briefly looking at how one practices the application of mindfulness to thought or the fixation of attention on consciousness. The foundation of mindfulness on mind. It can be translated those ways. They each have a little bit What is the practice of the application of mindfulness to consciousness for the shravaka, for the disciple or the listener?

[01:44]

Yes. So this is from Satipatthana Sutta. First level of mindfulness of thought is these rather general categories. Any questions about that level of relating to this practice? You know how to do it?

[02:45]

Anybody who doesn't know how to do it? Well, perhaps you can tell us what's difficult about it. Did you understand what he said? Yes or no?

[03:46]

You did understand? You did, you didn't. You did, you didn't. Did you? Could you explain it to me? Oh, I'll explain it to you. You can notice, Bob, that your mind didn't take over, and then you begin to start changing, and the mind of the others are what you thought of. Is that how you understood it, Susan?

[04:58]

Is that what you meant? So when you read this description of how to do this meditation, it says that you actually kind of say to yourself, I am having a greedy thought, or I have a thought, this thought, This consciousness has greed, or this consciousness does not have greed. This consciousness is concentrated. This consciousness is distracted. This consciousness has faith. This consciousness does not have faith. This consciousness is wholesome. This consciousness is unwholesome. To look at a state of consciousness and say that it's wholesome, at the moment you look at it and say it's wholesome,

[06:05]

the moment you look at a state of consciousness and say that it's unwholesome, it's not really unwholesome at that moment. So it seems as though there's some kind of a problem here to do a meditation where as soon as you're aware of the state, certain states of consciousness seem to be contradictory. If you can say, I am with some confidence, if you can say with some confidence, this state is an unwholesome state, then the confidence and the mindfulness and the alertness and so on that are there to make this observation sound inconsistent with unwholesomeness. So how then does one observe unwholesomeness? How can you ever know it?

[07:11]

Because as soon as you know it, it's gone. It's actually quite easy to spot on wholesomeness, according to the Abhidharma. Wholesomeness is determined by two dharmas. One is lack of decorousness and the other is lack of self-respect.

[08:17]

If you see those dharmas, if you observe those dharmas and are aware of those dharmas, then you are aware of an unhopenable state of consciousness. So anyway, although it sounds like there's some problem, you can't actually be aware of these dharmas, and you can't actually note and be aware of an unwholesome state of consciousness. But to, in some genuine way, bring that point across to yourself will then probably not be an unwholesome state of consciousness. So it's possible to notice an unwholesome state of consciousness, to note it, and still be an unwholesome state. In other words, you can be conscious as you go into unwholesome realms. This is a different type than not being aware of it.

[09:24]

To bring back to where I think we started is that You can note these qualities of consciousness, which are listed in this explanation of how to do this meditation at its most basic level. You can note these things without interrupting the process of their occurrence. Now, of course, if you keep noticing, keep noticing, you'll start noticing states of consciousness which will be characterized by concentration and mindfulness more and more. That's not why you're doing it. These practices are not intended actually to be done as what people might call preliminary common practices. These are not preliminary common practices. Mindfulness and mindfulness of consciousness, in fact, you can see is a third of four.

[10:37]

and that we would usually have a preliminary calming of the mind before even practicing mindfulness of the body. Now it turns out that mindfulness of the body is one of the most preliminary ways to calm the mind. So in this case, one of the... double-edged teaching of the Smriti Upastanas is that they are a very beginning practice, especially the mindfulness of the body is very beginning and also quite advanced. It's a practice that's given as one of the part of the practices are the most gross lassoes of consciousness and also they can be also on a sort of level. So you use the mindfulness of the body to calm the mind so that you can do mindfulness of the body in such a way that you can let go of the body.

