So I have this idea that I ask some of you who are up for it to be teachers or tutors for new people when they come. Okay, so if you're willing to do that, please let me know. And at some point, I think what might happen in some of our meetings is a new person might ask a question that we spent 15 classes dealing with. And I'm not going to really tell them quickly the answer to their question. But they might say, well, what is the origins of consciousness? And we, you know, so now we've been spending three weeks on that, and tonight I'll talk a little bit more about it, but I'd like to be able to say, well, but if you'd like to know, I'll have one of the people who went to those classes, they'll tutor you.

[01:11]

So if you're willing to tutor... new people in this group i think that would be good for you and for them and uh... that way sometimes we get more uh... into the into the topic that may be more and more necessary some of you may also want to have a tutor so i could assign you a tutor of someone who thinks that they got it not that but someone who is willing anyway to discuss with you the situation you can tell them it's wrong. Just say, that's wrong. If you don't know, well, then you come back to class the next week and then you... and I say, who was your tutor? We'll work it out, don't worry. It is workable. And eventually, everybody has to understand everything, so, you know, it's going to take a while.

[02:14]

So what I've been trying to do for the last couple of weeks is show the origins of knowing, the origins of awareness, the origins of consciousness. And tonight I'd like to continue this but take a little different slant on it. Okay, and a different slant I'd like to take. What we call, what has been called in, I don't know when this started or where it started, but the term original sin appeared in human culture. You ever heard of that, original sin? How do you say it in Spanish? What? Yeah. How do you say it in German? Very good. Sunda, right? Yeah. How do you say it in French? Can you say it in French? Original sin. Do you know the French for that?

[03:17]

Original sin? What does pêcheur mean? Sin? Yeah. What does that mean? Yeah. A sinner. Okay. The German was Sunder, right? The word sin, the root of the word sin is Sunder. It means cut. Is there anything like that in the Spanish? Like something related to cut? No? But in the German it has that root. And sin, the English word sin is a German word. Yeah, it might be not the same word. Yeah.

[04:28]

Yeah. Anyway, the English word sin, which now we have this term original sin in English, is related to the German. But in the German you can still hear the word sin. It's the original cutting. And what I've been trying to show you in the last few weeks is that this original cutting is not something that you are responsible for. The original cutting is in the origins of knowing. Knowing is based on a cutting. Knowledge is based on cutting. It's not some person that does this. It is part and parcel of the origins of knowing that there's a split. Now, another approach to this is the word psychology. And literally, The psychology means, ology means study, or the study, or even you could say the science, but anyway, the study of, or the logos of, logos means study, it means word, it's related to logic, and so it has also meanings of word, logic, meaning, and study, right?

[05:54]

Is it okay for me to say that about logos? Logi means study, meaning, and reason, and word. And it's the study of the psyche. And psyche, the root of the word psyche is breathe. Breathe. Breathe. And it's related to, it's a Greek word, and it's derived from psychein, which means to breathe, to blow, hence to live. That's psyche. Psychology is originally the study of the psyche. It's the study of breath.

[06:57]

but breath that has given life. Consciousness is life. Life is consciousness. Life is difference. Difference is life. Built into life is difference. This is the original sin of life, is difference, is two, is a splitting, If you take away two, you don't have life. Life needs this split. Psychology is a study of psyche and psyche means originally its root is breathe or to breathe but it also means the soul and the mind and the self. and subjectivity.

[08:02]

But again, subjectivity involves an object. Consciousness is consciousness of knowing, awareness of an object. There's a split there. And I was talking to someone today about what I would call the fact the state of affairs, which is that consciousness is separate from what it knows. If it's not separate from what it knows, it collapses into what it knows and all that's left is what is known. But what is known without consciousness is not anything. Not anything that you can separate from consciousness because consciousness collapses into its object and is no longer separated.

[09:06]

But when consciousness is separated there can be knowing but that's the original sin. But that original sin is necessary for there to be knowing. Let me go on a little longer. One of the problems of this class which I mentioned to somebody is this class is based on love and because of all this love it's hard to keep the class under control. So the class isn't under control and yet I would like to go on a little bit before, a little bit longer before it becomes its normal loving chaos. I'd like to tell a story about Psyche. It's actually called, it's the story, which is called the story of Amor in Psyche. Amor in Psyche. Or Eros in Psyche. Or Love in Psyche.

