the sense of an observer from the functions of self. And we have this unusual capacity of being able to have an observer of ourself. It seems to go with sentience. Even a tree, you know, you see a tree growing somewhere and its branch goes out this way and another branch goes out this way and there's a wall here.

[03:24]

And this branch gets to the wall and kind of bends a little bit. And this branch then, if you see a tree over several months, this branch begins to compensate for that branch. So it's a kind of knowing the tree has. And sentience is a kind of knowing. The little wombat I was introduced to last night that I mentioned, couldn't see, he was just a dark shadow. But we were quite close to him. I'm so excited to be in Australia and have a wombat in the backyard. This is great. I've been a... And then we have wallabies, I hear, you know. I'm a wannabe Buddha, but I know... But a wallaby, this is... So anyway, but if I'd gone out for a walk and at first this wallaby was wannabe, I mean wombat... I thought a wombat was something you played a game with.

[04:27]

But anyway, this wombat was very still at first. And if I'd been by myself, I would have thought, well, it's a rock I might have gone over and tried to sit down on. It's a rock in the dark. And I don't know what wombats do when they're sat upon. I don't think they act like Zafus. If you come in the morning, I'm sitting there with a wombat, blissed out, you know. But I would expect that the wombat would do something if I sat down on him or her. Can you tell the difference? Are they her and hims? Thank goodness for wombats. So the wombat has a knowing. And in fact, the wombat began to munch a bit and then would check us out and munch a bit more.

[05:31]

So living is, being alive is actually knowing. A baby that's first born is, has a know, is sentient in the sense that it has an ability An apprehension or appreciation of something, what's going on around. I know when my daughter, the one who's 19, was born, we didn't put that stuff in the eyes you're legally supposed to, at least in the States, in case anybody in the parents have VD or something. But we didn't do that. And so she came out, she was about halfway out, and she was looking around the room, you know, everywhere. It's great. What's going on out here? She's still like that. We had a midwife, so she was born at home. So this knowing, for instance, say that I'm in zazen mind, my zazen mind can observe my thoughts.

[06:51]

But I can also then have a deeper state of mind than ordinary Zazen mind. And that deeper state of mind can observe the consistency, shall we say, of the first state of mind. But what I'm pointing out is every state of mind can generate an observer. There is no reason you have to make one of them into yourself. These different observers can have different qualities, even different histories, because they also have a karma, though, usually unacknowledged. So there's no reason to confuse the observing function with the functions of self. The observing function is a capacity of the knowing of mind to know itself.

[08:05]

Now we take one of those observers, generally, designated, officially designated by our parents, or somebody, this is who you are, you're a big eater and you're a nice guy, or whatever, you know. Then you go through life thinking you're a big eater and a nice guy, or something like that. Your stomach has nothing to say about it. Or not enough. So one thing that happens in practice is you begin to shake loose these various identifications with the observer. and begin to function through a number of observers. I remember somebody, Keith Richards, was asked what he thought about Mick Jagger.

[09:13]

He said, oh Mick, he's a lovely bunch of guys. And I think that when we have separate personalities which don't talk to each other, it's a... psychiatric condition, but actually we are a complex, a variety of people that hopefully do talk to each other. And Zazen increases our ability to talk to or be open to the various observers. Okay, I've said enough on that, so let's look at the specifically the functions of self, which are quite simple. And any society, anywhere, anybody, has to have these three functions of self in order to function. So, no matter how adept you are, the Buddha herself has to have these functions.

[10:17]

And one is, first of all, separation. You have to know this is my voice and not Paul's voice, or your own inner voice. And if you think it is Paul's voice and not my voice, or you think it's the voice of this or something, you have another serious problem. You have to be able to make basic distinctions like that. And your immune system is a form of self. Your immune system knows what belongs to your body and what does not belong to your body. And that sense of separation is fundamental to self. Now, self also has to function to establish connectedness. I have to find ways that I'm connected, know how I'm connected to you. I'm connected to the world.

[11:20]

Obviously, self functions to establish connectedness. Now, in our society, connectedness is usually something like politeness. We actually feel separated, but we're polite. And we say, hi, how are you? It's nice to see you. How's your health, et cetera. But often there's not too much real sense of connectedness unless you're in love. or unless it's your child. And sometimes with good friends we feel connected, of course. And sometimes I think women have a more natural feeling, a gift of feeling connected than men do. Men often don't have close friends, I've noticed. In fact, we don't It's very interesting, you know, in the West, I was trying to think the other day, I was near Haneshof, and I was pondering this with some friends. I said, you know, in China, most poetry is about friendship.

[12:21]

About this guy, he went, traveled for four days to have one night of drinking with a friend and writing poems. And then, you know, the next day at the gate, at the pass between the mountains, they said goodbye. And, you know, until two years later, they have another time to, people go along, you know, I came a long ways to see you, so let's be friends. But I couldn't think of any novels. We have lots of romantic novels. Love. But there isn't much, I can't think of any novels or poems in the West particularly about friendship. Someone said to me, the wind in the willows. I thought that was a great, great suggestion. And the epic of Gilgamesh, but that goes back quite a ways. What about the Dharma bombs? The Dharma bombs, I know all those guys. I think you're right. Gary Snyder's Jaffe Ryder. I can't remember the names of all the different people, but they're all folks I know.