[11:44]

But you have to do mindfulness of the body to a certain extent in order to calm your mind enough that you can do mindfulness of the body at this more subtle level. You can't do mindfulness of feelings And you can't do mindfulness of consciousness if you can't do mindfulness of body. And you can't do mindfulness of consciousness unless you can do mindfulness of body and feeling. And you can't do mindfulness of dharmas unless you can do all three of the formal ones. But when you do mindfulness of dharma, you simultaneously do all the ones before it. And once you can do mindfulness of dharmas, when you do mindfulness of body, you also do mindfulness of feeling thought and dharma. Is that clear? So the first time you go through the sequence, you have to calm the mind and then you get good at mindfulness of the body.

[12:48]

But that time, first time, if you feel, if you think this is the first time you've done this, then you feel like this is, you don't see that you're also doing mindfulness of feeling and mindfulness of consciousness and mindfulness of dharma. But when you go through the sequence and finally do Mindfulness of Dharmas, you realize that at that moment, you know you can do the previous three because you've just done them. Not just done them, but you've done them over whatever amount of time you've been doing them. You know that you can do them, plus you know that you are doing them. Then when you go back and do Mindfulness of Body again, you know that when you do Mindfulness of Body, you're also doing the other three. In other words, the most advanced includes all the other ones, and the beginning one includes all the other ones. Mindfulness of the body is a mental activity as well. Mindfulness of the body is a mental activity, yes.

[13:53]

So in that sense, there's also a lot to know that I'm going forward to some position in the body. It doesn't mean you're aware of thinking in the sense that you, a note that you think it. There's two ways to talk about awareness. One is awareness within the perceptual field or cognitive field, and then the other is awareness on the level of consciousness. In Buddhism, there's no such thing as unconscious. It's just consciousness, the mind's impact on itself, and the perceptual realm or cognitive realm. Now, the first time you go through, the first time a person is practicing mindfulness of body and they're saying, they're aware, I am standing, it's quite likely that they might not

[15:02]

know that i think i'm standing quite likely they wouldn't know that but by the time you get to the last stage they would know that they are standing and they think they're standing so that shows that you know that by doing you can do the dharma awareness that you're thinking you're standing at the same time that you are standing and that standing and thinking of standing are not true things that's why it's nice to do all four but Excuse me. But the awareness at first, the whole consciousness knows that it is thinking that you're standing. And there's no standing aside from the thinking. But it doesn't yet register as a notion or a concept that it's thinking-less. In the perceptual field, this may not be there. It could be there, but it's likely not to be. Yes? Thinking is your understanding.

[16:04]

It seems that way. That's why when you first go through, if you're mindful of your hand, you don't think you could also be mindful of your feelings. But it turns out that There's always feeling. In every moment of consciousness there's feeling. So if the object of consciousness is a visual thing, actually the hand is not a, there's really not an object called hand, but some color. The object of consciousness is color. At that moment there's also feeling. At that moment consciousness includes all that. The type of consciousness is visual consciousness. Consciousness gets its name, by the object. So the visual consciousness, so there is consciousness, you could say, as soon as you see color, you know it's visual consciousness.

[17:11]

And you know there's feeling there too. And there's also various other dharmas, like anger, or confusion, or concentration, or mindfulness. You're not mindful of each one of them as an object in a given moment of consciousness. And yet, you understand that to be mindful of dharma does not mean that you're mindful of the way dharmas actually function. And the way they actually function is that only one dharma gets to be the object of consciousness in a given moment. And that's what you're mindful of. You're mindful of the way they actually work rather than the way you might think they work. And so although feeling is not the object of consciousness, you can still be aware of it. In what way are you aware of it?

[18:13]

You're aware of it not as an object of consciousness and also not necessarily as something in the realm of perception or cognition. But you can tell that this is the realm of of cognition, you can tell by, you can tell it's angered here because the realm of cognition is thin. Well, that means that the realm of cognition, although it doesn't include anger specifically, it is angered and followed by the shape of it. So actually there is no separation. Sort of like a subject and instead of the object. It's bending how you look, yeah. You can tell when you're looking at the theater marquee that you're angry because of the way it looks.