[10:11]

You know that story? You don't? Would you like to hear it? Okay. Upon a time, I think in Greece, or in the neighborhood of Greece, or in the imagination of Greece, There was the psyche, the breath, the mind. There was psyche. And psyche was manifested in the form of a beautiful young woman. She was so beautiful that the people, particularly the men, stopped going to worship in the temples to Aphrodite, the goddess of

[11:19]

And Aphrodite noticed that her temples were not being maintained and inhabited and figured out the reason for that. The worshippers were in a state of confusion because of the beauty of Psyche. Can I say a little parenthesis? This is not in the story. Can I make a little parenthetical remark? Love is getting disoriented. Love is in love. Beings are getting disoriented by beauty, and the beauty they're getting disoriented by is the beauty of the mind, the beauty of breath, the beauty of consciousness. Humans are getting disoriented.

[12:32]

They can't tell where the love is. So they stop going to worship love at the temple to Aphrodite. Aphrodite is this mind manifested in the form of a beautiful girl. So she sends her son, offspring of love, Cupid, with the arrows. Cupid, also known as Eros, also known as Amor. Amor. These are his very... Amor, with the bow and arrow, he can kill people with this. So his mother sends him to kill this beautiful manifestation of breath, of the mind, which is distracting people from worshipping. And he goes to kill her. He's looking for her. At the same time, the father... Psyche's father, is getting upset with her too because these guys are so disoriented with the beauty of her breath that they can't even figure out how to mate with her.

[13:46]

They're in awe. They don't ask her out on dates. They just walk into trees and stuff. So Psyche's father can't, you know, he can't marry her because everybody's so confused. He's getting upset about her. So what he does is he kicks her out of the house and he takes her out on a cliff and leaves her on the cliff. It's called, what's that called? It's called, what do they call that? There's a word for it now. It's called wilderness. What do they call that? Huh? Rustification, outward bound, survival, what do they call it? But there's another word. It's called a survival something, right? A survival retreat or wilderness retreat. Vision quest. That's what it's called. You sit on a cliff without much food, you know. Actually, you have a little campsite nearby. But anyway, it's a vision quest. He put her on this forced vision quest.

[14:48]

He put her on a forced vision quest. He put her out on a cliff in the wilderness by herself with no camping equipment. She doesn't know it. He doesn't know it. But that's what they do know, right? We know it. We're more advanced. You will find out that this was a vision quest, literally. She's sitting there. The boys can't find her, but Eros can find her. He finds her. He's God, right? He can locate her. beautiful mind. He comes up to her, to kill her, but when he gets closer he notices that what he's got in his presence is something very beautiful. The mind. Kill it. He disobeys his mom. As a matter of fact, not only doesn't he kill her, but he waits until it's dark and goes up to her and marries her.

[15:52]

He becomes her husband. And the love and the mind are very happy together in the dark. This is, I'm not sure exactly where evolution of consciousness, but I think I'm going to put it at the level of direct sensory experience. Direct experience, but there's nobody there having it, and nobody knows it. Remind me to reflect back to the Garden of Eden, getting kicked out, paradise. I'll tie that in later, if you remember to remind me. So they get together in the dark, and he tells her, I have to tell you something.

[17:04]

And she says, what? And he says, you can never have the lights on when I'm around. And every morning when the sun rises, or before that, I'm going to split. But don't worry, I'll come back every night. I just can't be around in the daytime because you can't see me. If you bring light to me, I'm going to leave. You're going to lose me if you put a light on me. The vision quest has started, but she hasn't yet had a vision. But she doesn't really know who this guy is. She does not know who he is or what he is, but she's happy with whatever. And he's happy too. And his mom doesn't know that he didn't do what he was assigned to do. Her sisters somehow come to visit her.

[18:06]

because this cliff, it turns out that the cliff where she got left was near to the little palace that her husband manifested for her. She lives in a high-quality, you know, celestial palace. And her sisters come to visit her, and they see the setup she's got. They see the house. and the great food and the music and the flowers and the servants and they get kind of a sense of who she got married to but they're jealous it's more like they just can't stand to let things remain kind of in the dark so the sisters poke at her and prod her and tell her she's a fool not to find out who this guy is then they start to scare her by saying and maybe he's just fattening you up on celestial goodies for the sacrifice. He might be a total monster who's just like wooing you into like being his little, you know, mortal morsel.

