to just hear your voices, if you can think up something to ask. Yes? You referred to the Four Abhidhammas as a teaching. Is it possible to sketch that teaching, or does it need to be a teaching? I think that what I said is enough about... The emphasis is on wholesome. I think that's enough for now. That's the gist, is to recognize that you can decide for yourself, as we say, whether water is warm or cold or wet or dry and so forth. And that comes down to knowing whether you feel nourished by things or not and having the confidence... encouraged to make decisions to not do those things which don't nourish you.

[01:04]

To not do those things which lead to unwholesome feelings and so forth. It's the pleasure principle, but deep pleasure, deep satisfaction. Yes? No, you just were letting me hear your voice. Oh, how charming. Yes? Can you tell us something about the use of koans and when is it appropriate to use one? A little koan, which is, Dungsan was asked by the proverbial monk, how do you meet your teacher? And Dungsan said, oh, it's not difficult, as long as there's no difference in age.

[02:10]

And the monk started to say something. Dungsan cut him off and said, say something in a different track. Now that illustrates something, what I was talking about this morning, basically. Let's just make it quite simple. Dungsan answers in immediate consciousness, shall we say, or answers in a non-dual consciousness in which you don't make comparative distinctions like age. And the monk starts asking again in the same way, how do you meet your teacher, you know, wanting some kind of... He says, say something in a different track. Do you understand? These are like different tracks here. If I speak to you in borrowed consciousness, say, say a monk asks me, or someone, you ask me something in borrowed consciousness, and I would, if you're going to meet your teacher, you're going to meet him, I'm simplifying it, in immediate consciousness.

[03:21]

Okay? So he answers by referring to immediate consciousness and says, um, It's easy as long as there's no difference in age, because in a fundamental sense we're not different in age. Do you understand? Okay. So the monk, though, doesn't get that he's shifted levels and still is speaking in, let's say, borrowed consciousness. And so Dungsan cuts him off with saying, say something in a different track. Does that make sense? Yeah. So koans are like that. That's a typical kind of koan. Another one would be one of my favorites. In fact, I have a little scroll in my room I just got in Japan which illustrates it. I could hang it up to tell the story. It's about Daowu and Yunyan.

[04:24]

And they were brother monks and also blood brothers. They were Dharma brothers and blood brothers. And Da Wu was a little sharper. And Yun Yan was not so sharp. My lineage comes through Yun Yan. And so Yun Yan was sweeping. And Da Wu comes by and says, hmm, too busy. And Yunyan, who wasn't a complete dummy though, says, you should know there is one who is not busy. And Da Wu says, aha, a double moon. And Yunyan picks up the broom and says, is this a double moon? Now, I can come back to this story if you want. But if you want to work with that, for instance, you would work with trying, just like you used the phrase, already connected, you use the one who is not busy.

[05:31]

Trying to discover in yourself, in the midst of busyness, the one who is not busy. And something like this was an important practice for me back in the 60s. And I took two phrases, there's no place to go and nothing to do. And in the midst of my activity of going places and doing things, because I had a young family and I had a job at the university and I was a graduate student and so forth, I thought I was pretty busy and practicing Zen with Sukhya Rishi. So in the midst of this activity, we didn't have a monastery, so I pretended San Francisco was a monastery. Best I could do, you know. But I said to myself all the time, there's no place to go, there's nothing to do. And in all my activity, I kept repeating that.

[06:32]

It took me a year and a quarter. And once I forgot it for two or three months. But then it came back, and I didn't say, oh, you bad boy, three months, you forgot it. It just came back, so I stayed with it. And it changed many things for me. And it's basically the same kind of practice as practicing with you should know there is one who is not busy. So there's quite a few koans, I would say, for people I practice with. I'd say there's 20 to 40 koans which are quite accessible without knowing a great deal about teachings that are behind it and so forth. There's one koan I've been working with, where you're going, Di Jiang, and I'm going on a pilgrimage. Well, what's the purpose of pilgrimage? I don't know.

[07:33]

And then Di Jiang says, not knowing is nearest. Now, this koan is somewhat more evolved. And so I've been working on it with people for maybe two years now. So in other words, koans can, depending on how deeply you want to go into them, can be a subject accessible to us as laypeople for a long time or to come back to years later. Or they're fairly direct, like knowing the one who is not busy. Does that sort of answer your question? You would use them in everyday practice. Would you not use them in sitting? Oh, you'd use them anytime you want. Yeah. Now, if you're sitting not very much, say you're sitting only 20 minutes a day, three times a week, I wouldn't work on a con probably.

[08:36]

I'd work on the con in your daily life more. But if you sit a lot, you know, I mean, thousands of hours if you sit regularly for years, everything happens in zazen. The basic practice is uncorrected mind. But within that, things happen. You think about things and so forth. But let me say... Well, let me just finish on the koan question. So I would, if you're interested in koans, I would browse... I wrote an essay that's about 30, 40 pages about how to practice with koans as a layperson. It floats around. I don't have a copy with me, but I would browse in some koans and get a feeling for one you like and stay with it, but don't try to think about it too much. Just stay with it if the phrase catches you. And if you have a teacher, then you can ask your teacher to give you a koan.

