It's one of those dangerous mornings when it seems like there's nothing to say. So get your teas ready. It's said quite a few times that the teaching of the Chinese Zen, of Bodhidharma, was a special transmission between teacher and student or between Buddha and Buddha.

[01:38]

that doesn't rely on any particular scripture. A special transmission directly pointing to our own mind. And in this direct pointing there is becoming Buddha upon seeing one's own nature, a direct pointing, a direct inquiry into one's own nature. And this inquiry is done through seated meditation.

[02:50]

The seated meditation does the inquiry. The self-conscious subject doesn't do the inquiry into the nature of the mind. The sitting The sitting does the inquiry. The self-conscious subject is asked to be good and let the sitting do the study. Let the body sitting practice the way and inquire and study the nature of the mind.

[03:58]

I told you about this cartoon interview that is about the Zen Master Dogen. He's being interviewed and the interviewer says, How do you study the way? How do you realize the Buddha way?" And he says, just sitting, immobile. And the interviewer says, you mean just sitting realizes the Buddha way? just sitting does the work of studying the Buddha way and realizing the Buddha way?"

[05:17]

And he says, yes, just sitting alone realizes it. And the interviewer says, I've heard about koans studying Zen, studying the ancient stories. What about that?" And Dogen says, Oh yeah, koans are really great. I teach them myself. The interviewer says, I thought you said that just the body sitting does the study and realizes the way. And Dogen said, that's right. And the interviewer says, well, why did you say koan study is good? And Dogen says, some people won't sit still unless they have koans to study.

[06:22]

So the The self-conscious subject sometimes needs to be given a koan so they'll sit there, you know, work on the koan over in the corner while the body gets to sit and realize the way. Even Dogen seemed to have needed to study the koans and teach the koans to his students in order to engage his mind and his mouth so that just sitting could happen. But the just sitting doesn't depend on the koans or the sutras. The koans and the sutras are blossoms of the just sitting. If you practice just sitting, there will be more sutras and more koans will be appearing in the world. And the good ones will last for thousands of years. And then people can put their self-conscious subject to work studying the stories while the body sits and inquires into the Buddha way and realizes Buddhahood.

[07:42]

So if any of you are having trouble letting the body do the work by sitting still, studying the way, Give the one who wants to be busy and do something a koan or a sutra. But that's just so that person doesn't interfere with the body and doesn't say, okay, we're out of here. Get this body. Get that body to do something else other than just sit. So we aren't rude to this self-conscious subject. It's like having a little kid with you all the time. Mommy, I want a corn. Mommy, I want to get some credit for this practice. What can I do?

[08:49]

Well, here's a corn. Or I'll give you something in five minutes. Just give me five minutes and I'll be with you. We love this self-conscious subject like everything else, don't we? Especially our own self-conscious self. It's not to be rejected itself, but the delusion is not it. It's just a self-conscious subject. The delusion is to posit it, is to hold it up and carry it around. rather than just, you know, be kind with it. And to carry it around and use it to study Buddhism. That's not what it's for. It's for like, you know, worldly affairs. That's what it's for. It's for worldly affairs.

[09:51]

So let it be used for worldly affairs. Don't expect it to understand the world. It's for negotiating with other self-conscious subjects, making deals, and practicing the precepts in terms of the self acting on the world. The self can act on the world. That's okay. It does, right? It's just that that's just worldly activity. You won't realize the nature of mind by the self acting on the world. But you have to do that to some extent. If you're not enlightened and you have the self acting on the world, then you're not enlightened with the self acting on the world. If the self isn't illuminated, it's an unilluminated self acting on the world. If the self is illuminated, it's an illuminated self acting on the world.

[10:52]

A self which understands. A self which is dropped off. But it's in the situation of not expecting that self-conscious self to be doing the study that we understand the nature of everything, including the self-conscious subject. And we see that it's not that that's going to be doing the study. So we just have to see that it's a delusion to use it for that purpose. It can't understand the nature of the world. It's not its job. Don't expect it to do that. Just use it for social activity. Meantime, and at the same time, if possible, even while doing it, let go of the worldly activity

[11:57]

and enter into the practice of learning the backward step of turning the light around and looking inside, which is the way the body sees. Inquire into the inner world of the self, And there's various ways of trying to talk about what it's like to set this and let go of this worldly activity, but one way is just sit. Another way is make the self-conscious subject not conscious. If it won't go sit on the side, then have it pretend like it's not conscious. And say, okay, you can play, you can come and sit with us here, you can be with the body, but pretend like you have no preferences.