[19:18]

And she says, well, yeah, maybe so. He's so nice, but maybe so. Anyway, gradually she says, well, what... I think she says, what harm would it do just to take a little peek? But actually they say, when you take the light, take a dagger, just in case, and if he's a monster, kill him. So she goes up to him with the dagger and with the oil lamp and holds the light up to love and sees love. And, as you might imagine, when the mind sees love, it's... is even more beautiful than you could imagine. So she gets to see love and know love. So now she knows love. Now we have knowledge, a subject knowing an object. And now the sunder has happened. Now there's knowledge of what?

[20:25]

Knowledge the mind knows love. The best thing, right? Of all the things you'd like to know, wouldn't it be love? Like, yeah, love's great, but I'd like to know it. Like, actually see it, touch it, you know. To see it, smell it, hear it. She got to know it with her mind. But she accidentally spilled a little oil on him and burned him, and he woke up. And he said, I told you, you blew it. Now you get to lose. I get to lose you. Nice going mind. Beautiful mind, beautiful soul, beautiful psyche. You blew it. So he flies away and she tries to hold him. She grabs those little wings on his feet, you know. But she can't. He's got these big ones, you know. She can't hold him. He takes off. She loses her love. She loses her love because of this knowledge.

[21:29]

Not really loses it, but is separated from it. So that's the story of sin. The original splitting of the mind into subject and object. A terrible rift now has occurred between consciousness and love. And everything... But we have knowledge now. And we can't help it. This evolution was inevitable. If you look at the story I tell, anyway, of the origins of consciousness, the dualities built in, and the process... of the sisters is really the prodding of evolution to make this breakthrough into having this consciousness of mind consciousness of mind knowing itself of mind knowing the love which is part and parcel of consciousness the love of the entire universe that has created this baby

[22:44]

this amazing thing called mind, called psyche. But to know it after it's created, it's unavoidable because its origins are this which sets up the possibility of something knowing itself, of splitting itself into two. To make a long story short, and I can expand it some other time, but to make a long story short, anyway, for some reason, the goddess of love finds out that the sun didn't kill her, but she feels pretty good because not all of the girls didn't get killed. She feels much worse than being dead if she lost love. So she's pretty happy with that. And also, in terms of, you know, distracting the mortals from their worship of the temple.

[23:46]

So probably the guys are back in the temples doing their thing again. Because that's the virgins are lighting it up and the guys are coming. So the goddess is happy. And so she's got her little daughter-in-law who's a wreck. And for some reason, she's on her. And gives her these incredibly difficult... I'm going to make it shorter, but not much shorter. These incredibly difficult tasks which she needs to do in order to get back with her husband, back with love. Long story short, all these deeds she tries to do, all these tasks she tries to do, and she fails at every one of them. But each time she tries and fails, other beings come and help her. And together with other beings, which she also feels she is able to accomplish the deeds and get back together with her husband.

[24:48]

There's various interesting things about each one of those, but I'm not going to tell them right now. If you want to, I'll tell them again some other time. But basically she gets back together, so it's very much like this. In other words, we've got this mind which has been split into subject and object. And once one branch of Mahayana Buddhism, Mahayana means the Buddhism of the great vehicle, means the Buddhism which is about the coming Buddha. It's the vehicle that arises out of the aspiration to live for the welfare of all beings. And there's two basic philosophical versions of that school, of the Mahayana. One is the Madhyamaka, the middle way school. and the other is the Yogacara, which I would say is the psychological school. So we've been studying the middle way, and now we're studying the psychological way, which is the way of studying this fundamental split, which is we're studying now how, what is this

[25:59]

this mind, this psyche, which knows objects, which feels separate from what it knows. And how can we reunite consciousness with what it knows? How can we reunite the subject with the object and heal this wound in the universe, which only exists in the psyche in the duality of the psyche and the psyche is yearning to return this intimacy and one thing I aborted saying was that the fact when I said fact before the fact that not only must the consciousness be separated from its object in order for there to be knowledge but consciousness and what it knows are purely and simply intimate.