[09:40]

Or, in the midst of this seminar, I'm actually presenting things which could be, in effect, koans. Koans are rooted in a turning phrase, a phrase you turn, like already connected. It's basically a koan practice. And... Okay? It's enough for now, yeah. But anything in your life can be treated this way, like, why am I not getting along with my spouse or something? You can take that as a phrase, I mean, if that ever occurs, and you can present it to yourself without trying to solve it, just keep presenting it to yourself. Yes? Yes. I was wondering about, you were talking about browsing books for colleges and I think all of us here abuse books and reading at some stage to learn and develop ideas.

[10:45]

How does that fit with the three ordinary everyday consciousness and particularly the borrowed consciousness idea? Well, that's a good question. The discipline, the discipline of the way to study I presented this morning of sustaining and evolving attention, right, is really rooted in a discipline of not studying what you can't practice. So we say wave follows wave, wave leads wave. You don't study more than you can practice or relates to practice. So sometimes practice leads study and sometimes study leads practice. But you keep them in very close association. And if you're practicing seriously, it's quite a mistake to... range widely in Buddhism and read a lot of Buddhism, unless you read it with just a kind of sense of skimming it or getting a feeling for it, to get a general picture.

[11:52]

But basically you limit yourself to studying what you're practicing. And it means that, for instance, if you're practicing, it takes quite a while. The commitment of a Zen teacher is not to teach anything that he or she hasn't experienced. So it means it takes a long time before you can teach things. You can't teach things out of books. But it's the only way your practice really develops. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Yeah. Anyone else want to say, yes? I sort of noticed through sport and through the martial arts. Pardon me? Sorry, I've noticed through sports, especially through martial arts, Well, I think through practice you get in the habit of, which probably would be helpful to, if you're doing some athletic sport, which is demanding, or martial arts, you get in the habit of being out on a limb, of not having alternatives.

[13:34]

And that is both a moment of consequence, but it's also a moment of timelessness. You know, it's five minutes to twelve. It's two minutes to twelve. It's one minute to twelve. It's half a minute to 12. It's a second to 12. It's half a second to 12. It's half a second after 12. There's no 12. There's no such thing as 12 o'clock. It's approached and it's passed, but 12 o'clock is immeasurable. Do you understand? I mean, there's actually no such thing as 12 o'clock. So we are living in the midst of timelessness all the time, which we have as a sensation of time. But when you make a decision, when you make a very big decision in your life, you can't say how long it took to make that decision.

[14:37]

I mean, you may have had a lot of worry and prayer, but at some point, yes, I'll do it. How long did that take? Fundamentally, our life occurs in timelessness. or at least in immeasurable time. And that's also part of trying to be in that timeless place when you're doing something demanding. In sports, it's sometimes called zoning. Everything slows down. Am I making any sense? So if you decide to take the precepts, for instance, you vow not to kill, say, Well, if you think, well, I know I'm a vegetarian, but the farmer plows the field and kills insects and rodents. If you think this way, you can't take the precepts. You just say, do you vow not to kill anything? Yes. That's all.

[15:41]

And that yes then appears in your other moments and affects and informs what you do. So the decision to take the precepts has to be a decision like a child would say, just yes. So that yes occurs in another kind of time. Does that make sense? And if you can make that decision, then it influences all your time. But if you think, oh gosh, I can't do this, I'm not a good... You can never. Nothing's influenced. So this isn't about right or wrong. It's the level of mind in which you make the decision. I think that's enough said about that. Yeah. Something else? Yes. Yes. Zen comes from the Mayana tradition. How much do you think you should worry about helping others or saving others, and how much should you concentrate on your own awareness?

[16:45]

Well, I've got three people to help here, and I've got... No, you can't measure. It's like, how many sentient beings... We don't vow to save three sentient beings. If you're going to save three, why not save four? So we vow to save all sentient beings. And the vow to save all sentient beings means you have to be capable of that kind of effort. So often we help people we don't help. So I think you have to be able to help yourself or take care of yourself before you help others too much. But if something's in front of you, you do it. That's all. But I don't try to help anybody. I don't try to do anything. Things just happen. But sometimes I seem to help people, I guess my daughters or something like that, you know.

[17:51]

Okay. I mean, I don't think so much in these categories of helping or not helping. I just... Something else? Yeah. From a broken heart. Because everything breaks our heart and breaks open our heart. I mean, you can hardly look at the planet these days. Maybe Australia's a little better than other parts without it breaking your heart what we're doing. Well, let me speak about... Just try to approach with you some more senses of mind...

[19:08]

manifestations of mind. And then I would like to speak about breath practice because it's so fundamental to Zen and to meditation practice. I'm sorry to use the three of you as examples all the time, so maybe... What is your name? Paul. Paul, yeah. Okay. So if I close my eyes, and it's a good practice just to close your eyes and then open them sometimes. If I close my eyes and open them and see Paul, what am I seeing? Well, I'm seeing Paul.