[13:27]

And there is a friendship. You know, I'm still quite good friends with Gary and a number of the other folks in that book. But that's a good thing. I think that one quality of the Dharma bums, of the so-called beets, was they were united in against society in friendship. A kind of sangha. I think you're right. I don't know that, but yeah. In any case, I'd appreciate any examples you might tell me now or later, but in general, we don't emphasize friendships. But friendship is really powerful. I mean, a good friend of mine at one time was... I finally had to break with him, but it was Huey Newton, the founders of Black Panthers. And they had a powerful worldwide connectedness.

[14:31]

And I said to Huey once, how many really are you? They were thinking of putting me on the board. I had to wear a black face, I think, or something. And Huey said... maybe there's really three of us who are really bonded. But a few people who are really bonded can have an immense effect on the whole of society. You should know that when you think about starting a little sitting group or joining... Kebi? Kebi. Kebi. Is that... Kebi's any relationship to wombats? By the way, let me say I'd like, after I stop wandering around here, to have some kind of report from each group and maybe some questions.

[15:39]

So our sense of connectedness is rather formal and it's something we make an effort to do. We naturally feel separated. We don't naturally feel connected. As I said, except with your baby or something like that. And then the third function of self is continuity. We need to establish continuity to function as well. I mean, if you're in a tough time, you say, I'm the kind of person who can get through this. You say something like that. And when you do that, you're speaking about yourself as a story, as this kind of person can. I've gotten through things in the past. I can face this. So we do have to have some experience of continuity from moment to moment. Not just for the sake of something or other.

[17:09]

What's this? Someone had the idea that everybody should write their name and phone number in different areas of Melbourne so there's a contact room. Oh, what a nice idea. Don't you have an office list of... I would suggest you do, to practise with these functions of self, to begin to notice these functions of self in your own functioning, is to... Again, this sense of holding, this practice of holding something in view, you spend a day or so emphasizing separation and noticing the ways in which you feel separated. Like you meet somebody and what's your first framework for that meeting is separation, usually.

[18:18]

Or you take a walk and you feel separated. separated or you feel separated from your future tomorrow you feel separated etc so just watch how separation functions in you because for each of you it's going to be somewhat different and then spend a day next day or some day in the next week same day the next week or something like that and and play around with feeling connected. And when you meet somebody again, there's immediately maybe a framework of separation, but there's immediately an energy toward connectedness. Now let me say something about emotions and feelings here. Feelings are rooted in knowing. Emotions are rooted in caring. And we think of emotions as detrimental, usually.

[19:24]

People talk about being free of emotions in practice and things like this. Again, this is one of those things which I think to say is rather nuts, because intelligence itself is caring. If you don't care about what you're thinking about, it's kind of ridiculous. And I've noticed some, when I was in college, there were some real bright guys, and then there were some, you know, fairly bright guys or women who were... And who was successful? I'm speaking now about scientists. Which ones were successful? Weren't necessarily the brightest ones, but the ones that cared the most. They had to have enough intelligence to do science, but the real super smart ones like who... never forgot a single thing after reading one book, you know, things like that. They didn't, weren't necessarily good scientists. It's the ones who really cared about solving some problem. So caring is, I mean, if you're angry, you're angry because you care.

[20:35]

If you hate somebody, you hate because you care. So all emotions are rooted in caring about something. So you can work with emotions by bringing them back to the root of caring. And generally our emotions are a problem because they are expressed within the separation of self, within the strictures of self. They begin to set up the boundaries and protect the observing self and the observing self's function in maintaining separation. And usually an advantage in that separation. So emotions as, the word emotion in English, emotion, it is a movement. And that movement, there's basically nothing wrong with that movement. It's when that movement is put in the service of self, in a narrow sense. So emotions are lovely.

[21:38]

And particularly when you begin to be able to experience them not in the defensiveness of self, but in their roots in caring about how the world is and people your ways and so forth. Now I'm just speaking to you from my own experience and this is just my experience and my understanding to date of in practice and so forth and you of course have your own experience which you can have to bring into this And then spend a day or so, or a week, or whatever, noticing how you maintain a sense of continuity. Now, you mentioned the other day when your breathing stops. What's scary about that is, one of the things that's scary about it is you lose a sense of continuity.

[22:46]

And it's kind of, geez, something could happen in that gap. Or if you begin to have states of mind and practice that don't fit into your sense of who you are and how you continue yourself, you can feel, well, this is clearly, you know, I'm going crazy. This is a kind of craziness. And we've been done a lot of damage, excuse me for saying so, by the institutions within Christianity of confession and the sense that the devil can be inside us. And one of the courageous things that Jung as a warrior of this century did was, even though he was the son of a Protestant minister, he faced these demons and said, this is not the voice of the devil, this is me, this is a form of me. And it was, for him and the kind of person he was, an extremely courageous and trusting act.

