So I would like anyone, I would like three people to give me a definition of consciousness. Any three of you. It's just anything you think of. It doesn't have to be important or smart. Anybody willing to try? Now, if I was in Belgium with French people, there'd be about five responses already. I'm not saying they'd be good responses, but at least... The state of mind where I know what I'm doing. The state of mind where I'm knowing what I'm doing.

[01:02]

And I know it's too funny that I don't know it. Okay. Anybody can add to that? Would everybody agree with that? Anybody have another definition? A state of mind that's observing. A state of consciousness, you said, that's observing. Yeah. Okay, yeah. Realizing that something is going on. Can you say that in German? Dass man merkt, dass irgendwas los ist.

[02:04]

We don't know what's going on, but we always think something's going on. Do you want to translate that? Also wir wissen nicht, was los ist, aber zumindest merken, was man merkt. Well, we just finished a session in Maria Lach. And a number of you were there. And we discussed the five skandhas. And I think that even though the ones in the Sesshin we went through it, we're going to have to describe the five skandhas again. Because we have to see how the word consciousness is used in Buddhist practice. And it's difficult to translate the word mind into German.

[03:19]

What about translating consciousness? How does that work? Is it an equivalent word? You all know the difficulty with the translation of mind into German. And I will also let that stand. So if mind appears, I will not say spirit, but mind. Mind, let it be, don't forget it. Consciousness, that is, consciousness, can be translated well. Now, zazen meditation practice is really something you, a place where you live more than something you do.

[04:21]

So I can give you some instructions about how to sit zazen. And in that sense, it's something you do. But once you learn the fairly simple aspects of zazen practice, then it's a place where you live. So when you sit down, you have the feeling of sitting down in a place where you lived. Almost as if you were sitting, I don't know if this makes sense, but almost as if you were sitting down inside yourself.

[05:32]

And as if you could forget about your sitting down inside yourself and yet you can forget about yourself at the same time. Now, practicing in this way is the way in which the Buddhist sense and Zen sense of consciousness has arisen. Now, we have various ideas of consciousness in the West. And some of them I will probably have to speak about. because we need some sort of contrast to see the differences.

[06:44]

Now one practice that I've been giving to people during this time of being in Europe this summer is to When you go through a doorway, go through with the foot nearest the hinge. So let me illustrate that. Let's pretend this is a door. And this is actually a kind of silly practice, but it's very important. So you're walking along and say that the door is hinged here.

[07:48]

If you come to it, you step through with this foot. And, of course, coming in the other direction, you'd step through with this foot. And when you get... This has to do with consciousness, I believe. Of course it has to do with consciousness in the sense that you're paying attention to something's happening. What did you say? Something's going on. Okay, so something's going on. We don't know what. We might as well start with our feet. So when you step into this next space, you stop for a moment and have a feeling of being somewhere. And it takes a little while to get into the habit.

[09:06]

I actually did it for many years. Because I noticed my teacher did it, and then I sort of adopted it as a practice. So I did it probably regularly for five, six, seven, eight, ten years. And then I forgot. And I just, I mean, the basic, what arises from the practice I didn't forget, but whether which foot I went through, I was, I don't know, sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. And then this year, for some reason, I decided to give this practice to people. And then immediately people began to catch me when I didn't do it. Like, he didn't do it, you know. Do you do that in German?

[10:43]

It's international sign language. So anyway, because I've been giving it to people, I'm getting a little better at it, but you'll still catch me probably not doing it. But when you get in the habit of it and you stepped into a place and you're sitting down so you're sitting here in a chair or something like that and you know that in a few minutes you're going to go back out And you know that when you go back out, you're going to go through. Now there's a kind of line you're going to cross, and you're going to step through with a particular foot. Now the result of a simple practice like that is you're not sitting in your mind.

[11:58]

You begin to have the feeling you're sitting in a place which is not the same as your mind. Oh dear, this is a little hard to say. In other words... If I say the place is different from the mind, that sounds like very bad Zen. Jung has some image that the self is like a cork floating in a sea of consciousness. And somewhere he said we don't create consciousness. Consciousness is something we wake up into in the morning.

[13:06]

That's definitely not the way Buddhism would look at it. From the Buddhist point of view, every time the cork would move the ocean would appear. So the ocean would arise out of the cork. Now that's a rather different way of thinking about it. And you may think that consciousness remains the same no matter how you think about it. But I don't think that's true. But the way you think about consciousness affects what kind of consciousness arises. So strangely enough,

[14:20]

the concept within consciousness that you have of consciousness affects the consciousness you have. Are you following me pretty much so far? Some people aren't, I think. But what I said is quite simple. But the reason for it may not be so clear. Just to say, first of all, if you practice something like this, stepping through the door, or another good time to practice... physical bodyfulness, of physical awareness, is going up and down these stairs.