[20:11]

I know Paul is out there, or something called Paul, that he tells me is called Paul, is out there. But really, I'm seeing my own mind. Now, we can have a feeling for this when we, probably in Zazen, when you hear something, a bird, a sound, a bell, there's a special quality to the way you hear it. And we can call that special quality, which is a little different to something blissful or pierces us in a certain way, that we could say that you're hearing hearing. But when you hear hearing, you're hearing also the field of mind. Now, when you hear a bird, a sulfur-crested cockatoo, Now I'm told it's sulfur-crested. Yeah.

[21:12]

So, and you're not hearing that the way another sulfur-crested cockatoo would hear it. You're hearing it the way we humans hear it. In fact, if you analyze bird sounds and imagine the articulateness with which birds hear things, there's like Bach fugues in there, and we just hear part of it. So clearly, when you hear a sulfur-crested cockatoo, you are hearing your hearing of it. It's obvious, right? You're hearing within the range of your capacity to hear. Okay, when I look at Paul, I'm seeing Paul within the range of my capacity to see. I'm not seeing Paul in any way as he really is, or whatever that is. I should know that all the time. I should know when I look at you, I'm seeing myself seeing you.

[22:16]

And I know when you're looking at me, you're seeing yourself see me. And there's almost a kind of vibration of the fields of your seeing me and my seeing you. Because if I know that when I'm looking at you, I'm looking at myself, I'm seeing my own mind see you, the more I know that and know that as a basic view, the more I'll feel at ease and connected all the time. And much less likely to be depressed, for instance. Because if I look at you and you're gray and kind of, you know, and I feel kind of depressed looking at you, I know this is my own mind. I can't blame you or I can't blame the world or something like that. And I know I can put energy into it and brighten it up. So the more I look at you and know that I'm seeing my own mind, I'm now also in the field of awareness and not in the field of consciousness.

[23:29]

Does that make sense? And in the field of awareness, the more I'm in the field of awareness and I get the habit of being in the field of awareness and not in the field of consciousness, the more things have a brightness, a brilliance, a clarity, a precision, and so forth. So this is just a simple, obvious kind of science. But you have to remind yourself of it, that when I look at you, I'm seeing not only you, but my own mind, which arises through seeing you. Now, for me this is nice, because I actually rather like my own mind. So I'm happy most of the time, because every place I look, I see my own mind. And I don't usually get lonely because, you know, what the heck, there it is. It's always appearing, you know. So this practice of knowing and feeling your own mind is also what we mean by Zen mind.

[24:42]

It's to get in the habit of I mean, there's many causes that brought you here. Cars, buses, I don't know how you got here. You know, you followed the crumbs dropped by Tibetan monks. But from my point of view, you got here because I opened my eyes and looked at you. When I look at you, and you appeared through this causation, our mutual causation. When I look over here, you disappear and you appear. It's quite lovely. This is just simple stuff. But it changes the way you live. It changes the way you feel. And we have bad habits. You know, if I hold this up for you, and you look at it, and if you look at it quickly, or generally we look at something long enough to say it's an orange or it's some kind of fruit, and then we forget about it.

[25:49]

And what you've done is you've collapsed your state of mind. Now, if you take... This actually happens to be a piece of wood that looks like fruit. I'm fooling you. But if I hold this... That's got too many little babies. I better take this one. If I hold this flower up, and you can hold back from naming it, and just let its redness... come into you, its greenness, the way it takes possession of the space, its own space, and so forth. Well, yes, it's a flower, but if you say it's a flower, you diminish it immediately. But energetically, you collapse your mind into a concept. Does that make sense?

[26:51]

And that concept... collapses the field of mind. And you know, if you work with your senses, if you begin to practice with your senses and isolate your senses, you'll find that, you see, normally we homogenize our senses under eye consciousness. If you don't homogenize your senses, you probably can smell this, even if you're back in the back part of the room. And you can feel its presence in a certain way that is not the same when we both homogenize it or collapse it into a name. So I'm trying to give you some examples.

[27:53]

And when you don't collapse things into a name, you're practicing what we call big mind. And you want to keep, as often as possible, find opportunities to bring yourself into big mind, not collapsing it into concepts. Because there's an energy in the field of mind like if I just look at you, there's a quality of energy that's nourished and arises through looking at Paul. But as soon as I say, Paul is such and such a kind of person and he does this or he does that or he feels that, I mean, it just shuts down and all that energy gets into little balls of concepts and drives me into states of mind which tighten me up, make me concerned about the future and so forth. Yeah. So what do you do at that point, at the point that you recognise that you've just collapsed something?