[23:51]

to say and then tell the world, these archetypes, these demons, these forces are us. Before that, it was heresy to say that you could have an inner voice. And Socrates listened to his daimon, his inner voice was called your daimon, and his inner voice told him, that it was nobler, was better to drink hemlock, is the classic moral act of our Western society, rather than concede to the wishes of the society at that time. But the word daimon is the root for us in Christian culture of demon and the devil. So an inner voice becomes demonic. Well, you have to, if you're going to practice Buddhism, you're going to practice meditation, and you're going to slip outside your usual observing self that you identify with.

[25:01]

You're going to start hearing other voices. Which may not be Paul's. Is that Paul? Paul? Are you there? And that inner voice can be, it's not actually speaking, it's inner feelings that don't come from our sense of usual continuity with who we are. So it means if you're going to practice Zen, and one of the reasons I emphasize this, if you're going to practice Zen, you've got to discover another way of establishing continuity, or other additional ways of establishing continuity. And one of the most basic is your breath. And we can understand the breath practices that I gave you, the different ways of practicing with your breath as an additional ways of establishing separation, continuity and connectedness.

[26:17]

So I think that's enough to introduce that the functions of self to you, so maybe someone could give me a report on their discussion yesterday. Some brave soul. Yes? Yes, this is my question. I would hope so. Breath. You were able to carry on. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Next. Well, we were immediate.

[27:24]

Consciousness, yeah. No feeling for or grasp of the idea of borrowed secondary and immediate consciousness. It's nice. Something else? Someone else? Is some group going unrepresented here? That's a good question. Sentient means the ability to sense. Rocks don't sense in that sense, so rocks would not be considered sentient. But certainly insects, and if you... an experience of angels would certainly be an experience, a sentient experience.

[28:26]

But I, you know, I wish we had a couple more days, two or three more days, because if so, I would go into the practice of working with the senses of working with unhomogenizing the senses, and then discovering the senses, orchestrating the senses, and then discovering the senses underneath the senses, and then how to work with what's between the senses and what's beyond the senses. We do it by email? Since we've seen it. Well, yes, that's not... I mean, for example, I mean, just let me say that there's our... We have five or six senses, and if everyone in this room was deaf, and everyone on the planet was deaf, we would be unable to speak about or imagine...

[29:47]

And the point I'm making is that although our senses give us what we consider a consistent picture of the world, a virtually seamless picture of the world, we see this, we hear it, And you can even smell it. It's quite amazing. You can like, you know, the taste of cheap silverware in a restaurant or smell of cheap silverware. I mean, these are, I mean, how many molecules of this silverware are floating up to your nose? I mean, this is, we have an amazing sensitivity, not equivalent to a dog. Of course, it can, it's hundreds or thousands of times more sensitive. But we have an amazing sensitivity that we mostly don't use because, again, as I've said, we homogenize our senses. So we primarily think about, know about things through conceptually based eye consciousness.

[30:58]

But if no one could hear, and no one on the planet we would know nothing about it. We would feel it vibrating, but we wouldn't have any idea that that was a sound different from any other vibration. The point I'm making, one of the points in, particularly in this koan I was speaking about the other day, which I said we've been working on the last year and a half or so, one of the phrases in it is, in the eyes it's called seeing, in the ears it's called hearing, What is it called in the eyebrows? And the point of this is that our senses, we're fooled into thinking our senses give us a seamless picture of the world, but they give us a picture that we join five or six ways of looking at the world together to make a seamless three-dimensional picture.

[32:05]

But in fact, right now, there are what? 10,000 handy cellular phone calls in this room. And at least a large number of television stations. There's the Doobie Brothers or something. And then there's many radio stations. And if you told somebody 100 years ago this room was filled with movies... You know. So how do we know a hundred years from now? I mean, we just don't have the chip, the sense. Now, it's not impossible that we can sense the electronic, the feels in the room, but it's still at least in between our senses, if not beyond. So there's a phrase in Buddhism called great function, which means to function within the intuition of the mystery of...

[33:07]

the senses. To function knowing that there's a lot happening in between the senses. Am I making sense? Now we generally are taught to function as if you know the senses are barely showing us the world. Hi little bird. But they but it's at least we function within our senses, but Zen practice, Buddhist practice, is to function with a wider sense of the world than just what our senses show us. And this is sometimes called intuition and things like that. Now, it's also assumed, I'm answering your question, believe it or not, it's also assumed that in yogic culture that there's a macrocosmic, microcosmic relationship.

[34:15]

There's a relationship between you or the individual or the particularity and the allness or the cosmos. And one of the things we practice with is not oneness. In Buddhism there's no oneness. And when people say there is, it's a mistake in English because oneness is a theological idea. We live in an omniverse, not a universe. It's a world of multiple worlds. It's a world of folding in. Even if you look at contemporary mathematics and string theory, the world is best described in ten directions, in ten dimensions, not three. And yet, we can sort of experience three or four of them, but... six or seven or so of them, are not experienceable because they're folded in outside our perceptual abilities.