[27:08]

They're as intimate as anything can be. They're a little different. You can distinguish between them, but they're basically . And the separation between them is insubstantial. The intimacy is already the intimacy between the subject, like, for example, your awareness, and what you know, namely the rest of the universe, already there. And we yearn to realize that intimacy, which is already there. but our mind is built in such a way that we feel that there is a real substantial separation between this and all the beings we know. We may feel closer to some but even in the closest situation there's this little rift, there's this little wound and we need to do these various tasks with the aid of all beings in order to overcome that

[28:22]

duality which is necessary for us to know something. We can't go back, we can't regress. People try to regress, become psychotic. We have to go forward from the situation of having objective knowledge, of having the split. We need to split, study this psyche and its objects, study the knower and the known until we realize that the separation is necessary but an illusion. It's a necessary illusion. Like that thing about a psychiatrist who says, my brother thinks he's a chicken. The psychiatrist says, you should tell him he's not a chicken. He says, but I need the eggs. So, we think we're chickens and we need to think we're chickens, but we're not chickens. we think we're separate, we need to think we're separate, but we're not separate.

[29:27]

If we stop thinking we're separate, there wouldn't be any conscious awareness. There would still be, however, sensory experience. But there wouldn't be anybody knowing it, there wouldn't be any knowing of it at the level of mind knowing its take on direct sensory experience. So direct sensory experience can be converted into this wonderful thing called the imagination. But there wouldn't be any knowing of the imagination. So there wouldn't be any knowing of what it's like to be human. There would just be blissful immersion psychological bliss, which is already going on and will continue as long as we're alive. Direct sensory experience is blissful, but no human knows about it.

[30:38]

And that's my, you didn't remind me, but I remembered, you know, paradise Originally means just a garden. So the Garden of Eden, it's the paradise of Eden. It's Eden, just the name of paradise. It's a garden. Just a garden. Paradise is a garden. What's in a garden? Plants and animals. What are they doing? Particularly the plants are like, they're just veggies, right? They're just vegetating. Like people in a coma, they're like in comas. Except they're in happy comas. Plants are basically happy. And they're still basically like, this is terrible what they're doing to us, but... I mean, this is life. They got kicked out of the garden. They got kicked out of the garden. We got kicked out of the garden. But kicked out of the garden means...

[31:45]

that we move up in a realm where we feel separate from the garden. Garden's still there. Garden's still there, right under our nose all day long. But because of this wonderful breakthrough that we made of objective knowledge we feel cut off from it. In the realm of objective knowledge we're scared to pieces. We're scared, we're anxious, and we're suffering because of the constant threat of the object which is not us. So we're in threat from that, plus we yearn to the dark bliss. When the wound is healed, we not only are free of the anxiety, but we fall through the floor back into the garden. So it's important work. The psyche, psychology. So the yoga chara, it's called the path of yoga, but really it's the psychological chara.

[32:56]

It's the mind-only school. In one sense it's saying, all there is is mind, but another way to say it is, all you need is mind. It's a Beatles song like that, isn't it? All you need is mind. Yeah, it's a Beatles song. This is the study of psychology. Chara means like path, like, you know, acharya is somebody who teaches you the path, who goes ahead of you on the path. Acharya, the Buddhist teacher, means somebody who goes ahead of you on the path. It's related to like sensei, the person before you. So yoga means the path of yoga, but all Buddhist schools, including middle way, the middle way is also yogachara. So mind only, mind is maybe a better name for that school.

[34:03]

It's the yogic application to studying of Buddhist psychology. So we don't just study it intellectually, we study it with our whole body. We actually enter into a physical intimacy with the psychological processes. And that's our task. So those tasks that Psyche did are the yogic tasks of reuniting body and mind with the intimacy of consciousness and its objects so that the separation between subject and object is seen for its illusory nature without destroying the mind and trying to go back in a kind of psychotic break back, sliding into, like, back into the womb. Okay? So now, Vernon? All you need is mind. That strikes me very differently than

[35:08]

Western law concept of pure idealism. This is different. Well, this is just me. Some Buddhists actually are saying... That will be another class. Actually, that will be several classes on the teaching of... my understanding of the essence of teaching of mind only is all you need is mind in order to get free of mind. That the teaching of mind only is to free people who are hung up on their mind, who are grasping the objects. So the skillfulness of that teaching is to set people free who are attached to forms of awareness. And some people would agree with that, but it's a little bit, they go a little further and say, actually, There is nothing but mind. Some of them actually go that far, and I don't agree with them at that point. So they pushed a good thing too far, in my opinion.

