What we might do this weekend is going to require some cooperation from you. Because I really can't tell you anything that you don't want to hear, or at least I can't tell you anything you're not willing or ready to hear. So that's one reason, though I know many of you know English, I like to have a translation. Because I have to hear you hearing what I say in order to know what to say. And in general, I can't hear you hearing English.

[01:05]

And although I don't understand German, I can hear you hearing German. Believe it or not, it's true. And by cooperation I also mean if you are actively listening even though it gets sort of too much to follow sometimes. What I mean is that sometimes because Buddhism for many people is rather new, and I like dealing with Buddhism as a craft, sometimes it's a little hard to hear three new things in a row.

[02:11]

You can only hear two new things in a row, you know? But if you're wondering inside yourself, like, I wonder what that means, or something, I can feel that. Now, I only see two or three or four people who are familiar with my teaching, so I can feel free to repeat myself. Because if you're mostly fairly new or new, then there's some things I just have to repeat myself in order to find, I can only find so many ways to say things. And let me ask, without amplification, can you hear Ulrike and myself?

[03:17]

In the back, too? So-so? Okay. We can always move forward. What? Yeah. You can't hear so well. Why don't you move your chair up a bit? Good, thanks. Now, Ulrike translates for me, but also

[04:44]

Since we've been working together so many years, we have discussed a lot of these things on how they can be talked about so they're accessible. And many things that I actually have talked about have come out of questions that she's asked me because something hasn't been clear. And now we've been doing this together long enough that I'm learning from her, I mean, perhaps more than she's learning from me. Sometimes I think I can give any lecture and she'll just improve it. Women usually do for men anyway.

[05:48]

And I've also learned a great deal from Martin through his probing and often, or at least sometimes, doubting questions. So I may turn to Ulrike and Martin during the seminar to carry some of the teaching themselves. Now Martin told me this evening that a large percentage of you have no experience of meditation. So let me ask how many have little or no experience with meditation. Well, this may be exciting for you. I don't know. Let me see. And how many have had some experience with Zen meditation?

[07:18]

Specifically Zen. Okay. Okay. Tonight you're feeling you have no experience with anything. Okay. Well, I have to... I'm sort of wondering what would be useful to do. Hmm. Now, I'm assuming that you have all of... Has anybody here not done the quadrinity process?

[08:24]

Two or three. Two. Three. Well, you have to go to the downstairs room where the quadrinity process starts. No, that's not true, Anne. Anyway, I'm going to assume that most of you have some in-depth experience of your own psychological processes. So what I would like to see if is possible is we could follow up on that with a description of processes in Buddhism which relate to psychological processes. Do we have a blackboard or paper board or something? We can get one? Maybe I could use one tomorrow. No, I can't hear you.

[09:25]

It's very loud. Okay. Oh, I wondered what that was. What a difference. When you teach in cities, you're so used to noise like that. You think it's just streets or air conditioning or something. So what I would like to be able to do is to give you an opportunity and perhaps permission to look at yourself and the world a different way.

[10:38]

And perhaps... I can give you some of the means to look at yourself a different way. But if I'm going to give you the means to do it from a Buddhist point of view, then we have to learn something about meditation. And let me say that at each part of what I will be talking about, I'm happy to have some questions and discussion with you. I'm not only happy, but at some points during the seminar, I think some discussion among us is essential. Okay, so I have to give you some meditation instruction.

[11:49]

And Zen practice is, the basic practice is, we could call uncorrected mind. But as you can readily imagine, just to say that is a kind of correction. So uncorrected mind is a way to leave yourself alone, to profoundly leave yourself alone.

[12:56]

Okay, so how are you going to leave yourself alone is the question basically Zen practice asks. Okay. Now, Buddhist practice, the most fundamental practice in Buddhism is mindfulness. But mindfulness is something that can occur while you're walking around, sitting, even sleeping. And we should talk about mindfulness at some point, but mindfulness is basically a particular way to pay attention to what you're doing. But you can't really learn much about, you can develop yourself and become calmer and more intuitive through mindfulness practice, but you can't learn much about yourself.