[13:06]

You can be here, but don't choose and pick anymore, okay? Put that aside. Okay. Just sit it down there. No choosing, huh? Nope. No matter what happens, I don't get to choose? Nope. It's kind of like you're not conscious. You don't know about this stuff. You can be here, but you don't do your regular stuff. No judging in the spiritual practice. There can be judging in the spiritual practice, though. Like, for example, you're getting back into your old habit again. That's not it. but no picking and choosing. Feelings arise but no preferences, no indulgence in arranging among the preferences. That's how we enter the way.

[14:15]

And that body is always entering the way. It's a matter of making that body entering the way, you know, become, you know, wholehearted, all-pervasive. It's a matter of making that body cover the whole earth. So it's always alive and there so that we can see. So that they can be seeing the Buddha. When dusts are wiped away, we see Buddha. The body sitting does not have any dust. Dust means seeing things out there.

[15:19]

When there's no seeing things out there, that's called seeing Buddha. That's seeing Buddha, and that's Buddha's seeing. The body doesn't have anything out there. Let that body which doesn't have anything out there cover the entire world. So there's no other There's just seeing Buddha. And even when involved in worldly affairs, you still can notice and learn there too, even if you have abandoned your meditation practice, you can still learn, oh, this is the realm where the self is acting on the world. I don't expect anything of this other than just getting along pretty well in my interconnected life.

[16:22]

This is the realm of the self acting on the world. And I'm going to do a good job of practicing the precepts from this point of view. But I don't expect this to be the way to understand the precepts. I'll just do the best I can in the worldly affairs of practicing the precepts. But if I want to understand the precepts, I understand that this is not the way to understand. I'm going to have to drop this mode and just have the body practicing the way. in a form called seated meditation.

[17:27]

In seated meditation, all worldly judgments are suspended. There's no picking and choosing. Body and mind is dropped off. And the seated meditation is dropping off body and mind. This is the mode of understanding. Does this sound familiar? Maybe that's enough. Yes, Duncan? Is there a... You've talked about self-conscious self, and I'm wondering if there is a... I'm sometimes, in the last couple of days, getting the feeling not of a self-conscious self, but of a conscious self, or a consciousness.

[19:20]

But what you said yesterday about consciousness being the result of various factors that come together at the same time, and consciousness not being located there, would indicate that that might be another delusion on my part, that there's a consciousness, that there's a unitary consciousness, that this might be yet another delusional trick coming up. I was just wondering. So now what's being posited is a unitary consciousness, a consciousness that abides or exists on its own? Is that what's being posited here? I know posit is the word I'm talking about.

[20:22]

Experiencing some kind of consciousness that is not... Experiencing consciousness? That is not experiencing a self. So much. So now there's a discussion of a consciousness that doesn't experience a self so much? And it feels unitary, like it's a thing, a body. a consciousness that doesn't experience a self so much, but feels unitary, like it's a body. That unitary feeling is a self. And the body feeling of the consciousness is a self, like a body, like a unitary body of the consciousness.

[21:23]

Did you run into that kind of feeling? Well, that's good that you found out. This is called Satkaya Drishti. Maybe it's not quite a drishti yet for you. Satkaya Drishti means the view that there is a body, a self-body. When there's consciousness, there can be views. Now, views, in one sense, views are... You don't quite have a view yet, sounds like. One sense of view is just of seeing something, just a view. But another way that drishti is used is drishti is used as a view like this is actually there. So you're kind of not that heavy-handed yet about this. But you could get that way, perhaps, eventually, if this kept happening, you kept noticing it. But it sounds like you're kind of like tentatively saying there seems to be this... there seems to be this, that's a view. I'm not yet making this into a... I'm not yet proposing this as so, but there seems to be a kind of unitariness to awareness, to this awareness.

[22:36]

And then you're asking, in your tentative mode, you're saying, could that be a delusion? It's not exactly a delusion yet. It's more like, what do you call it, it's a superficial view of consciousness, or it's a superficial understanding of consciousness because there really can't be a view of consciousness. Consciousness can't view itself. When consciousness views something called consciousness, what it's viewing is an idea of consciousness. Whenever consciousness arises, whenever mind consciousness arises, it arises with concepts. Because consciousness cannot arise without an object.