[36:17]

But they do actually get to the point of being idealists. They're bodhisattvas. They're working for the welfare of all beings, but they're actually also, some of them seem to be idealists. But it's also possible to use something which might have the logical implication of idealism, but not go that far and not grasp that. So we have to be careful when we study that. about that difference in emphasis. How are you doing? Yes? This original sin, this original sundering, we can't do much about. This already happened. Is there sin or sundering subsequent to the original sin that we are responsible for? Yeah. What might happen? Can you just admit to that? Well, the first thing that comes to mind, which may be not the best thing to bring up, is to not study is a living in accord with the sundering and is perpetuating the sundering.

[37:28]

To study the sundering is not further sundering. It's the path of healing this rip, this wound. So, some way to realize intimacy in this process, which is always there, by studying the psychological phenomena widely, but also helping us actually to get down to actually see and understand this basic Mind between self and other, subject and object, knowing and known and so on. Knowing and concept. To the extent that we aren't applying ourselves to keep an eye on this, we are loafing in our healing process. And or acting in accordance with this delusion which is, you know, this is mine, not yours, you creep. That's a further sin. But this sin also is not really done by a person.

[38:34]

It's just really a cranking the delusion, the ignorance wheel one more time. And you can throw in there, mix it up and make it all the more. You're still cranking that, basically that same delusion system. And the origins of this thing is not any person there. But once you get to split, then you can have a person on this side because the psyche can be personified easily. Say it again. Someone said that, huh? Who was that? Really? It wasn't Jesus? Anyway, I agree with that. Pretty scary, huh? Can you hear it? Once again, louder and slower. So penetrate that guy with that. And when you eat, you have to eat mindfully.

[39:38]

Every little bite. This is the deal. But not turning away from what it is to eat that fruit. And we need to be really skillful at eating this fruit. We need to eat it and chew it and chew it until we taste it completely. And then we realize, whoa, this is like a dream. This is like, lacks inherent existence, this taste. Yes? Well, you've not introduced something which is antithetical to the process you just described. One does not realize this, and one cannot function. However, there is possibility to realize this

[40:50]

this reunion, to realize this healing. It is possible that it can be realized, but you and I do not do it. Togetherness of you and I does it. Our life together is what realizes it. And our life together is what is realized. But you don't realize this, and you, if you did realize it, you'd be in trouble. But you don't. You think about realizing it, but on the other side of realization. In realization there is no you there realizing it. There's just realization. Now if you want to know after there's realization is there a happy life at Zen Center or whatever? There is. There is great activity. Great activity but it's no longer yours because you just got over that thing. That your thing. That yours and mine. That mine and me and mine. or whatever, and then the kid would say, yeah, who said?

[41:55]

And you'd say, me, myself. Well, who's going to make me? Me, myself, and I. Three to one, we're going to beat you. Yes? yeah so that's hard to understand like again look at the story of Amor and Psyche Psyche tried to do these various tasks she tried she failed and in her failure she got so like you might try you might say you know how are you going to practice Zen so now maybe you're still thinking you can practice Zen If you keep trying and keep trying, you will fail. And in your failure, people will come and help you.

[43:01]

Dogs will come and help you. And then you'll get that you were never supposed to be doing this on your own, by your own power. But you may have to try real hard and fall flat on your face before you realize that you can't practice Zen by your own power. And nobody else is going to practice it for you. but you together with all beings, it's a snap. The root of the word psyche is this word which means, this word, what is the word? Psychein. Psychein, which means to breathe. Psyche means breath. Uh-huh. Breath is basic experience.

[44:04]

You know what you said? What? That's fine. Oh, and the mind's on top of that? No. Also another, the word, what is it, the word spirit also means breath, right? Spirit, respiration, inspiration, expiration, various kinds of breath. So breath, spirit, psyche. At their root, etymologically at their root, They're basically the same thing. Breath, psyche, and mind are basically the same thing. Mind is the animation of the universe.