[35:17]

But this enfolded world, you are actually living whether your senses, your gross senses tell you or not. So then, this macrocosmic-microcosmic relationship which we practice with primarily through practices based on the four elements or five elements, clearing your psychic space, various kinds of attunements. I can't do it all this weekend, sorry. But practicing with, as I mentioned the other day, the elements, you begin to feel the world as connected to you in a new way. So then you have questions that come out of the very question you asked, like Dungsan again asked his teacher, I don't hear, there's a famous thing, the teaching of insentient beings. Sounds like an oxymoron or a contradiction. The teaching of insentient beings.

[36:23]

And this puzzle, I mean, when you really practice, you take these things and you puzzle with them. You don't just say... That's nonsense. You say, you know, some person in the fullness of their life and experience said this, what the heck did they mean? The teaching of insentient beings. So he went to his teacher, he went through several, asked several people, finally went to his teacher and said, what is the, I don't, uh, what is the teaching of insentient beings? And his teacher said, you don't hear it? No, I don't hear it. And his teacher said, don't hinder that which hears it. So with a phrase like that, you can work with a phrase like that. Do not hinder that which hears it. And you can begin to use that to open yourself up to the teaching of insentient beings.

[37:31]

Okay? That doesn't answer your question, but it gives you the means to explore it for yourself. Okay? Or it gives you some of the means. One thing I like about Buddhism is I can never reach the end of it. I like having something that no matter how long I live, I'll still be a beginner. It's great. Yes? You decide. Whatever you want to call it. Yes? Yesterday I agree with everybody because I didn't know any better, but this morning I woke up quite... I feel like I might have missed something out or I don't have the right definition for what homogenized senses are.

[38:35]

No, no, I... No, that's not very clear, I understand. Help! I'm trying to think of how to say something about it since actually several other people have mentioned something like that to me. And it's a phrase that makes sense if I give you the whole Vijnana teachings, which I don't think I can do today. Although it's a wonderful teaching.

[39:38]

It's great. It really is wonderful. So how can I answer in some other way? Each sense... Let's take the sense of hearing. The sense of hearing is of a... tactile world. And there are many things that are heard. If you separate, if you practice separating out the senses, and you spend a day now, let's say, just hearing, like a blind person would, you will begin to notice that you start hearing things.

[40:41]

For instance, let me go back to something else. One of the things that led me to practice is when I was in high school, I began to notice that I knew something about people which I couldn't figure out how I knew it. So being from a scientific family, I experimented like if I was... What is your name? Colin. Colin, yeah. If I was this far from Colin, say, I would not notice it. So then I began to see that when I was within certain closeness to a person, I knew something about their moods, their feelings, and so forth. And I discovered that I was virtually certain it was smell, that I began to realize I was smelling people's moods and states of mind.

[41:46]

But I had no confirmation for this from my parents or school. No one told me that you can smell moods. You can certainly smell cancer, for instance. You can smell somebody who has cancer real quickly. And some are obvious. The person who's dying, you can smell. But that you could smell... moods changing and it led me to having a sense that the way the world was being presented to me by my culture schooling and parents was not the way it wasn't covering all the territory so it opened me up to begin to trying to find a state of mind which covered more of the territory or something like that okay and all the time whether somebody inhales in a word or exhales or whether they, how they're breathing and so forth.

[42:49]

In fact, if you take a movie of this room right now and slow it way down and look at it very carefully like frame, [...] you see that almost everyone's eyelids, everything is doing totally coordinated. And if I lift up my hand, somebody else is doing something else, and it all fits together. And it's established very quickly. When a group is in a room, it's not true for the first two or three minutes, but within a few minutes, it settles into this very common rhythmic that you can't see. It's outside our perceptual range, but it's seeable if you take a movie and slow it way down. I mean, they studied seven minutes of a group, I think it was seven minutes, and they'd stretch this seven minutes out over about two hours and watch what happened. So there's an immense kind of thing going on here, right, that's happening in sound, smell, movement, etc.,

[43:56]

we don't experience almost any of it because we relate to what can be heard and smelled that can also be seen and conceptualized as a word. So what I mean by homogenized sensory base through the eye consciousness is that for us the dominant consciousness is eyes and being able to read and see and et cetera and create language. And that creates a framework which eliminates a large percentage of what happens in the senses. Now do you understand more what I mean? For instance, a dog could never have a conceptual framework for being able to smell into a food at a molecular level. And we couldn't, if we could do that, which I think we can to some extent, there's no language refined enough to say that.

[45:00]

So we eliminate those refinements because it doesn't fall into the kind of categories that eye consciousness allows us to know. So basically we have homogenized our perceptual lived life into categories that work with was through the eye, primarily through the eye consciousness. That's, I mean, that's not all I mean, but that's enough. Okay? Yeah. Listen, you don't know how much energy and years it's taken me to find out how to articulate my experience. You know? I think it's time for a break. And it's 11. So let's come back at 12, a little before 12, and then see what happens.

[46:08]

Okay? All right. Thank you. Sentient being which listens. I know, and someone mentioned to me, and I know well, that when you're confronted by a lot of new things, one gets exhausted. And I'm sorry that I'm exhausting some of you.