[23:43]

And its objects are concepts. And one of the concepts that consciousness can have is the concept of consciousness. And being aware of that concept of consciousness, consciousness can feel like that's a unitary thing, that consciousness. There can be that sense But if you are following this line of talk, you can see that this is nonsense because the consciousness arises with concepts. It's not unitary. And it can't happen without concepts. There's no concepts happening without consciousness, and there's no consciousness happening without concepts.

[24:50]

And there's other things that come up with consciousness too, that come up with it. And not only that, but the coming up of it depends on something other than the consciousness, which I discussed yesterday. Namely, for example, for consciousness of color, there has to be this physicality this physical thing called color, there has to be something that's sensitive to it, another kind of physicality that's sensitive to it in some lump of flesh. And in our case, the part of the lump of flesh that's around the area we call the eyeball is particularly sensitive to color. The whole body is sensitive to color. but not really sensitive to color, but sensitive to the physical thing which we interpret as color, called electromagnetic radiation.

[25:58]

The whole body is sensitive to it, even fingernails, not to mention the skin and the hair, and other parts of our body too, right? Because does vitamin D get stimulated by that electromagnetic radiation? Is there vitamin D in electromagnetic radiation or is the vitamin D in the body and gets stimulated by the sun? Which is it? Where is the vitamin D? Is it, where is it? Is the vitamin D something that happens to the body when the sun, when the electromagnetic radiation touches it? Is that what happens? Well, anyway, the body is sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, particularly of a certain band length. Okay? And certain parts of the body are especially sensitive and are connected to something which developed from them.

[27:08]

So the sensitive surface of the body developed into a brain. the sensitive surface of the eye particularly, developed into the human brain. So then, when the electromagnetic radiation touches the eye, the eye responds, and then the brain responds. And from this interaction of electromagnetic radiation touching, hitting this sensitive surface on the flesh, on this uncooked flesh, further electrochemical reactions are set off, and then there's an experience which is then seen and converted into a concept called blue, and then there's an experience of blue. and this experience of blue is not just the sensitivity of the surface and the energy of these light particle waves, this mysterious thing called light interacting with this mysterious thing called the flesh, but a consciousness arises too.

[28:19]

But the consciousness doesn't know the color, and the eye doesn't know the color, and the color doesn't know the color. But the three together are called knowing the color. So there isn't a unitary consciousness of color. There is this thing that happens called consciousness, which is totally dependent on these other things called, for example, color. Not color, but light, which can be interpreted by color in conjunction with organs and the arising of consciousness. Inquiring into the Buddha way inquiring into the Buddha way through seated meditation is to enter into the birth of sensory events, is to enter into the coming of the body in response to sensory stimulation, and the coming of consciousness is to be

[29:41]

entered into the coming of these body-mind arisings. When they occur, another one that can occur is the coming of the sense of the object being consciousness itself, and that that object is a unitary thing. So the consciousness can be involved in the imagination that itself is unitary. But this is a superficial take on the process I just described. It's an error if you take it as a reality. but it's just a sense of unitariness if you just see it as that. If you grasp it as real, then you're grasping something superficial as real. The profound aspect of the process is that these things are interdependent and that you never can get a hold of consciousness by itself.

[30:49]

If you reach for it, you won't get it. It's not there because it is nothing but a dependency between these two. Now, it is nothing but that, but that doesn't mean it's nothing. It's just you can't get a hold of it. What you get is what it depends on. If you reach for them, you can't get them either. There's no light out there on its own. Nobody's ever found a light without somebody being there finding it. And nobody's ever found a light without a sense organ or some kind of sensitive tissue. And nobody's found a sensitive tissue without something proving that it's sensitive, and so on. You can never find anything. That's the profound aspect of all the ingredients in all experience. What finds this profound aspect? Hmm?

[31:53]

What studies this profound aspect? Huh? What? Just sitting. That's what studies this. You can't use the self-conscious subject to study itself. But itself is coming forth every moment. Now, some moments it's not so strong as others, like the sense of consciousness arising can happen without the accompanying concept, this seems like a unitary kind of like thing. That doesn't always happen. And when you first talked about it, I thought that was going to be one of those cases, but as you described it, it was one of the cases where the sense of self did arise. So that was very nice that you showed us an example of the sense of self being associated with consciousness, that it was a kind of unitary thing.

[33:02]

Anything that arises can be seen as a unitary thing. As a matter of fact, every phenomena has this superficial quality that it's seen, can be seen as an isolated entity. No phenomena happen without that superficial quality. So in that sense, every phenomena comes with a little kind of self-sense or sense of self. But to use that sense of self, or to use that which we feel has a sense of self, To use that consciousness which has a sense of self as the way to study the process by which it arose is a mistake. it's not going to show the nature of the process. That's not going to be the way to illumination.