[45:04]

And this animation of the universe comes through the universe interacting with itself, splitting itself into two kinds of materiality. the gross and the subtle, the field and the organ, the responsive, this dynamic in the universe, this wonderful split in interactive quality of the universe has now manifested spirit, breath, life, and then finally consciousness. Not finding consciousness, consciousness. It's a wonderful thing of life. So breath and mind. There's not life before there's consciousness, so I don't think there's any non-consciousness. Like, take an amoeba, there's responsiveness. Take a redwood tree, there's responsiveness.

[46:06]

But the plant kingdom seemed to veer off in a direction of not developing this mind which splits itself into two. And the animal kingdom did. And I have theories about that, but anyway, basically the plant kingdom doesn't seem to be so split mentally as the animal kingdom. Uh-huh. Well, now we're here in the time to try to integrate the brain and not call it junk, because the brain... Big time bossy name. We've got to respect the brain. Just like in the old days, they used to have little temples to bow down to the goddess of love.

[47:12]

They bowed down to the power of sex. and they had goddesses, they had temples to bow down to the power of the intellect temples to Mars they had temples to bow down to the power of the intellect temples to Apollo they had temples to bow down to the power of orgasm temples to Dionysus and Bacchus temples to bow down to these forces of the mind to these very powerful things so we bow down to the force of the brain temples to the brain universities think tanks computer software let's face it not run away from it in the old days they maybe they thought they could those Egyptians.

[48:13]

Oh, for example, in the story she couldn't go back and say, sorry, I didn't mean to see you, you know. I'll forget, you know. Now we have these TV, these movies where they shoot these things and you forget what happened, right? These chemicals that make you forget the experience. So she could say, well, I'll take some kind of pill to forget that I saw you. I'll go back to... No, you can't go back. That would be like major damage to reality for us to try to go back to an earlier state of development where we don't have the ability to see something as separate in ourself over here and there. Every time you're born, you can spend a little time doing that. But you have to die first. You can't go back to an earlier stage of development. You can't go back 6,000 years. No. No, you don't... You may... To want to be that way is, again, regressive.

[49:25]

It's regressive. It's saying, I don't want to be... I don't want to be a boy. I want to be a... a neither. I was different. There can be that impulse, but that impulse only occurs to people who have evolved to the stage of feeling separate. And then when you feel all that pain, you want to, like, escape that situation. Go be some other way. So regression is one of the things people do, but it's psychosis. It's so painful to live in this world of wounded, sundered mind. It's so painful. We feel so at a loss, plus so hassled, we think regression might be the trick. But it's psychosis. It's not the solution. You have to go back. And if you want to be that earlier stage, then, again, you're getting psychotic.

[50:28]

To want to reconnect with that earlier stage is different than going back there because you want to reconnect with it or realize your connection with it without losing the fact that you still have to think that it's separate. So while continuing to have the ability to think in terms of subject and object, you no longer use those facilities, but you've got them. So you're not going back. You've still got this evolutionary breakthrough, but you've now reconnected to what you always had and thought you'd lost. Yeah. you're understanding the split, not getting rid of the split. The equipment, the splitting equipment is still there. The point of this whole thing is to help other beings who are split. This yoga char is to help other beings who are split.

[51:30]

You have to understand this process. You can't just become a neuropsychotic and let some other bodhisattvas take care of you. You're a bodhisattva. Say yes. So you want to learn about the mind so you can help other miserable beings who don't understand the mind and who are agonizing in their, you know, in their torment and pain of this wound in their mind, which they take very seriously and are trying to, like, blame somebody for it or at least regress. or at least do something to get as far as possible out of this body as they can by various kinds of addictions. You're here to, like, study this and tell them, now come on back and study it, it's really interesting, come on. It's not so bad, I know it's bad, but, you know, all the Buddhas will help you and all that. So you've got to... No. You don't want to go back, you want to go forward and bring everybody along with you into this study of the mind, of the psyche.