[47:09]

But, you know, I want to give you, while I'm here in this short time, I mean, it would be nice just to meditate with you, but I think if I'm here, you can do a lot of meditation when I'm not here, but while I'm here I ought to share some teachings with you. So I'd like to give you, you know, two or three main teachings, but then I have to also put that in a context so it makes healthy sense in your practice and in your life. So I have to kind of fill in the picture, fill in, goes in between. And... And so this afternoon I would like to give you this teaching of the five skandhas, which is an essential teaching for practice and for relating to what we've been speaking about, mind and self.

[48:38]

Now the question The question you brought up about wisdom and compassion. Thanks. We Zen guys always forget the word compassion. It's interesting why, because what there's some, I mean, I don't agree with what you said, but in the sense that, because the ideal Zen teacher is characterized by grandmotherly... As you can tell, I haven't got there yet.

[49:45]

But I'm working on it. even a kind of, like shamans, a kind of feminine body as well as feminine presence. And the Tao, in Taoism, the Tao is definitely feminine. But in any case, certainly the emphasis in Zen is on, first of all, realizing that the realizing mind. And then the manifestation and articulation of that is through the immeasurables, unlimited friendliness, empathetic joy, and so forth, generosity, loving-kindness, But again, Zen emphasizes, first of all, realizing mind, and particularly your original mind, and then from that basis, you manifest that and develop that through all the other teachings of Buddhism, which emphasize compassion, loving kindness, and so forth.

[51:17]

But let me say that We call this the world, the universe, and things like that, right? These aren't very useful words. They don't tell us much. Buddhism is always attempting to describe things in ways you can practice with them, and generally means to describe things in terms of their function. So, if we... The word for all this... The biggest word for all this in Buddhism is tathagata-garbha. And tathagata-garbha means simultaneously womb and embryo. And tathagata means coming and going. So it's a kind of, to say the least, a fertile image, a fecund image, of this as a situation in which everything is simultaneously an embryo,

[52:20]

and the conditions for fertility. And the quality of the world as both embryo and womb is realized through movement. Now, intention is movement. Ultimately, life is movement. And we can look at this. We can look at these. Well, at least three people want to be in touch. We can look at these as movement. This being movement toward us, saying we are separate, right?

[53:29]

That separation is, this belongs to me. Connectedness is this movement, right? And continuity would be, you know, sort of that kind of movement. But you can think of these movements more like circles. And separation is a movement like this. Let's say that's the out and in. So separation is, I'm acknowledging you, but I'm separate. Right? Connectedness is a movement of... I don't know how to draw it here. It would be a movement like this, right? And continuity, we could think of as an experience of that kind of continuity. I haven't thought through how to draw this exactly, but if you think of it as... So you can start...

[54:38]

Our culture, let me just give you a snapshot. I would say our culture is rooted in the Greeks' discovery of a phonetic alphabet that allowed general literacy and allowed then, because of the Greeks demythologizing society, allowed speculation to develop over several centuries. Most of our ideas are the development of several generations speculating about something. What uric acid is or something like that. Do you understand? When society used language to mythologize itself, there was no development. There was just, this is what we inherited, that's the way the gods say, etc. So the Greeks developed things because they would record in their language, you know, he thought this. And the next, you know, generation say, well, he thought this, but I add that, you know, and think. So ideas developed over several generations.

[55:48]

So our culture is a multi-generational creation. Okay? Does that make sense? Buddhism has the problem, and I can't go into what signless minds are, etc. Buddhism has the problem of being fundamentally signless and hence cannot be represented in language. But it's also developed over generations. You following me? So they developed a whole series of circles. And that's where the yin and yin circles and then circle comes from. And that's where the yin and yang. The yin and yang is a 10th century adoption by Taoism of one of 97 Zen circles. because they developed a way of talking about things that there isn't language for through a series of circles. And I'm playing with that right now. So, if this is the ordinary sense of separation, if we took it and say, that's the person, and we took this and brought the separation into our interior, that's more bodhisattva-self.

[56:56]

Because that means that I'm absorbing, and it's actually called the gathering in way, I'm absorbing everything into a single interior experience. And that's called wisdom. And that absorption ultimately is emptiness. When I go the other direction, it's called compassion. Am I making sense here? So, connectedness is to, would be to, how can I draw it? Anyway, it would be to... I'm going to have to think about how to draw it. But this would be more like this. And this is more like that. So connectedness is to feel this circle including others. And separation is to absorb this, but now it's no longer separation, it's absorption.

[58:03]

Like when you're taking a walk or something and somebody stops and talks to you, sometimes you really don't want to talk with them. You just want to just... You're not thinking about anything, you just want to walk along, right? If you carry that further and say that desire to absorb like that, ultimately is wisdom. So the movement in this wisdom... So in Yogacara practice, these are not philosophical ideas, these are ideas you can feel as movement. So if I look at all of you and I absorb you in, and you cease to be differentiated, you're now absorbed in And each of you, as I said this morning, is an embodiment of the truth. And I feel the presence of this truth as identical with myself. That's wisdom. Or emptiness. When I open up into differentiation, that's compassion. Does that make any sense to you?