[34:08]

What we need is illumination of that which we want to use for illumination. So we have to enter the inner world, the non-conscious world of consciousness. The non-conscious world of consciousness is the interdependence of the arising of consciousness. That's not a consciousness. That is its nature. Its nature is that it arises interdependently. The nature of consciousness is that it depends on a body, and it depends on physicality outside the body. It depends on gross and subtle materiality interacting, and from that interaction consciousness is born. And that inner active, inner dependent nature of consciousness and of everything is its deep nature, is its liberating nature.

[35:16]

Once we understand its liberating nature, we are liberated from the appearance of the superficial quality of things. once we're liberated from the superficial quality of things, we can go back into the world of the self, acting on the world, practicing the precepts, but not be deluded about this magical show of a self practicing the precepts, because we understand the profound nature of all the phenomena that are appearing and disappearing. Okay? Now you understand, right? That's the Eric and David and Elena and who else? And Erewhon and Joe and... These aren't the intellectuals, are they?

[36:27]

Eric? And Miriam? See, this is getting into dangerous territory. Tease, get ready, tease. Oh, there's already one. This is it. No, the lecture's over. The teas have come, and so it's been very nice talking to you this morning. Are you all right? No? Well, talk to the teasers. He's back there. Talk to him. There's another tea. No, no, talk to him. He's back there. He's a human being. Talk to him. He wants this to end. Convince him to let it go on. Give him some money. He loves money. Where do you want him to go? To tea, I guess. What do you think?

[37:34]

Do you want to go? No. You're kidding? You're taking him back. How about you going with him? I want to go to tea, too. All right. Anyway, some people want a tea. So what do you mean by tea? Okay. Thank you, that's enough. That's what he means. Is it okay if I answer Eric's question? Huh? Okay. Eric? Okay. One of the extremes coming in is the mental stream. We have mind, we have consciousness, eye consciousness, and one of the pieces, mind consciousness. When there is an awareness in sitting meditation of the co-arising of an external object, a sense consciousness, and something associated like a sound, there's an external object, there's your consciousness, sound happens.

[38:41]

That awareness of sound happening, is that simply one element in this mental stream or is it another, is it taking place elsewhere? Is that simply something that's arising in that mind stream? It's simply something that's happening in that mind stream, right. It's not happening someplace else. So what is the relationship between the mind stream and the other streams of eye consciousness, tongue consciousness, ear consciousness? Because you described, just to take the ear consciousness, there's the ear side, there's the object, and then there is the arising of the consciousness of the sound. Is that arising the same as something that's happening inside the mind consciousness? Say it again? Maybe it would be good to wait a second and see if everybody got the first part of your question. Did everybody get the first part?

[39:42]

No? I think you said something like, when there's an arising of Was it ear consciousness? Was that your example? The ear consciousness arises in conjunction with what we call the sensitivity to sound waves, interacting with sound waves, and then there can be the arising of ear consciousness. Now, you also talked about mind consciousness, and if there's an awareness conscious awareness of this arising of ear consciousness, in other words, of the experience of hearing a sound, if there's an awareness, conscious awareness of that, that means that this experience has been converted into a concept And now mind consciousness is dealing with that, a concept of that hearing process. Okay? They can be together, except that the mind consciousness happens based on a kind of ghost of the sensory process.

[40:53]

Sensory process are not known objectively. They're happening to us, and we're living with them, and that is a response that our life gives to sense of sensation. But these are not known. And so it would be possible, according to certain yogis, that all the sense consciousnesses in a given moment are arising together but only one of them in that moment, I shouldn't say, but then the next moment only one of them will be the object of a concept for mind consciousness. The mind consciousness can also arise simultaneously with sense consciousness in its dealing with the previous sense consciousness. So the mind consciousness is growing up out of body consciousness. And body consciousness is eye consciousness, ear consciousness, nose consciousness, tongue consciousness, and skin consciousness.

[41:55]

That's body consciousness. They're actually body consciousnesses. They all have their consciousnesses, but they have names of sense organs. They're really body consciousnesses. And mind consciousness deals with that is based on that. So first there's the mind consciousness, the body consciousnesses arising out of physicality, and there's mind consciousness arising out of body consciousnesses. So mind consciousness is dealing with concepts at the same time that new physical consciousnesses are arising, they're arising together. Okay? Now what's your question, first question? Well, it was really that relationship. Does one become aware of the way objects are arising in mind consciousness? The same way... He said, does one become aware? Does awareness arise of objects appearing in mind consciousness? Does awareness... Objects in sense consciousness. No. And he said, does awareness of objects arising in mind consciousness appear the same way as awareness of objects in bodily consciousnesses?