[19:19]

You know how it looks ordinarily when you're not angry, and now you're angry. But you don't necessarily say I'm angry. Because as soon as you turn and look to see you're angry, then now anger is another object of it. But you can also have a pleasurable feeling while you're watching the anger. But if you turn to see, if you've got a pleasurable feeling, then now you're looking at the feeling. And you may be angry while you're looking at the feeling. So if you're not looking at it, you're looking at it. A moment of tension about in Pluto, as you say, Is your anger affecting you? Say it again, please. But what your concept of a visual

[20:26]

Yes, we think the anger is affecting it. In other words, when we look at colors, we often aren't satisfied with just looking at colors. So we exercise some emotional potentials, for example, We give rise to anger. At the same moment we're looking at a red dot. Anger doesn't need... Anger is something you can exercise without it being associated with the object at all. you can hardly associate with objects too.

[21:30]

At the same time, various other mental functions can be exercised. They're being exercised within consciousness, but not within perception. However, depending on what you're exercising, what you perceive will look different. So you see then, this leads into Emptiness. Because there is no anger, and there is no perception, aside from the influence of all these other things. And although they don't overlap, they influence each other. They're different, and yet they're inseparable. Yes? I'm talking about free-floating anger. Pardon? Are you talking about free-floating anger? Yes, I'm talking about free-floating anger. Well, we're not talking about perceiving it.

[22:40]

We're talking about anger that does not perceive. For example, in the perceptual realm, I'm talking to you, but strangely enough, I may not say exactly what I intend. And I hear myself say Greenville, but I don't know why I said it. But if I think, you see, although there's no past that I can refer back to, there is a knowledge of the way I think I think. And the way I think I think is that there's a reason why I said that word rather than another. and I can figure out that I was angry by looking at the way I think I think. And I'll find out that I was angry, and that's why I said that to you, instead of what I was intending to say. But the anger wasn't at that time.

[23:41]

I wasn't aware of it being directed to you. I might find out that it was not directed to you. I'm talking to you, and I'm angry about something that I think happened yesterday. Someone insulted me. was uncomfortable and I got angry and now I'm thinking about it while I'm talking to you. that anger has an object I can still say that it doesn't because rather not so much that it has an object but it has situations in which we feel we can give rise to it but not necessarily has an object is it the object of the anger or is it the situation for example some people will will take something as an object of anger even though the situation doesn't seem to allow it because they

[25:06]

because they feel that anger should have an object. And not only that, but anger should have certain objects rather than others. But in some other cases, if you really wanted to say anger had an object, you could say that anger has an object in all situations, and then You could say that even when it doesn't have an object, it's angry then at the situation rather than it's an object in a situation. But I think that to think that way is a kind of limitation on anger, which is not necessary. I think it's a kind of, that way of thinking about anger, I would suggest, is somewhat is limited and it's afflicted.

[26:08]

But actually, I would suggest that anger can flare with no object. You can experience just as heat. You can experience as just fireworks. So maybe an example that I gave wasn't a good one. Maybe I should just say that at the moment you're observing certain things, in another part of consciousness, you're setting off fireworks to entertain yourself. You're having a boring conversation with someone, and all of a sudden... In the example I used, she found an object, but I'm saying, let's take another one where you're talking to someone and all of a sudden you notice by the nature of your conversation, you notice that the conversation just got blown off course.

[27:21]

And if you examine the situation, you can find out that actually you wanted to entertain yourself at some other level, but you felt you had to stay in the perceptual realm, you had to stay with things. You have to keep things tidy in the cognitive realm. But you also know that on the side you can kind of do these things. You can do this other stuff over here. But it can be just fireworks. Just explosions. Like fireworks. Fireworks aren't necessarily explosive, but they're not meant to blow up ships or knock over walls. They're just light. But you could say, well, that's The object of the fireworks is the eye that perceives it, to entertain the eye, the eyeball, the thing that sees it. But that's the object of the anger. Or the object of the anger is the darkness of the sky.