[59:05]

I think I've got lost. Yeah. I think I've got lost somewhere in the step where we went from separation into the second circle. Well, just think of it as two directions for now. One direction is outward and one direction is inward. That's all you need to know. The rest is a more subtle way to perhaps visualize it. And this coming and going is basically these two movements. So when you feel you're moving out, this is compassion. When you feel you're moving in, this is wisdom. And we need a pulse of those two. This is Buddhist teaching. So when you do zazen, basically you're meditating, this is a wisdom practice because you're bringing everything in and absorbing. It's like the whole ocean becomes a drop. And you can also think of direction, every act you do either goes toward karma or goes toward dharma.

[60:09]

Everything you do either leads to more karma or leads to freedom from it. And you can begin to sense your actions as leading to karma or leading to wisdom and understanding. So this is the same kind of idea. Dharma and karma is actually a movement. Wisdom and compassion is a movement. So you can begin to feel when you want to go out, you can go out with a feeling of, and then it's most complete, with a feeling of unlimited friendliness, empathetic joy, and so forth. Anyway, that's enough. This is a whole teaching. It's this sense of of wisdom being a movement, absorbent movement, and compassion being an outward movement is part of all the koans, and it's called the Gathering Way and the Granting Way.

[61:12]

The Gathering, Granting Way is your Buddha, your Buddha, your Buddha. And I feel that. You're an embodiment of the truth, even koan. And our two sisters, and... Even me sometimes. And the gathering way is, you're not Buddha. You're not. No, no. Is this an interesting thing? No. Because everything is absorbed in, and it's not no in a negative sense. It's no in a sense of, I'm not differentiating. So we could say now, if we went back to the koan you had me bring up earlier, Dungsan is asked, how do you find your teacher? How do you meet your teacher? And this is a going out kind of statement. And Dungsan answers from the gathering way where there's no distinctions and says,

[62:20]

It's not difficult as long as there's no difference in age. Do you understand? See, that's the gathering in to say no distinctions. When you realize your teacher as one without distinctions and you relate to him or her through your own freedom from distinctions, then this is a real teaching relationship. Okay, well, that's enough on that. And you asked something back there when you talked about what your group did that was actually a question. About the awareness and about if we're striving for awareness in every action that we do. Three minds of daily consciousness. And this immediate consciousness is still consciousness. It's not what wakes you up at 6.02. It's just consciousness without names. Does that make sense to you? I'm looking at you and I'm conscious of you.

[63:22]

But I'm not thinking about you. I just feel you, smell, fancy you, etc. That's immediate consciousness. But that immediate consciousness opens up to awareness. But awareness is present in all of it. So awareness is more like, again, the water. And these are more like waves. But this is a very smooth, you know... You understand what I mean? So this is just a way to... It doesn't make sense to try to map these various teachings on top of each other. We're not trying to say, this teaching relates to this teaching, relates to this teaching. Each teaching is a separate thing you practice. Then in your lived life you find the relationship. Because we're not working in a oneness. We say, as in, not one, not two. You say it's one, and then you see that it's many. You say it's many, and then you see, yes, there's a kind of one. So we say, not one, not two.

[64:25]

We don't say oneness. Though there's an experience of oneness, but that doesn't mean everything is one. Let's not confuse the experience of oneness with the fact that everything is one. If everything is one, nothing would happen. Because things are not one, you're there and I'm here. We have a dance. And someone asked me a question. Two questions. One was, why are they too shy to ask the question? And the other question was, how do you start as an absolute beginner? And basically how you start is you have an intention to study yourself and you begin primarily through being attentive, that's all. Attentive to what you're doing, being mindful of what you're doing. bringing your attention to your breath. That's all. Anyone can start.

[65:28]

And this is beginner's mind. Now I feel I've burdened you a little too much with too many things. So let's figure out, maybe I'll just answer some questions. And let's figure out, if we're going to end at 4 or 4.30 or something in that vicinity, should we have a shorter break after lunch? Okay, so if we have lunch, and lunch is at 1 about again, if we have lunch at 1 or thereabouts, shall we come back at 2.30, 3? 2.30? Okay, and then I will give you the And I'll try to make it not too dense, the teaching of the five skandhas. One reason it's nicer to have more days is, though I know it increases the expense for you, you have to take time off from work or something probably, is that we can have more meditation and we can have an easier pace.

[66:38]

You know, and approach these things a little more slowly. But anyway, I'm having a good time. And so I hope it's okay with you guys. All right, so any questions? Yeah. I didn't quite finish your question. As long as awareness is an effort, it cannot be present all the time. Yeah. But you are aware all the time, in fact. But to bring an awareness to that awareness, when it's no longer an effort, then you're aware through the 24th. Even to the extent, for instance, like if you're in a session, it's a fairly common experience that you're sleeping, and you sleep four or five hours, or eight hours, well, not eight, six, you can squeeze in. But you can be virtually lucid during the night. If someone walks in the room, you can talk to them and everything and stay completely asleep.