[14:02]

To learn something about yourself and to develop and educate your interior consciousness, it requires some kind of meditation sitting. Mm-hmm. And as long as you're in physical activity, your body and mind are caught up in that activity. So you want some way to be able to be still without physical activity. Now, there are many reasons for this.

[15:18]

One of the most basic reasons is to break the adhesive connection between thought and action. Because you can't really explore yourself and your unconscious with meditation until you completely know you don't have to act on whatever comes up. So central to Zen practice is not just sitting calmly or sitting in a relaxed way, although that's important, but to sit as still as possible without moving. Because you really want to know with your body, with a deep confidence, that whatever thought comes up or whatever happens mentally, you can physically stay still.

[16:44]

And that's not staying still through willpower or some sort of special effort, but staying still through willingness. So it's not staying still in the realm of like or dislike because then you feel vulnerable. It's staying still independent of whether you like to or dislike it or... or whether your will is strong or your will changes, you're just able to stay there. So when you first start to sit, there's a certain amount of physical difficulty because you're not used to it.

[17:47]

But there's more difficulty because psychologically you want to move. There's a threshold below which ego does not want you to go. We want to be private individuals, but somehow we want to be private in a way that we could share what happens to us. Mm-hmm. I mean, you can hear it in people who say, so you don't hear it so often anymore, but 20 years ago you heard it a lot, which is, why are you wasting your time staring at your navel?

[19:05]

You know, shouldn't you be out helping the world and not meditating? But if you went and sat in a bar for 40 minutes, nobody comes up to you and say, you shouldn't be having a beer, you should be out helping the world. Or if you go to a movie, nobody says that to you. But if you sit down and meditate for 40 minutes, people say, you know, you're not helping the world or something like that. And what that kind of statement means is there's a certain fear in our culture and a certain fear in all of us is going into territory which we can't share with other people.

[20:11]

Und was das bedeutet, ist einfach, dass es in uns selbst und in unserer Kultur eine Angst gibt, eine Angst davor, in ein Territorium vorzudringen, das wir nicht mit anderen teilen können. You start thinking maybe you're going crazy, or these are strange thoughts, who has ever thought this way before? Man fängt an zu denken, man wird vielleicht verrückt, oder es sind altenartige Gedanken, das hat noch nie jemand gedacht. This is the work of the devil. Das ist die Arbeit des Teufels. And as many of you may know, that the word daimon of Shakespeare's inner voice in Christianity becomes demon, becomes the devil. So practicing meditation, to really learn to sit still, is a kind of very simple secret. You can find ways to go into yourself in great depth if you've just developed the habit of being able to sit still 30 or 40 minutes a day. Now, just going into yourself in great depth or some depth doesn't solve all your problems.

[21:26]

But it does change the membrane between consciousness and unconsciousness. Now, you in addition need other skills in order to make use of this membrane change between consciousness and unconsciousness. Now, all of the aspects of meditation posture as developed in Zen are meant to... be the seed of these various crafts that allow you to explore yourself and your world. Now, we tend to think at the base of the person, at the root of the person is psyche.

[22:28]

But in Buddhism, at the root of the person is reality. And the reality is how things actually exist, how you actually exist, and how the phenomenal world actually exists, and how that you and the phenomenal world interconnect at a fundamental level of being. That wasn't too long, eh? A bit long, on the long side. Sorry. Although I don't mean the psyche isn't a part of it, but Buddhism is a mindology, not a psychology. And that's one of the things I'd like to talk about with you and learn from you in this context, with you and through you this weekend, is how a mindology practice like Buddhism and psychology and your own story work together.

[24:05]

And this is also something that I would like to find out together with you at this weekend, where I would also like to learn something from you, such as psychology on the one hand, and then the practice of spiritual sciences in Buddhism, and at the same time a certain feeling for one's own history, how these three aspects come together and work together. Now, I want to also introduce a koan to the seminar which we have translated into German. I decided to take one koan for each seminar this year. Since you're the second seminar I've done, you're the second koan. And the second koan happened to be the most famous koan in Buddhism, which is Bodhidharma and the emperor and emptiness and so forth. Do we have enough copies in German for everybody?