[28:58]

It's just the awareness of what you've done enough. Yes, that's a lot. That's a lot. If you keep noting that you do that, notice that you do that, I mean, Whenever you do anything the more you can approach it without collapsing your state of mind Either more you can do something fully but when you notice it you notice that energy difference and You begin to get the power to sometimes resist it now this Cohen I said that we've spent the last couple years on has a phrase in it just hold to the mind before thought arises and Look into that and you will see not seeing and then let it go. But now this is a yogic skill to hold to the mind before thought arises.

[30:05]

But really it just means don't name something. You don't know what this is called probably so I can put it up. Originally it was a back scratcher. It's a teaching staff and originally a back scratcher and a teaching staff because it reaches anywhere. But I'm not going to tell you its official name. So, the more you can practice in a homeopathic doses even, sensing not letting things turn into names. Now, our mind rushes into names. But you can get a feel for not rushing into names, and you can't do it by thinking. You have to do it by a kind of energy, by feeling the difference in energy. So now maybe I could say something about uncorrected mind.

[31:12]

The basic mental posture, I gave you some of the physical posture. The basic mental posture of meditation is uncorrected mind, which means we can say, don't invite your thoughts to tea. You let whatever comes up, come up. Now you can think you're doing nothing, but actually, as I often say, you either cook your karma or get cooked by it. So when you let, and this is important for us Westerners, because as I said the first night, our sense of personal continuity is embedded in our story. And we can't ignore that as Westerners. So when we first start practicing, lots of stuff is coming up.

[32:16]

And Zen is badly taught, especially in the West, when it's said you should clear your mind of thoughts. This is actually not good. It's probably dangerous for us, in fact. What you want to do anyway, it's not that you want to get your mind free of thoughts, because that's quite pleasant, is you want to stop identifying with your thoughts. And that's a big difference. You let your thoughts be, you just try to withdraw identification from them. Now there's various ways to withdraw identification from them, but the first practice is uncorrected mind, because when you try to do something, you are in effect being involved with your thoughts. So you do nothing. You just let things come up. Now, again, it's like different soup stocks. When things come up, memories and associations come up in ordinary mind, basically they're being re-karmalized.

[33:23]

They come through your mind and they get stuck with more associations and things and then they go back in your storehouse consciousness and they're all gooped up and they go back in there just as they were before. But there's a purifying element to uncorrected mind, to zazen mind. And we know zazen mind is different from waking mind. At first, it's somewhat similar to dreaming mind. And while it's similar to dreaming mind, it also, in an associative way, draws up dream-type images and associations. but it's a dreaming mind in which you're awake and alert. So it's helpful to think of mind as a different kind of liquid. And now, even though these thoughts and stuff are coming up, they're coming into a different kind of soup stock or mind stock or different kind of liquid of mind.

[34:29]

And they actually get changed and restored in a new way. Am I making sense to you? So when you sit and do zazen and you're just sitting there every day for 20 minutes or 40 minutes or something, and all the associations come up and table legs and people and your parents and stuff like that. And things start coming up that you didn't know happened to you or, you know, were sort of non-conscious. Unconscious and non-conscious. Things that weren't, it's not things that were just repressed. Unconscious usually refers to those things which are not let into the conscious. This is things that the conscious never even noticed. That happened to you but they weren't in the category of which you notice or make part of your history. And I am absolutely certain that each of you already has within you the history of a Buddha. You just haven't connected the dots.

[35:32]

In other words, you have a virtually infinite number of experiences in you. Those experiences put together in a slightly different way are the history of a Buddha. This is true. But you put your history together in a very particular way. And it's drawn up out of you by our conscious mind, which has the particular structure of our experience, our parents, our grandparents, our history, etc. And it structures your experience of yourself so you become the person you think you are. But if you begin to draw on your storehouse consciousness, if you begin to allow the many... virtually infinite, again, experiences of your life up to now, to begin to come up without your interfering with them, you find out you have quite a number of histories. And we could say the deepest, most inclusive history is the history of a Buddha, but you have the histories of probably an asshole.

[36:42]

You have the history of a erotic maniac. You have the history of various kinds of people in you. Now, let me go to breathing practice now. Practice in this sense, again, is just bringing attention to something where you're already doing. I presume you're already breathing. And I presume you'll be breathing as long as you're here.

[37:48]

And so what are the ingredients of breathing? The ingredients of breathing are an inhale, an exhale, a pause at the base of the exhale, an inhale, a pause at the top of the inhale, and an exhale. So basically there are four ingredients that way, right? Then you can increase the number of ingredients or you can vary the ingredients by there's long inhales and short exhales. or short exhales and long inhales, or long inhales and long exhales, etc. These all make a difference. Now, what is another ingredient? Another ingredient is attention. And that is an ingredient that's part of the practice of bringing attention to your breath. And also, another ingredient is intention, because you have to have an intention to bring attention to your breath.

[39:00]

Now, you may say, this guy's a nitwit. He's talking about something so totally obvious. But as far as I can see, it's like this. It's simple like this. But the difference that makes it Buddhist practice is there's an immense thoroughness and attentiveness to very basic things. Now, intention is a mental posture. Attention is a physical posture. I mean, for example, if I say to you, attention, you may, whoa, okay. If I say to you, intention, you say, What the heck's wrong with him? Well, attention is a physical posture. Intention is a mental posture. So when you bring intention to bring attention to your breath, you're actually merging a mental posture and a physical posture.