[67:41]

And you can feel them in the room. You can stay asleep and yet talk to them. But that wouldn't happen in an ordinary circumstance unless you had some, were you doing a great deal of meditation and had done a great deal of meditation. But a certain kind of awareness does come through the 24. But not if it's an effort. Yes? Yes. No, I'm kidding you. The point of Zen is to ... popular Zen I know. I'm always fighting against popular Zen as much as I fight against our Western habits. Yes, it's true, but it's not true. In other words, the experience of being free of an observer is certainly a normal and essential experience to Zen practice.

[68:51]

But it's not the goal of Zen practice, it's just something that happens, and it's not continuous, although I could speak about that in another way, but in any case, First, you free yourself from your being stuck to one observer. And the step of beginning to notice that in actual fact this so-called one observer is several observers, depending on your mood, feeling, time of day, state of mind, etc., opening yourself up to the subtlety of a fluid observer, then opens you up to melting that observer and allowing it to reform. And that process of melting that observer and allowing it to reform, then the process of reforming it is a purification process in which, in effect, you're reforming the observer as a bodhisattva. Okay, that's enough.

[69:58]

Something else? You had a question earlier. How did your mother hit two and a half holes in one? I was wondering if anyone would ask me that. When she was, I think, 72, she hit her first hole in one. She played a lot every day. And when she was about 86, she hit a second hole in one. And the very next day she went out on the same hole, hit the ball, and it went to the same hole and sat on the edge ready to fall in. The very next day, when she was on the same T, or whatever you call it, drive, so I call it two and a half, and she got a little prize from her club, you know, and so forth. Yes? I would like to go home and do some reading and sort of fill in some of the gaps and try and put this weekend into a big context.

[71:08]

But I'd like to avoid picking up the popular zen that you speak of, which might have put me on the wrong track. Do you have a recommended book or two that would be good? I don't know. There's so many books out now. I mean, there's a book called What the Buddha Taught by Walpura Hula, which is a Theravadan-based but inclusive of Mahayana, which is quite basic and good, and he speaks from a real sense of practice. But in general, I would pick up a book. leaf through it and read some sentences. And if there's an intelligence and sense of practice in the sentences themselves, you feel the sentence itself, there's a physical feeling you get from the sentences, then maybe you can trust. But if it's just like ideas one after another, I'd put the book back. But so if a book, you can feel the book, then I'd try it out. You haven't written any, so...

[72:11]

Well, I have one sort of in process called Original Mind, the Practice of Zen in the West that I have decided to redo now. So I'm re-editing it now. When can we expect publication? Yeah, maybe next year. Yeah. Yesterday you mentioned the Hara. Yeah. I'm not sure if you actually expanded on that or not. I didn't. Would you mind doing a little bit of that now? Sure. A mind is not limited to the sense of this and this in Buddhism, although that's the cultural thing in Japan and China, that mind is a relationship and heart a relationship. In Buddhism and in the martial arts, a mind is also energy, which is located here.

[73:16]

Now, it doesn't mean, you know, energy is located everywhere. but we need some kind of particularity to function. So the chakras in a sense are a particularity where you can feel, you don't feel yourself so much in your upper arm, but you do tend to feel yourself here or here. And we can particularly feel our energy here. This is quite a good place to work with. And there is a movement of energy, which it makes sense to locate energy here, though it can be located. Like the Sufis only work with the chakras from these chakras. They don't work below at all. And they're perfectly energetic, nice folks, you know. So... But in Zen you emphasize this place. So one way to practice in everyday life and is also to think about what we call the mystery of body, speech and mind, is to work with a phrase when you can, like already connected.

[74:22]

You work with this area by bringing your attention to your breath and this area. And through breathing and your attention you begin to feel this area. And then your will, your will body, your intention, you bring to this area. And you can just mechanically start working on it. For instance, open the refrigerator door from this, you know, okay. And when you walk up to somebody, come up with a feeling of your stomach meeting. I mean, you can get in trouble, you know. depending on how attractive or aggressive the other person might be. And one of the problems of practice is it brings you into intimacy with people, which can be very confusing. And we have a relationship that's endless with our parents and with our spouses. but we don't have an endless coastline to our relationship with a teacher. But when you really accept a teacher, relate to a teacher, it tends to, for us, to fall into the psychological categories of spousal or parental.

[75:31]

And in Asia, it's a clearly different and even, if anything, as powerful, if not more powerful, relationship as parent or spouse. And there's a tremendous intimacy in the relationship and intimacy in practice in general, which is, you know, we have to learn to know that intimacy as well and not psychologically transform it into romantic love or parental or something like that. So you actually can practice with moving in the world from here. and feeling yourself here. So these are three ways to practice in your daily life. You can feel this area, you can feel your intellectual area, your views, and you can have this sense of a physical location here. And with working with a phrase, working with your breath, and working with your energy.