[25:23]

Do we have enough copies in English? Oh, good. All right. I'm not sure I should pass it out to you tonight, though. As you read it tonight, you might not come back tomorrow. What is this? I mean, you're into about the second paragraph and you feel like you've been in a museum all afternoon. But maybe we'll chance it. You can have it until tomorrow. But the reason I'd like to pass out the koan is not really to teach you anything about Buddhism. Also, der Grund, warum ich gerne dieses Koan austeilen möchte, ist also nicht, weil ich jetzt euch unbedingt jetzt etwas über Buddhismus lehren möchte.

[26:37]

But koans are an extraordinary spiritual form of literature. Aber koans sind eine außergewöhnliche Form spiritueller Literatur. Which I think it's just useful to know something about. Und ich halte es einfach für nützlich, darüber etwas zu wissen. And it also presents a particular way of thinking which I'd like to introduce to you. So the first step in zazen practice is to try to come to a posture which allows you to sit still. And the main... You're not sitting still. You're maybe... You're moving around so you can sit still.

[27:56]

We didn't take our pillows out of the car, so we have some so these four pillows can go to somebody tomorrow. We haven't taken our own pillows out of the car yet, so here are a few pillows for you tomorrow. Now, I started out saying the basic posture of... Yogic means mental and physical and mental postures. So the basic posture of Zen is uncorrected mind. But to come to that point, you have to establish certain conditions.

[29:11]

Okay. And the first is usually you sit down somewhere. And you sit down and you take the best posture you can. And I'll try to teach you that. And then you leave yourself alone. Now, how you leave yourself alone and certain ways in which it can help you to leave yourself alone, that's the teaching of Zen. All right, the basic posture is your backbone. So your backbone works with your... It's through your backbone that your energy body can awaken. And sometimes you see some Buddhas, Amida Buddha, usually they're sitting this way with their back like this.

[30:39]

Yeah. And that's always a Buddha emphasizing compassion, kind of leaning forward to people. But all the postures of the yogic Buddhas are all sitting with a very straight back. Now, it's not a back that's held, but a back that you can find the posture best through feeling a lifting motion through your backbone. And this is not a straightness in the sense that you keep your back straight with an effort, but the back rests in itself by creating a feeling as if you were pulled up. And you can check your posture if you're sitting on a chair on the ground by pushing straight up beside you.

[31:52]

And then letting yourself back down. That usually means your backbone is pretty straight. Now, if you want to sit in a more contemplative way, more relaxed way, that could be psychologically very calming, you can sit leaning back and with your back curved. Now, my experience and understanding is that that can be very useful and can create a sense of well-being, but you'll always be sitting within your personality. And within your culture.

[32:54]

I remember a blind, I had a blind student once who discovered that when she was on the bus, if she curved her back slightly, people treated her as sighted. But when she stood up completely straight, the way blind people often do because they can't see other people, everyone treated her as blind. Because in a funny way she was standing up outside the sighted world. So there's a certain quality, and I couldn't explain why, but when you sit with this lifting feeling through your back, so you're really quite straight, you have this yogic posture of your back, you're a little bit outside your personality and outside your culture.

[34:16]

You're already moving into the unconscious a little bit. You're moving out of the non-daily space world into a non-daily space world. So you try to sit, whether it's on a chair or on a cushion, in a way in which your back can be, without too much effort, have this lifting feeling. And then you... But still, since the posture is basically a posture of relaxation, this lifting feeling through your back and through your back of your neck and head up, so it's almost as if you're being lifted like this.

[35:23]

is accompanied by a simultaneous feeling of relaxation, almost like honey or butter melting down through you. And your tongue is at the roof of your mouth, which connects later as you, at first it stops saliva flow, which tends to accumulate in your mouth when you meditate. But later it becomes a way in which some of the energy channels are connected through the tongue to the roof of the mouth. And the reason we, if you can, the reason we sit cross-legged is because when you meditate, you're concentrating the heat of your body.