[52:36]

What makes it seek love? It is born of love. It's a love child. Love, it's love looking for love. The nature of mind is love. The nature of mind is love and interdependence. It's totally, the nature of mind, like all things, is that it is, what's the word for it? It's called, the nature of all phenomena is, what? Retardos. Huh? Non-abiding. All phenomena are non-abiding. Non-abiding is the nature of all phenomena. But, all life, is not just non-abiding, substantial, interdependent, ungraspable, etc.

[53:43]

It's also totally imbued with compassion. So, if we lose touch with that, through ignorance of this situation, we suffer, so we yield to our nature, which is always right under our nose. Well, you could say that, but you basically just face the split. Out of compassion, you face this split. You face this painful situation. Yes? Yes? Yes? mind consciousness and consciousness have a relation to meditation? Yes. So it's just quite possible that meditation is, in other words, is consciousness, not mind consciousness.

[54:55]

I think it would be more less split, that mind consciousness is stronger split. So in meditation, so to speak, Would children of my production go back to the direct perception of this consciousness? It is possible to do certain meditations where one, in a sense, goes back to this earlier, this more fundamental direct experience level. You go back to the garden for a temporary visit. Like last night, that happened to me. You know, there's a song, another song, Warm San Francisco Night. We occasionally have warm nights. We often have warm days, but sometimes we have warm nights, too. No fog, no cooling off, right? Last night was one of those warm nights. When my wife came home, she said, Come outside. It's paradise. So I went outside, and it was.

[55:57]

And it was like, there's a certain thing, you know, about, like, where you like go out into the temperature and into the light and it's like it's just tuned in such a way that it's like it's almost like there's no separation it's like the climatic situation is such that it's almost like an instant meditation state because it's not warmer it's not colder it's not brighter it's not darker it's like you're out there and it's like it's like it's almost like you're one with the environment. It's like, it's like a garden again. It's like there's a garden and that's it. It's not even you. It's just, you know. So meditation can be like that. But, in order to free all beings from suffering, you have to come back into the torture.

[56:59]

of self and other and if taking excursions into that kind of meditation are encouraging to you and then you know in that bliss of that state you feel like you get happier and happier and you get so happy you finally say there's only one thing more I can do to be happy and that would be to go back and help those people there so it is sometimes meditations are like that where you kind of like temporarily reduce the torment of separation and that sometimes is a kind of like a nice relaxation so that you can go back to work you must solve this problem you must see through this wound otherwise you will always be susceptible to being attacked as soon as it's manifested again by that sense of other plus you won't be able to help those zillions of other people who don't yet have access this illness that we have.

[58:02]

So the meditation ultimately is the serene and peaceful and patient and enthusiastic and generous stability which studies the fundamental human and sees them, understands them and liberates beings from it. But it's possible to take vacations occasionally. which some people think that's the extent of meditation, but it's not. It's just one aspect, the vacation aspect, which is, you know, it's part of the deal, but it's true. People sometimes narrow in and they think that's all there is to meditation. But Buddhist meditation is fundamentally, ultimately, to address the fundamental human problem and become liberated from that misunderstanding. It's to address ignorance. is understood, we realize the Buddha nature, which is always right under our nose, this insubstantial, compassionate mind, which is never someplace else.

[59:16]

Okay, so please find that. It definitely involves mind consciousness, because mind consciousness is where the self is where this mind consciousness is where ignorance lives. Ignorance doesn't really live in direct sensory consciousness. Mind consciousness, conceptual consciousness, is where the idea that we're separate and the idea that we're enemies, etc., etc., and where the idea of I'm better than you, that lives in mind consciousness. Do you know that actually some people think they're better than you? People actually think, yes, I am better than anybody at Zen Center, I'm better than, because they're basically, they're not, they don't agree with me. There's that too.

[60:18]

Better than, thinking that I'm better than I am isn't as bad as me thinking I'm better than you. Excellent. Do I think I'm better than I am? No. I think I'm about as good as I am. Not better or worse, actually. My only problem is if I think I'm better than you. If I think I'm worse than you, that's not so bad. But actually, I don't think I'm worse than you or better than you. That's where I like to live. Either better or worse. But the same. The same. but I have this little problem of a brain that thinks I'm different. I'm working on that. How about you? Want to work on it? Study it? Good. Well, let's continue then.

[61:16]

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