[40:11]

And we are not You know, Descartes split us apart and said body and mind are different and dogs don't feel pain and so forth because they're not human and only humans and the pineal gland is the only place body and mind touch. This guy, you know, he was smart, but he was confused. In any case. But now we take for granted in the last 20 years or so, yes, body and mind are joined, etc., but body and mind are actually pretty separate. You have to weave them together. You have to bring them together. It's a field. We experience our body and mind quite separately. In actual fact, we experience them together, but the way we're constructed, we tend to notice them as separate. Are you still with me? Am I making sense here? So, if you want to bring body and mind to know each other, you have to bring them together in some way.

[41:16]

You have to weave them together. Now it is assumed in yogic culture that the best way to do this weaving is with your breath. And I'm going through it very simply with you. You bring intention to attention. So that's two ingredients. And intention is something that you hold and you try to bring attention to your breath as often as you can. while you're walking, and I would take specific times to do it, like, for example, going up the stairs. Normally, you're by yourself, or you can, you know, if you walk upstairs in a building or something like that, somewhere, just train yourself in a Pavlovian sense to, when you come to stairs, bring attention to your breath. And eventually, and it takes, you know, If you're a slow learner like me, it takes quite a long time. But eventually you get so that you reside in your breath body.

[42:20]

I don't know if some of you know the book Street Zen, but my disciple, Isan Dorsey Roshi, who founded a hospice for people with AIDS, we more or less did it together back in the 70s and 80s, And he eventually, because of a forgetful weekend, died of AIDS. But he was a great person, and he once said to me, you know, you told me 20 years ago to reside in my breast body, and it took 20 years for me to find out how to do it. But if you have this intention and you can realize, perhaps from what Isan said, that it's important, you can bring your intention to reside in your breath body so it's a present intention that you reinforce when you can.

[43:24]

Looking out the window, walking upstairs or downstairs, taking a walk by yourself or even with people and so forth. So you have these ingredients of pause, pause, in and out, and attention and intention. Now what you're doing when you bring your mind to your breath, basically, is you're physicalizing your mind. You're making your mind physical. You're grounding the mind in the tones of the body, in the tones of the heart. And you're, though there's no such word, you're mentalizing the body.

[44:27]

So in effect, it's a weaving process. This bringing your attention to your breath is a kind of shuttle that's weaving mind and body together and giving you a familiar, it's a kind of bridge too, a bridge between what you experience as inner and what you experience as outer. So a lot's going on when you just bring your attention thoroughly to your breath. So you're physicalizing your mind and by physicalizing your mind you're refining your mind. That may seem strange because we think of our mind as more fine than our body but actually on the whole our body is more fine than our mind. Because the mind's job not subtle mind, but the mind's job as a conceptual consciousness that we notice is again to establish three-dimensional awareness.

[45:38]

And three-dimensional awareness is quite gross. It's called gross consciousness. So it's a little bit like you take dirty water. What's the best way to clean up dirty water? To put it in the dirt. and it bubbles up as spring water. So it's this, the earth itself purifies water and the body itself will purify your mind. So you are bringing, when you bring, again, excuse me for belaboring the point, when you bring attention, intention and attention to the breath, you're bringing your mind into the breath and the breath itself is a process of purifying the mind. and within the body. Now sometimes we speak about the subtle breath and yes it is a kind of subtle breath but it also means a refined mind that's been refined through the breath is subtle mind.

[46:41]

So to get access to your subtle mind in Zen practice we discover this access through refining the mind within the breath. Am I making sense to you? Yeah? Okay. And you also, as the mind becomes more physicalized, it becomes more stabilized. It's stabilized through being rooted in the body, and then we could have a practice of the four or five elements, solidity, water, fire, air, and space, etc., solidity, motility, and heat and so forth. And those are important because this is solid, you are solid and liquid and I can relate to your solidity and your liquidity and your heat and so forth as well. But you can't do those kind of practices until you have a mind refined enough to be intimate with your own solidity, fluidity and so forth.

[47:49]

But I can know Jane as a solid thing, independent of knowing her as an idea or a concept or something, and I can know Jane as a fluid, pliant thing, and so forth. But I can know it through my own fluidity or my own solidity, or my own rising and sinking. So energy has direction, like cheetah. Mind has direction. The directions not only go out, they go in. And they go up and down. Now, I'm saying a lot here, but I'm... Again, what I'm saying is simple. Now... When you first bring your attention to your... Your breath is first non-conscious. Primarily, it's an autonomic nervous system. Function of the autonomic nervous system, like your heart. And it's just going away there, you know. Your heart's going and your breathing's going. And for the most part, it's not conscious.