[15:47]

points of transition, like going through a doorway or up and down stairs, is a time to return your sense of location to your body and your breath. In other words, you need some way, we all need some way to locate ourselves. And if you locate yourself in your self or in your thoughts, you actually will live over a period of time in a rather different, even quite different world than if you locate yourself in your body or in your breath. The question is, how do you come, if you want to, to locate, have a sense of location in your breath and in your body?

[17:07]

Because at least my experience is, it's not very easy to do. And you really have to, first of all, feel, see the point of it. And then find ways to remind yourself of it until it becomes a sometimes habit and then finally maybe an all the time habit. So a good time to develop the habit is in transitions like going through the door, up and down stairs.

[18:26]

Now this has to do with becoming more aware and more conscious. Now, consciousness is not a... I don't know what words to use. It's not a faculty like your stomach. Or like your arm. Or hand. But it's more like handling.

[19:26]

Can you say that in German? Handling? Handle and handling. Or it's maybe more like digestion instead of stomach. So if you tried to define, you know, I think that often we try to define consciousness as if it were a kind of stomach sitting there waiting for food. And sometimes we put food in it and sometimes we don't. But you couldn't say that about digestion. Digestion is sitting there waiting for food. Digestion doesn't sit there waiting for food.

[20:31]

It doesn't even appear unless there's food. Does the distinction between stomach and digestion work in German? So from my experience and the British experience of consciousness, consciousness is something like digestion. And when you say, you can't say digestion is something, you have to say digestion is digesting milk. And digesting lettuce or milk is something different. So there's milk digestion and there's lettuce digestion. Okay, so when you look at a tree there's tree consciousness, and when you look at this room, there's room consciousness.

[21:56]

In other words, consciousness is created by the tree. Now, When your consciousness is sort of passive and you kind of see this and you see that, then you don't notice that consciousness is created by the tree. So if your consciousness is connected to self, and then usually connected to the idea of control because we have a sense that what we're conscious of we have some control of then probably with that way of thinking you're not going to be so sensitive to the way what you look at

[23:02]

What you perceive creates consciousness. Because you can actually feel your consciousness. Like when you're getting sick, say a cold is coming or the flu or something. You may notice something like your throat gets sore or something like that. But long before your throat gets sore, your consciousness begins to get sick. It begins to feel squeezed or bent or something. So you can begin to do something about the sickness by sort of unbending your consciousness or noticing where it's squeezed instead of worrying so much about whether you're

[24:26]

cold or hot or something. In other words, you can feel the kind of openness or stretch of the consciousness. And sometimes what may make your consciousness feel a little more open is you might want a breeze on your face or something like that. Now if you're thinking, you say, I don't want a breeze because that's a draft and that makes my cold worse. And maybe that's true a large part of the time, but that's thinking. That's not feeling what your consciousness needs to feel more open and less squeezed or less sick. So it's possible to get a feel of your consciousness.

[25:44]

But first you have to get a feel of your body and a way of locating yourself in your body. And probably the easiest way to do that is with your breath. In fact, you might say the breath is a kind of lobby or train station or something. And your sense of location can wait in the breath lobby. And that can decide, oh, maybe my sense of the... When you say my sense, you're in trouble, right? Because who owns this sense of location?

[26:55]

I don't know how it works in German, but how do you say in English, my location? So my is another location separate from location? So the breath is a kind of lobby for for location and this sense of location can move into your thoughts and self Where can it move? Into your thoughts and into self. Then it looks back at the breath and says, oh, my breath. But when the location's in the breath, the breath looks and says, oh, my self. Yes.

[28:13]

This is not very, you know, this is not esoteric or anything. It's just something you do, everyone, but you don't notice it. Most people don't notice it. And then the breath, let's call it location, can go into your body from your breath or into some kind of activity. Okay, so what I'm emphasizing here is practicing with your breath. And when you come up and down stairs, of course you get out of breath, or you can feel your breath as you go upstairs.

[29:24]

So during that time, you try to feel you're in a very specific location on the stairs. You're not somewhere else. You're not where you want to be. This may be where you want to be, but where you want to be is irrelevant. You're on the stairs. And the more you can feel that, you can feel a kind of consciousness of the stairs. I mean, if consciousness isn't always there, it's arising in what you're doing. So there's stair consciousness and tree consciousness. And my voice consciousness.

[30:37]

And Ulrike's voice consciousness. And there's a kind of consciousness that is in this room that's particular to this group of people. If you have the idea that consciousness is always the same, you won't see that. Yeah, if the only distinctions in consciousness are whether you're sleepy or awake or something then you don't see this other side. And if you tend to think of the world as real you won't see this. And if you think the world is real, when you dream, you're going to think your dreams are real.