[36:56]

Basically, when you get used to it, it's a kind of cozy posture. You're kind of hugging yourself with your legs and arms. And heat and consciousness are closely related, so anyway. And for the same reason in Buddhism we generally put our hands together. And usually the left hand on the top of the right. But if you happen to be right-handed, I mean left-handed, you might put your right hand on top. You want to put the hand most connected with the unconscious on top of the conscious hand.

[38:01]

Is there anything I've forgotten you want to add? The eyes? Yeah, why don't you... Yes, very important is also the eye position. Many people are used to keeping their eyes closed. In Zen meditation, if you think about it, you try to keep your eyes a little bit open. Not wide open, but just gently place the eyelids on the eyelids, so that a little light comes in and you can see a little unfocused what is in front of you. And you direct this look about one to two meters in front of you on the floor. Breath. Yeah, and... What is also very pleasant is when you also lean back and forth a little bit.

[39:35]

At the beginning of the meditation, until you really have the feeling that you have found your center, the spine rests in place. You can also move your head a little, become a little looser. Also make the shoulders a little looser and let them hang down on the side. Yes, and then you close your eyes, put your tongue on the roof of your mouth and try to concentrate on your breath. And usually we try to count in the Zen meditation, always while exhaling. Say so. At the beginning of the meditation practice, it is difficult for many people to sit with their legs crossed.

[41:01]

There is another possibility to sit on the floor without a seat. If you now put the legs next to the seat cushion on the side, it goes like this. Place the pillow between your legs and make sure that it is high enough. It is an incredible help to have enough pillow material and to build such a small throne until you are high enough that the back is straight without much effort. I mean this practice is based on the roots are is rooted in a very simple observation made in India long before Buddhism.

[42:18]

It looks like Zen and yoga practice and Taoist practice all go back to this simple observation. That we have three states of mind at birth. Waking mind. Sleeping dreaming mind. And non-dreaming mind. Non-dreaming sleeping mind. And two of those minds are mostly unconscious to us. So they asked themselves a question. How can we develop a mind that includes these three?

[43:19]

It joins waking mind, dreaming mind, and non-dreaming mind. And they tried psychedelics, and they tried meditation, and the Buddhist tradition stuck with meditation. And this was such a fundamental, and the whole Kundalini teachings and all and Taoism and so forth, they all root back into India. Because they discovered an underlying mind that includes the other three and in fact surrounds the other three. So the basic practice of Buddhism is no matter what your various minds are and how you have to work with them, they're all enhanced if you come to realize the underlying mind.

[44:41]

And that underlying mind is realized through a freedom realized through certain mental and physical postures. Now this was considered so intuitively important in Japanese culture, as Ulrike mentioned, That the entire culture until recent decades was designed around, in terms of their clothes, their eating habits, their furniture, the design of their houses, their lack of furniture, was all designed to have people, the ordinary person, ordinary daily life, conducted in a meditation posture.

[46:04]

Do any of you have any questions about sitting or about what we discussed last night? Did you hear what he said in the back? Okay. I had these swinging movements internally and then I also did it with my body and it felt right although we were supposed to sit still. No, that's good.

[47:10]

Actually, if you don't mind my saying so, it's a sign that you have a physical predisposition toward meditation. So we'll give you a medal later. This kind of movement, it means your energy body is moving when you're sitting. And it takes the form sometimes of a spiral. And your chakras move a certain way, too. So you can change the way they move, in fact. They're called wheels. The word chakra means wheel. And it's a kind of wheeling around you.

[48:29]

Gesundheit. My one German word. In general, it's... Well, first of all, it's good to let the movement happen. But it's better to let it move inside you without it physically manifesting. You can let it move outside you, but there's a danger of developing a physical habit of letting these movements externalize. Although it happens to men less than women, there can be a problem, at least in my experience, there can be a problem with involuntary physical movements resulting from meditation.

[49:31]

And it's interesting, I've only seen it happen to very emotional men, or men who think with their emotions. Now, I'm not talking about the movement you had, but the involuntary movements. And sometimes people actually keep leaping off their cushion. They jump up and their arms, you know, and you can't sit beside them because... But don't worry, it only happens to maybe one in every several hundred people. And it's not really a problem except for your neighbor. But anyway, in general, it's better to maybe go with that kind of movement if it occurs occasionally.