[48:51]

Now, you're interfering with it when you bring consciousness to it. And when you first start to practice, you count your exhales. Let's say... Count your inhales. Or notice that your breath is long or short. Or visualize your breath to stabilize your breath. But you notice that whatever approach you take to, and the approach makes a difference, to noticing your breath, how you bring attention to your breath is also important, whether you bring it by counting your breaths or by naming your breaths or by visualizing your breath and so forth. See, I'm giving you a lot to do in the next weeks. So I also want to show you how something so simple as your breath is not, and what you're doing, when you begin to bring your own intelligence to it, it's not simple at all.

[50:02]

We have attention, intention, the pause, how long do you pause, what's the difference of the feeling at the top of the breath when you pause and the feeling at the bottom? What's the difference when you name or notice your breath to when you count your breath? And what's the difference when you visualize your breath? Or what's the difference when you follow your breath? And those are the main ways that in Zen we would emphasize, or I'd emphasize, following, noticing, counting, and visualizing. Now, at first, you... The first stage is your breath is non-conscious, mostly non-conscious, but noticeable. The second stage is you're bringing your attention to your breath and you're actually interfering with it quite a bit. Then at some point that interference lets go, disappears, and you suddenly feel your breathing breathing itself.

[51:17]

Again, it's not so unusual, but when breathing breathes itself, it's a wonderful feeling of freedom. But breathing's been breathing itself all your life, but now breathing is breathing itself with your attention not interfering. And you feel kind of liberated. Your shoulders begin to shoulder themselves. Your stomach begins to stomach itself. each part of you begins to have its own independence. And what you've developed at this point is a non-interfering observing consciousness. Now, a non-interfering observing consciousness is a very important yogic technique, at least as important as one-pointedness. A non-interfering observing consciousness. So, for example, let me try to give you a feeling for that. Say that you're doing zazen. And you're sitting there and you're concentrating and not concentrating and sometimes you're relaxed.

[52:19]

And it's better to not concentrate all the time. It's good to relax sometimes. And suddenly you find yourself in a state of mind with no thoughts. And you say, this must be Samadhi. Hey there. And... It goes away like that. And it goes away because you do not yet have a non-interfering observing consciousness. Because once you've developed a non-interfering observing consciousness, you can say, oh, this is samadhi. And you can sustain samadhi and explore it. And that skill is as easy to come to as developing the ability to observe your breath without interfering with your breath.

[53:20]

And once you have non-interfering observing consciousness, now I've made a technical term, non-interfering observing consciousness, you can begin to explore your inner psychology, your organs and so forth. You can begin to follow your breath and explore within your body and you can begin to notice things like when a cold is starting or when a headache is starting, when your mood is changing. But as long as you have a consciousness which is so gross it interferes with, you can't notice things like that subtle moment when a headache starts. or what accompanied that that made the headache start, etc. Am I making sense? So a non-interfering observing consciousness is like suddenly you have the tool by which the eye sees the eye. I sound like a preacher.

[54:25]

Stop it. But I really like this stuff, you know. So... So I'm excited to share it with you, you know. So I think it must be time for a break. And when we come back from the break, let's say quarter to ten to six, And I guess we end at 6.30 or 7? Something like that, 8, 9, 10? Dinner is at 7.30, right? 7, 7. I'm going to learn. Yeah, okay, so let's come back at 10 to 6 and I'll have a small surprise for you.

[55:29]

Okay, thanks. Well, the nature of the experience, I would just say, is that you get absorbed. And that absorbed is also sometimes a lack of attentiveness or a concentration without an observer. And when you don't breathe, it's very basic to be startled. So in general, although certain yogis actually stop their breath, in Zen practice we, you can, if you're skillful enough, you can practice with such things if you want. But in Zen practice, generally, we don't stop our breath, but sometimes our breath goes extremely slowly. It can only be maybe a couple breaths a minute. But you don't want to... First, this is taught as a visualization, but there's other reasons for the visualization.

[56:36]

In general, if you're a... For instance, if you work on watches or something like that, when you concentrate, you stop your breath to do something fine. And if you... And if you have that as a natural habit to stop your breath when you concentrate, when you come into concentration and meditation, you sometimes stop your breath. And that will occur if you breathe more with the upper part of your chest. You don't want to breathe the upper part of your chest. You want to breathe from way down, even from your heels, we say sometimes, but at least from your hara. And I'd like to speak about the hara a bit and the energy of mind at some point. So if you visualize your breath, the way to visualize your breath is you exhale and you imagine the exhales coming out like this, exterior to the body, and that the inhale is coming in from down below.

[57:42]

And it actually will, the way the diaphragm works, it'll actually feel like that. That you exhale, And it feels like it's making an oval. And then you inhale. Now this also sets the... There's several reasons for this. Maybe I'll come back to it. But I'll just limit it for now. When you do that and you get in the habit of that kind of visualization in your breath practice. First of all, you just take an inventory of your breath practice. of different ways you breathe. When you first sit down, you breathe this way. When you're thinking, you're breathing that way. You just notice the way you breathe. And at some point, you begin to inject into that inner inventory, counting your breaths or following your breaths, or in this case, visualizing your breath. If you visualize your breath, generally your breath will become so stable it won't stop. It will go very slowly sometimes.