[31:40]

And if you're going to practice with your dreams and really feel your dreams as not real, or as real but real in the way dreams are real, So you have to get in the habit of seeing this to some extent as a dream or as something that you're seeing and making at the same time. So this way of looking at things allows you to get more of a feeling of consciousness coming up in each situation. So when you look at a flower like this, if you're really able to bring the feeling of consciousness to it, a particular kind of consciousness arises from the flower in your seeing.

[33:12]

And the more you get in the habit of seeing that way, the more the world seems like it's inside you. The more the flowers feel like you're inside the world. It doesn't feel like you're separate from the flowers. And if you get in the habit of seeing that way you don't feel the world separate from you. You don't get feeling estranged and kind of threatened by things. Because they feel like part of you And you feel like part of them.

[34:22]

And that comes from seeing, feeling consciousness arise on each occasion. So back to zazen practice. So when we sit down to practice zazen, you sit down and sit down and feel a certain consciousness arise. Now, It's a little difficult to do zazen sometimes because it's a different kind of time than usual time.

[35:31]

As most of you know who practice zazen, the usual, the ordinary mind can count to ten quite easily. Sazen mind has a hard time counting to ten. This means there's a different kind of consciousness has arisen when you sit down. And it's a different kind of consciousness which allows different things to happen in your life. You're digesting things differently. And when you sit zazen, sometimes five minutes can seem like twenty-five minutes. And sometimes you can sit for an hour or two, and it feels like five or ten minutes have gone by.

[37:04]

So it's a different kind of time. So that's when I said earlier, you live in a different kind of time. Or Zazen is a place where you live, not something you do. And because it's a different kind of time, we often find in our usual time many reasons not to do it. because the usual time approaches this thing and says what am I approaching it's some different kind of time so you just have to make it a habit trying to do it and it helps again if you practice something like this stepping through the door or going up and down stairs with feeling your breath and your body again.

[38:17]

Now if you've had some kind of physical sense of meditation practice, So wenn ihr so ein physisches, körperliches Gespür davon habt, was Meditationspraxis ist, but your sense of location is still in your mind, aber euer Platz ist immer noch in eurem Mind, it will often create some kind of tension in your body. So the practice of zazen has to equally, as you begin to sit and settle on yourself, This practice of settling into your posture has to be part of allowing your sense of location to move a little bit out of your thinking.

[39:23]

I think that's enough to start out with. So I think I should say a little something about zazen posture. And as I said at the break, I'll give a little more instruction for anybody who wants it. So basically you sit in a way that allows your back to be straight. And your legs can be in any posture. Crossed is more stable, but you can sit with your legs behind you or however you like.

[40:46]

And you have a lifting feeling through your back. And through the back of your neck. And a kind of melting feeling coming down through you, relaxing you. And again, a sense of sitting into the consciousness that arises as you sit. Okay, so let's sit for a few minutes and then we'll have a break for some juice or something. I'd like to give you the five skandhas tonight, but we don't have a blackboard or a piece of paper or something that I could write it on.

[42:02]

But I'll tell you what they are. It's form, feelings, perceptions, impulses, Consciousness. And consciousness then is understood as related to and part of this sequence. And I'll try to go into more detail of why the way we perceive and consciousness is understood in this way. It's a different dynamic of understanding yourself than, say, id, ego and superego. No, I am... I emphasized in the Sashin the feeling skandha.

[43:27]

In this seminar I will emphasize the consciousness skandha and how karma is understood and works in the way you exist and experience things. Today I had a pretty heavy conflict with somebody. Somebody I think is in a lot of trouble. And I decided to... put my friendship with this person sort of on the line because I think they're in trouble. A kind of intervention. And it just happened a little while before I came here.

[44:29]

I feel perfectly clear that what I did was what I wanted to do. But when something like that happens, Generally when two people are together and they're friends, there's a kind of enhancement of each other's consciousness. But in a situation where you're clearly challenging another person, there's a very sharp and dramatic close down it's a kind of territory of consciousness and many defense things come into play and denial and so forth and your consciousnesses get all kind of enmeshed they kind of get you know

[46:12]

Yeah So while I'm here with you I'm at the same time as I'm shifting away from that situation to feeling something here with you. But I don't want to shift away from it entirely. It would be hard actually to shift away from it entirely because it's so fresh. but I also don't want to shift away from it entirely because allowing the experience of these enmeshed consciousnesses to continue matures the situation

[47:28]

That makes the situation more mature.

[47:37]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_72.04