[51:07]

But for the most part, see if you can let your body become still and let the movement occur inside you. My question is about breathing, the right way to breathe in and the right way to breathe out. Yeah. Well, it's best at first to just take a kind of inventory of your breathing. Don't have an idea of a right way or wrong way of doing it. And when you have noticed the differences in the way you breathe, like how it feels when you first sit down, how it feels when you start to think, and so forth.

[52:37]

When you can have a kind of settled observation of your breathing is a good time to start counting your breathing. But of course you can start counting right away. But again, it's not something you force yourself. You just try to count, and if you forget, you forget. This is actually a very important point that I've just made. Because there's a tendency, particularly in our culture, to try to get results. To define our life almost entirely in terms of producing results.

[53:45]

And to be quite confident there's a doer inside us who does our life. And this is quite powerful medicine. And when you're sitting, you make yourself vulnerable to yourself. And so it's fairly easy if you use your willpower and try to control your breathing. And try to concentrate your state of mind that you push the subtlety of your life away.

[54:45]

Or you control your psychology or control your story by clearing your mind instead of opening your mind. And if you want to practice clearing your mind in order to develop a calm and a pure state of mind, I would recommend that you move into a cave up in the Alps and commune only with deer. Because if you clear your mind and in a sense push your your psychology, your problems, your ordinary life out of your mind, you're going to be in trouble when any kind of problem or conflict arises in your associations with people.

[56:14]

And I think very often Zen is badly taught in the West so that it's a form of controlling rather than opening the mind. And it starts in small points like... I'm going to concentrate on my breathing and learn how to do it, etc. And not just, you try, but it doesn't work, it's okay. As I said, we want an uncorrected mind, not a corrected mind. problem with a corrected mind is who's doing the correcting according to what standards certainly it's at least your personality or your culture

[57:24]

Now we sat, in case you're curious, for 20 minutes. 20 minutes a day, five, seven days a week for a year is enough to significantly change your life. To create the conditions, certainly, for changing your life. Or allowing your life to find itself, change itself. He talked last night about that at the root of our being is reality and outside is the phenomenal world.

[58:54]

And I didn't quite understand that. I said that at the root of how we exist is how everything exists. The phenomenal world and each of us. Is that any better? Everything else is quite clear?

[59:56]

We talked about the three phases or states of mind yesterday, and you mentioned a fourth state of mind, and the connection between the fourth and these other three is not quite clear to me. Yeah, yeah, naturally. Partly the nature of it is it's not quite clear. It's like if I imagined right now I know each of you is an entire world, universe. And I see only the surface of you. And I see maybe a little more than the surface, but not too much more. And you have certain social skills and so forth. But the whole of you not only can I not see, you can't see.

[61:23]

But I could take as a kind of personal koan, can I somehow, since each of you is a whole world, can I somehow enter each of your worlds? I don't know how to do it, but I could take that as a question. So koans ask that kind of question. And it's actually quite fruitful to present yourself with a kind of impossible question like that. Like there's a koan of kind of... There's a koan which is in the eyes it's called seeing. In the ears it's called hearing. That makes sense.

[62:42]

In the eyes, it's called seeing. In the ears, it's called hearing. And then the Zen teacher asks, what is it called in the eyebrows? Hmm. Yeah. And the teacher, then there was a long silence after he said that. And then he said, in sorrow we grieve together. In happiness we rejoice together. So exactly what that means is not clear, but it can kind of lodge in you and you kind of feel it. So this question that you asked or brought up is, okay, we have these three given states of mind, waking, sleeping, and waking, dreaming, and non-dreaming sleep.

[63:44]

What could be a fourth state of mind or an inclusive state of mind? And I think you first have to just present that to you as a challenge or a koan or something curious. Now you can imagine those early, there's ancient Indian folks who didn't know yoga, they presented this question, it might have taken a millennia of fumbling around until they decided to sit cross-legged. So we may know something about realizing this inclusive state of mind, but it's good to start with just the question.