[58:44]

If you're in a state of mind that's very clear and relaxed, you don't need much energy because mostly it's your brain which demands a lot of oxygen. So if you're in a very nourishing and relaxed state of mind, you don't need to breathe much. And so this, generally, if you learn to visualize your breath in this way, your breath won't stop. And if it does, you won't be caught unawares. You'll just stay present in it. Now, my surprise, what I'd really like you to do, there's about, are there 60 of us or 50 of us? Sixty. Sixty. Sixty. I'd like you to break up into groups of six or eight or ten and just have a discussion among yourself in your own language of what you think this is about. Maybe you could address for each of you what your experience or what your sense of mind was or is.

[59:51]

and some experience you have had of this kind of mind I'm presenting. I think it's very important that we have some... It's just not all coming from me. I would like you to get some familiarity with talking together about these things. So just for a little while, and what I'll do is I'll ring a bell three times but the first ring will just say maybe I'm going to ring it a second time and the second will say and the third ring will be we can rejoin together so if you'd be willing to do that just with the people around you or don't pick the people you think are the nicest just thank you very much for discussing this stuff with each other And I would like it if one or two of you from each group kind of thought a little bit about what you spoke about and maybe gave us a kind of report tomorrow.

[61:04]

Not too long, but just the gist of what you talked about. And so we now have some shared sense of what each group focused on or talked didn't focus on. And perhaps you could, and perhaps you will continue this discussion. It's nice to stay during this time, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, attentive to this in various ways, but not forcing it. And some of you have mentioned that you expressed that, in effect, that it would be helpful for you to have some others to practice with. And I know there's...

[62:07]

I believe a number of practice centers in Melbourne, but this is also an opportunity of us being together this weekend if any of you wanted to agree to get together once a week or something like that, two or three people or seven or eight or whatever. It can be the nucleus of starting a kind of Dharma friendship. It's not like an ordinary... One of the nice things about practicing with people is you don't know people who would necessarily be your friends. So it's a kind of wider, different kind of relationship. Another kind of friendship. And it definitely helps practice to have the support of some others once a week or so. So, anyway, that's just a suggestion you might see if it comes up. I don't think you have to force it, but if it comes up, it's a possibility.

[63:09]

And dinner is going to be at 7.15. Kitchen... liked it when I suggested it be a little longer because they're a little slow and are they being kind to me? I don't know. But they have a horn in the cob is coming and some other things. Now I'd like to suggest some practices that you can do between in general, but people are always asking, particularly the questions usually come Sunday afternoon, how do you continue this practice, this feeling in your ordinary life? And I've given you some suggestions already, but one of the important, useful, fairly easy ways to bring practice into your ordinary activity

[64:20]

Of course we have the general practice of mindfulness and of attentiveness, but is what in effect is a mental posture of nourishment and a physical posture, in effect, of completeness. So that you, when you're doing things, take a little time to see if you can, say, just walk. Walk at a pace which you feel nourished. More energy is coming into you than out of you. So it might mean you walk very slowly. It might mean, who knows? But once you discover that sensation, that pace, then it doesn't actually mean slow. But sometimes you have to go kind of a little bit leisurely to feel nourished. I mean, why not take a vacation all the time? I mean, I consider practice a kind of vacation. And so one is to do things with a sense of, when you eat, just eat at a pace and in a way that you feel nourished.

[65:34]

Don't feel obligated, you know, to eat a certain way, to do something. So that's nourishment. And the completeness is to, and these are related to what dharma means, a practical definition of dharma would be those actions in which you feel nourished and or complete. Now a painter, for example, has to know when a painting is finished, or though you just paint endlessly. That moment when you know no more brush strokes. That's a feeling of completeness. But they can also be present in your in your simplest actions. Like I can have my hand on my knee in a way that feels complete. And if I want to brush my long hair back, I can bring my hand up in a way that feels complete.

[66:37]

or I pick this up, these beads, I can hold them or pick them up or put them down in a way that feels complete. And in general, the precept, for example, precept literally means as a practice, not as a mindfulness training, but as a precept. Sept means to hold. Pre means what comes before. So, what you hold before you act. So, for example, one of the precepts is sometimes loosely translated as don't steal, but it actually means do not take what is not given. So, do not take what is not given. For instance, say I'm walking into a room. This room or anybody. But let's imagine there's a door here. If I just walk into the room like this...

[67:38]

I'm, in that sense, sealing the room. I'm not waiting for it to be given to me. So it's the feeling of... And the threshold... You know, in Japan, the ordinary word for an entry to a house is genkan. But genkan comes from D. Malakirti's ten-map room where he taught all the Buddhists and others. and it's called a mystery gate, genkan means mystery gate, but the Japanese have forgotten that a threshold is a mystery gate, just as we've forgotten that an entrance is an entrance, basically the same thing. So when you enter a room, go through the entrance, you actually, if you really are accepting that every state of mind is unique, You're entering another state of mind, another space, as you enter a room. If you have this predictable mind, you're walking right in, nothing's different, you're just going along, right?