[43:06]

Does it occur? It's the same pattern. So I take it back. It occurs in the same way, but it's different levels. But the body consciousness is a feeder system to the mind consciousness. It stimulates the mind to come up with concepts for bodily experiences. But the paradigm is the same. Namely, in all cases, the consciousness is something that co-arises with an organ faculty and an object faculty. so that consciousness never arises by itself. It always arises simultaneously with its supports, which are, in the case of mind consciousness, the ability of the mind to act like an organ and the ability of mind to act like an object. In the case of sensory, body consciousnesses arise with the bodily organs in relationship to physical stimulation.

[44:10]

Same pattern. In both cases, you can't get the consciousness aside from what it depends on. When you reach for the consciousness, all you can get is its supports. If you reach for the supports, they make no sense aside from consciousness. Color is not color out there. It's only color when it gets together with a physical sensation and consciousness. And it's still not color until it gets converted and meets the mind. You can't have a color without a concept. There aren't colors out in the world. You can't get a color. You can't get an eye organ either because this part of the body around the eye is not the eye organ until it's stimulated and responds. And it's still not an eye organ until a consciousness arises with it. It's not an effective eye organ just by quivering when something touches it. It's only an eye organ when it quivers and a consciousness arises with it.

[45:16]

It's not doing the job of knowing or being aware of or feeling until there's a feeling. But it turns out that not only do we have this physical material which can interact with another kind of physical material, but this miraculous thing happens is there can be a sense of that. That's consciousness. But that sense, you can't get that sense and pull it up there. All you ever get if you reach for it and try to isolate it is what it depends on. And similarly, each one of the things it depends on, if there's no consciousness, you don't have a functioning eye. And a non-functioning eye is not an eye. A non-functioning organ is not an organ. Like a non-practicing Buddhist, right? So I don't know if you had more questions. Okay? Let's see. Now let's check with the T's.

[46:17]

It's 11 o'clock now. How are the T's doing? Do you want, can you have another question? Huh? There's another T. The T's are accumulating. A question now for tomorrow. A question now for tomorrow? What do you say? Okay. One thing you should remember, ladies and gentlemen, is that your question may be short. David? There's a relationship between what you've just spoken of with psychology and a reference earlier in the talk to the body entering the way to realize the mind. Say it again, body entering the way? to realize the mind. Yes. And yesterday's reference, nonchalant, chow-chow, ordinary mind, and that.

[47:21]

So we talked about sense consciousness, and I'm interested in that understanding of mind, ordinary mind, or the mind that... Your question is about the ordinary mind, which is the way to enter into the way. Is that right? The question is, what is ordinary mind? The question is, what is ordinary mind? And you're interested in what ordinary mind is because you've heard ordinary mind is the way, the way to understand how things happen. The body realizes the mind. The body realizes the mind and the body studies the mind. The body studies the way.

[48:25]

The body studies the way things happen because the way things happen is their nature. The nature of things is how they happen. So the body is what studies the way things happen. Body and seated meditation is the way of studying. And you want to understand what ordinary mind is? Ordinary mind is about that. You're right. And you want to know about that. So that's the question for tomorrow. But, you know, now the teas are happening, so can you let the event stop? I know I see her. Maybe a pause would help. Would a pause help you? Pardon? Yes. Yes. Those who want to ask questions, say that the Eno's teeth will be definitive.

[49:58]

The Eno's teeth will be definitive. You know, if you do a T, that's the definitive T. She's nominating you to make the definitive T. Do you accept that nomination? She doesn't accept it. That's your suggestion though, Patricia. I guess I would ask the people who, I don't know, the people who still have questions to be compassionate to those who have had enough and let them do that silly old thing called studying the way through, what's it called, seated meditation?

[51:04]

Because I can see that some of these people just are dying to continue studying the way through seated meditation. And some other people would like to ask questions, so I'll try to take care of my health and meet you. to talk to you about your questions. And also if you have questions that you'd like me to maybe bring up tomorrow and try to incorporate tomorrow or give a class on later, just maybe give me a note about your question and I'll try to respond to it in the near future. Okay? Thank you for expressing yourselves. Yeah, this is our group.

[51:56]

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