[65:02]

Is it possible? What could it be? Because that question ripens us. Something else? Now, those of you who tried to count your breath, if you're new to practice, probably discovered it's not so easy to count your breath. What does that tell you? Well, first of all, it tells you that the mind of zazen, or meditation, is a different kind of mind than waking mind. So already... you've moved into a different state of mind than waking mind.

[66:22]

Because you, certainly all of you, I believe, know how to count in your waking mind. So if you can't count in the mind of meditation, it means it's a different kind of mind. So it means you've already succeeded because you can't count. Now many people think they've failed. I couldn't count. I can't. I'm a failure at meditation. But actually, because they can't count, they're succeeding. So this failure to count allows you to recognize you're already in a somewhat different kind of mind. And you'll think a little differently about things with this different kind of mind.

[67:33]

And for those of you who think you're too busy for 20 minutes a day, five to seven times a week, I can give you a little candy. Which is after you've been sitting 20 to 30 minutes a day for even a few months, you can take at least an hour easily off your sleep time. And there are many other goodies, but you know... But we're really not... It's very important to practice without any idea of achieving anything or attaining anything. So these goodies are just little indulgences. Okay, so what is the second thing not being able to count tells us?

[68:45]

Well, it is that our ordinary waking mind has been educated to count to ten. And what does being able to count to ten mean? It means your waking mind or exterior consciousness has developed a structure which can categorize things. So one of the first things a baby is taught is to count to ten and do things like that, because after that you can begin to say, oh, this is this kind of thing and this is that kind of thing, which normally you can't separate things out until you learn how to create a structured exterior consciousness.

[70:12]

So that tells you that because you can't count in your zazen mind that you have an uneducated interior consciousness. And this is something that our culture, nobody goes to college and is trained in educating their interior consciousness. And we... I mean people try to teach you study habits and certain attitudes, but it's a fairly primitive education of your interior consciousness.

[71:17]

In fact, one of the things we do with children is in the effort, in the West particularly, in the effort to educate their exterior consciousness, we deny their interior consciousness. And the result is it creates a very productive human being, but a human being whose identity is very hooked into the identity of others and hooked into the identity of the culture. And an identity that usually rests on anxiety. So when you start the practice of Zen or meditation, you're beginning a process of awakening and then educating an interior consciousness.

[72:35]

That's a lot. If you really recognize that. And you can see that, you know, in this koan, in the introduction it says, generally when a precious jewel is presented to someone, they immediately draw their sword. And that just means that in Chinese culture of the 6th and 7th centuries, it was just as true as today that when this fourth state of mind is presented to people, they immediately feel challenged or threatened by it. In the language of this koan, this fourth state of mind is called a precious jewel. So it's 11 o'clock and I think we should take a break.

[74:15]

But let's sit for a minute or something. You don't have to get any special posture. I'd like to start with looking at the koan for a moment, but first I'd like to ask you if anybody has a couple more questions you'd like to ask before we talk about the koan itself. This is Xeroxed from this book, which is a collection of 100 koans. And there are two famous collections of 100 koans.

[75:16]

This is one, and the other one's called the Blue Cliff Records. And a person who practices with the Dharma Sangha and with me, a student of mine, is translating them into German, and you have the translation there. So I would like to look at the beginning of it at least. My bookmark is Gurte's bed in Weimar. I don't know why. It should have been Freud's couch.

[76:22]

Okay. A man presented a jewel three times but didn't escape punishment. Now, to read a koan, you have to read it with a kind of detached mind. You more or less look at it, really, as I said to a few people last night, the way you look at a dream of your own. If you bring too analytical a state of mind to a dream, you can't remember the dream. Later you can analyze it if you want, but in the process of remembering a dream, trying to bring it back after you've awakened or partially awakened, you have to kind of keep a kind of loose fluid state of mind that's half asleep while you try to recover the dream.