[76:33]

And so this hara is where you work with your energy. And you begin to feel your strength there. And you can actually just emphasize it every now and then. and lifting up through your back from there and so forth. Okay? Yes? Does Zen work with manifesting mind in other areas of the body, apart from the ones that you've mentioned? Like, for example? Well, like, say, in the organs or in the other tissues in the body or other regions within the body. Well, the breath practice of... following the breath, you begin to develop the ability to have like a little flashlight. And you can start exploring your body and your organs and your lungs and your skin and under the layers of skin. You can actually get to know your body quite well. And I spent a couple years primarily working on just exploring my body from inside with my breath or subtle mind as a little flashlight.

[77:40]

I mean, that's a metaphorical way of speaking about it. So you do get to know your body quite well, and that allows you to stay healthier and take care of yourself, etc. So would that mean, did you have a sense in that exploration of all of those different places? Yeah, a lot, most of it. Oh yes, oh yes, oh yeah. And that is part of the process of clearing out the blockages in your body and then you can also extend that into clearing out your psychic space around you because, for instance, if you really meditate and you're open you can feel it's darker on this side than on this side or my mother's on this side and my father's over here and and there's a whole kind of population of the space around you in psychological terms it's called sculpting and you need to as a psychological practice to clear the psychic space around you but that's another practice which i'll go into yes When you say using your breath and this flashlight to explore the body, then just really practically, would you not only have awareness, say you're working on the flashlight and it was working on the arm, would you not only have awareness on the arm, but it would actually send the breath to that spot?

[79:00]

Yes. That's sometimes called the subtle breath. And you use the breath as a vehicle. but the breath is also a subtle mind and sometimes you breathe into your body and sometimes you bring a kind of brightness of the mind into your body. You know, if you meditate a lot, you get a lot of time to fool around and, you know, do things and keep yourself amused. You told me last night you had a question you wanted to ask me about sexuality or something like that. Well, Now you're repressing it. I might have been bearing on because of the interest and emotions and feelings and what you said about friendship, but the question was going to be, what does Zen mind, what's the attitude of Zen mind towards sexual love? I don't know about the attitude of Zen mind, but I know something about the attitude of Zen Buddhists. For some reason this question usually comes up near the end of a seminar.

[80:12]

There's love, eros, and sexuality. And it's considered in Zen and in Buddhism in general that sneezing, Fainting, sleeping, dying, and orgasm are all cousins. And when you sneeze, I mean, do you know why you say, God bless you, when someone sneezes? Because their heart skips a beat. And it's thought that your soul comes out for a moment and is in danger, and so you say, God bless you, it's a fortified, it's a... And in all cultures, in Germany, they say Gesundheit to your health because you're in danger for that moment because your heart just stopped. So in Buddhism, it's considered that a sneeze is a small death. And in Greek mythology, Thanatos and Morpheus are sleep and death are brothers mythologically. So sleep, you could say that sleep and orgasm are practices for death.

[81:31]

Does that make sense? Sneeze is a little short practice. I had a cold recently. I had quite a lot of practice. There's a very... You know, in Japan, it's interesting. The attitude of sexuality is so different from the United States, particularly. So there are sexual practices in Buddhism, but they need to be in a culture... which doesn't psychologize sexuality so much and doesn't see it as victims and all that. If you take somebody out to a good dinner, they don't feel victimized afterwards. But if there's a sexual relationship, it's very easy to think it's about being victimized.

[82:32]

taken advantage of or something. But even this, these, you know, the separation. Yeah, thanks. In Buddhism, connectedness is often seen as attunement. And you attune yourself. I mean, connectedness is seen as attunement. And the way you discover connectedness is basically to attune yourself to the world, other people, rocks, wombats, and so forth, the smells, the weather. And that attunement is related to the practices I mentioned. of nourishment and completeness.

[83:38]

And the attunement is practiced specifically with your teacher. But attunement can also be practiced in an erotic relationship. And sometimes erotic relationships, which may not be loving or sexual, are used by Buddhists sometimes to develop attunement. Now the problem is that when you are involved in a, which you implied, or you mentioned last night, to some extent a very demanding or engaging or erotic relationship or sexual relationship, it is a kind of death. And like in meditation practice, you lose yourself. And unfortunately, if you don't have experience with losing yourself but maintaining your continuity at a deeper level, your sense of continuity shifts over to your partner.

[84:44]

And then your partner's in charge of your continuity and you're in deep doo-doo. Because if the relationship doesn't last, as Eros often doesn't, you then are stuck with your continuity in this other person who's gone. And this is considered to be a Buddhist hell on earth. And many of the no plays of Chikamatsu and others are not about hell as some kind of Christian sense of hell as there or somewhere else, but how we often, through the abandonment of a person to love itself, to the beloved in a deep way, forgetting about society through a very moral act of trusting love, ends up in hell. So there's quite a lot of teaching about this, how we, through a very honest moral act, in a sense, trusting love, end up in a hell.

[85:46]

So that means that if you're going to endanger yourself through orgasm or sneezing or death or meditation, you've got to be able to find continuity in a deeper way than in through your usual way of... Because the nature of eros is to lose yourself. So that's also a form of attunement. Does that somewhat answer your question? I don't know if that makes sense to anyone else. I mean, I know none of you have experiences like this, so... Yes. Yes. Ideally, love and eros together. However it is, the point is to learn to establish continuity

[86:44]

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