[68:41]

So you can use a threshold, an entrance, to stop for a moment. Let yourself feel the room, then step in. And then the room, it feels like it's being given to you. These are very small things, but they make a big difference. So that's why when I come up to my pillow, the custom is I bow to the pillow, because I just stop. Actually, what I'm doing is stopping for a moment and feeling a certain completeness. There's the pillow. Hey, hi, how are you? Then I turn around and I, whoa, gee, where'd you guys come from? And so I'd have a moment of looking at you, and that's a moment of completeness. You understand? And there's a certain feeling of completeness just to look. And you may not notice that I'm making all these little stops, because I've been doing it a long time, but in actual, yeah, I'm always giving these little stops, these little pauses. So I might bow to you, typically doing that, but I don't have to bow.

[69:47]

In the same way when I sit down. I stop for a minute and my feet are on the ground. And I actually bring my spine. Cooks are having a good time. I bring my spine down to the cushion. That's the first thing I do. And I tend to bring it down, except I'm on this wobbly thing. I tend to bring it down in a straight line. And so I bring my spine down and then I stop. There's a sense of completion at that. Then I usually fold one leg and then I stop. Then I fold the other leg and then I stop. Then I actually straighten my back and I compose myself.

[70:49]

It's all part of the tea ceremony too. It's all the same kind of teaching. It's very similar to what I said last night, to do things with two hands. Why don't you put your hands together like this? Now sometimes you can feel, if you're relaxed, a spongy material between your hands. Can you feel that spongy material between your hands? Now sometimes it's not there, but for many people it's fairly natural to feel it. Sometimes you can feel it quite far out. That's also mind. And healers often get ready to do healing or massage by they do this first. And they feel this. And then there's an energy. We can even say a kind of... That's why there's an eye in the Buddha's palm. There's a kind of energy in your hands. So your hands are connected, obviously.

[72:00]

They're left and right, but they go right up through the chest and shoulders and heart. And yet we think of them as separate, and yet they're connected, but they're also connected this way. You put them together, they're connected. And each breath is a sense of completeness. Now if you do a simple thing like this, notice the completeness that's already present, particularly if you have more sense of each mind as each moment as unique, and hence then has the possibility of completeness, I guarantee you at the end of the year you'll feel more complete. If you do things always kind of like hardly finishing this and going into that, you're going to feel depleted.

[73:00]

So it helps to find this pace, this attunement of completeness. I mean, I don't know anything about golf, you know, very little anyway. I used to caddy a lot. And my mother's a very good golfer. She's 93 now and only stopped golfing recently. And she's hit two and a half hole in ones. And so one time with Mike Murphy I taught a golf workshop. It was quite popular. Because my sense of how you do things, how you step up to the golf ball and stop for a moment and let it be given to you. is actually very similar to the way some professionals work with it. So I knew this from a different angle. So these golf pros, which I did this with some people, actually seemed they wanted me to do it again. I haven't. But Michael's written a book called Golf in the Kingdom, and he's now written a second book called The Kingdom of Shiva's Irons, which is going to be in...

[74:10]

announced it's a big deal in America, so he wants me to come to New York and Atlanta with him, because he's one of my very closest friends, and sort of announced the book joint, so I'm going to go and do this book number about golf. I don't know anything about golf, except my mother was a good golfer. But then I had to play a little, because, you know, I'm teaching golf right, and I don't know how to play, so... So they said, well, you must hit a ball. So I thought, I visualized my mother. I've never been so close to her. And so I just said, okay, mom, hit the ball. Off it went about 200 yards. Everybody was quite impressed. They thought, there's Zen for you. It was just my mom. So you can practice completeness and you can practice nourishment.

[75:18]

And this sense of... I could overhear some of you talking about a little perplexity about the relationship between consciousness and awareness. And we can understand it also just conceptually as similar to the relationship between waves and water. Consciousness is more like waves and awareness is more like water. And water's pretty much the same, whether it's in a wave or down deep. So it's a bit like being able to discover how to shift from the waves of the mind to the water of the mind. And I think what I've decided to do is tomorrow morning I'll give you the teaching, a very basic teaching and implicit in the Heart Sutra and central to all of Buddhist practice is the skandhas. They're called the five heaps or something. It's another way of looking at self. So we'll discuss the three functions of self and the five skandhas tomorrow.

[76:25]

And I think it's quite useful teaching. And the five skandhas basically make clearer what the relationship is between awareness and consciousness in terms of your emotions, feelings, perceptions and so on. What, again, I would like to think of what I'm trying to share with you here is the art of actuality. Not the art of reality, but actuality, because this is all how we act, how we discover, how we pick up a piece of dust. With whom will we, who will go through life and who will accompany us in life and death? So why don't we sit for a few minutes and then we can have some corn on the cob.

[77:29]

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