[77:50]

So it's actually a kind of creative way of thinking that Trying to remember a dream is a state of mind that is actually a kind of creative way of thinking. So you listen to a koan again as if you were trying to remember a dream. So you're hearing a story from a previous life. Or you are hearing a story about your father or mother that a distant uncle is telling you that you never knew about.

[78:58]

A man presented a jewel three times but didn't escape punishment. This is a reference to an old Chinese story which you don't need to know about. When a luminous jewel is thrown to anyone, there are few who do not draw their sword. For an impromptu guest, there are For an impromptu guest, there cannot be an impromptu host. I changed the English a little bit because it's not quite right the way it is in English.

[80:05]

It should say more like, for an impromptu guest, there cannot be an impromptu host. What's appropriate provisionally is not appropriate for the real. If unusual treasures... And rare jewels cannot be put to use. I'll bring out the head of a dead cat. Look. And the case Emperor Wu of Liang asked great teacher Bodhidharma. What is the highest meaning of the holy truths? Bodhidharma said, emptiness, no holiness.

[81:05]

The emperor said, who are you? Bodhidharma said, I don't know, don't know. The emperor didn't understand. And Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtze River to Shaolin and sat facing a wall for nine years. This is the more or less, I mean real but mythical at the same time, mythologized story of an Indian teacher coming to China and and initiating Zen practice. Now, to practice with a koan like this, again, you just read a line at a time.

[82:06]

And to practice with a koan, you have to be able to ask yourself a question, what is the highest meaning of the holy truths? And you can ask yourself, does the structure of your life at present allow you to ask such a fundamental question? Have you perhaps lost the idealism of a teenager or college student when you asked yourself big questions? So again, looking at a story like this, you say, if I were going to ask myself such a question, what would I ask? What is truth to me?

[83:40]

Is truth something or is there some relationship to truth that I could have that would change my life? And part of this is that Real thinking has consequences. If you think in such a way that has no consequences, you're just reading the back of cereal boxes. So thinking is rather dangerous because it sometimes leads you to, hey, something has to change So the first question in this koan is, could you ask yourself such a question?

[84:43]

And then Bodhidharma said, empty, there's no holy. Okay. Now the basic dialogue in Buddhism is between form and emptiness. Or between what's called the two truths. The relative truth and the absolute truth. This idea is fundamental to Buddhism. And it can be related to this fourth state of mind or inclusive state of mind and the other three states, given states of mind.

[85:51]

So here it talks about what's appropriate provisionally, that's the relative, It is not appropriate for the real. So do you see in this, is it, you know, now that I'm pointing it out, do you see that this is a kind of way of talking about this inclusive state of mind versus a relative state of mind? And that even when it's presented to you, we tend to reject it. So Bodhidharma is presenting it to the emperor, but he doesn't understand what's going on. But you know, you work on these things and as I say, practice occurs in homeopathic doses.

[87:07]

You do a little bit each day and it begins to affect you. So what I'd like to do is say that since you guys have been involved with psychological processes, is to say that there's, is to draw a line, shall we say. And I'd like to put consciousness up here. And I'd like to put unconsciousness down here. And what I want to get out here a little bit, is this word emptiness is quite confusing.

[88:26]

So I'd like to give you some dynamic equivalencies for emptiness. So we also might have, as we as we discussed form and emptiness. And we can have some other things too, of course, like waking mind and dazen. And we can have waking and sleeping. And let's have here maybe guest and host.

[89:27]

We can have relative and absolute. So what I'm saying is that there's a line here across which we don't really know too much about what's going on on the other side of this lung. We could also have, you know, like in the colon, we could have a luminous jewel. What would we have up here? I don't know, what was it? Dead cat.

[90:55]

What? The dead cat. A dead cat? Yeah, maybe so. Well, why not? That's a good idea. Let's put the dead cat here. Except it's, anyway. So, what meditation is trying to get you to do is begin to go across this line. So, and what's, although consciousness and unconsciousness, unconsciousness in Zen terms is actually a form, it belongs up here, still there's a dynamic relationship in which you cross a line that's similar. I'd like to take another picture, which would be consciousness and unconsciousness. and then form and empty.

[92:26]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_73.78