[28:24]

The anger goes light, and therefore it obliterates the color behind it. the black goes away and red comes out. So in that sense, you can say the black is the object of anger because the color makes the black go away. But you see, what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to show you an unafflicted anger, an anger that's not bounded by the usual concepts of anger as having an object. See, there's three questions. I can see this having no optics, except what you think is made up to you. Because you can get angry in a situation and find out later on that someone else felt the situation completely differently than you did.

[29:29]

And in that case, we don't have any justification for getting angry. That brings in another dimension. You get angry at someone for saying something or doing something, and later on you find out that that's not what they meant. So what you're angry at was your understanding of what they said, not them. You know, someone goes, and you think that means something, and you get angry at it. Later on you find out it meant something different. So then you, what you first were angry at was this, But then later, you take that away, and now you're angry at an idea about this, which is actually this. This is what you really got angry at. But this is what they meant. So you can switch objects in a sense. Were you angry at what they did or what you thought they meant? I thought getting angry was very rich.

[30:31]

It didn't feel, came it up, like you said, in the morning, you just read along, So that brings up another aspect of it. And the other one which you brought up was that, anyway, we basically just want to give rise to this show, this demonstration of power, and yet we feel that it needs an object. at the first limitation of the first affliction associated with anger. The second thing is that we feel that certain objects rather than others, another level of affliction, and so on. And let's see. Well, it's the same in the sense that both are liberating alternative ways to the habitual ways that we usually think.

[32:26]

They're antidotes to two different problems. Thinking that anger has or does not have an object does not necessarily involve the past. Freedom from the idea of past is different from the freedom from the idea of anger needing an object, or the affliction of anger needing an object, and the affliction of past as an existing thing besides present imagination. They're two different problems. But both, they're the same in the sense that they're both kind of letting go of the problem. There's, from the point of view of the quality of our life, they're the same kind of stuff, but they're relating to different problems. I think you're in the next one. Yes, there is a choice of anger and that's very important because

[34:15]

We actually choose, but we think that it's determined. That's the part about, if you think anger's hooked to an object, then you think you can't choose it. But actually, you choose it all the time. You always choose it completely free. But I had to do it because of the . To think that, to remember that you choose anger rather than something else, that's very good, to remember that you choose it. to see that you just wanted to do it. Usually people can't see it. They say, I did it because that made me angry, because they did that. See, people don't usually say, because they did that, I chose to be angry. They say, because, and then you don't say that I chose. Of course, it's unlikely that you can say that since it's contradictory to it. You don't say, that made me angry, so I chose to be angry. You just say, that made me angry. rather than I chose to be angry.

[35:18]

Given that opportunity, I chose to be angry. Given that situation, in that situation, I chose to be angry. Now, strangely enough, we decide to say that the situation is powerful and I am determined by it. And then what we do is we also choose. We always choose. We never don't choose. But what we choose is say, we choose the habit. We'd say, I'd rather take my habitual understanding of how things go rather than say it in a new way, which might be much liberating. So to say, I choose to be angry at you is pretty scary. Who knows what might happen to me if I take total credit for my own thinking. So I'd rather say, that made me angry. I know I've tried that a million times. It almost always works. There may be some debate, but at least they're not going to call me a Martian on top of it.

[36:26]

But it turns out, the funny thing is, if you say, I choose to be angry, all the people might get angry at you for saying it that way. They also might forgive you because you admit that you did it rather than trying to blame it on somebody else. So they're always making a choice. You're always making a choice. In other words, you're all not making a choice because you really don't make a choice. You all do just what you want. Given the situation, you do exactly what you want. Multi-dimensional in a given moment. Think to it. This brings up the story that I've been told a long time ago. I never seen the answer. It was about the man going on and driving to space, All of a sudden, it was a crack and hit another boat, and turns around and yells at the person in the other boat.

[37:33]

But then, in the outside, in the lift, it just fell by the tension. And the moral of the story is to see the way I was hoping to be even in the boat. If I can figure out how you do that. Good start. I thought this was an open thought. You see, this is an open thought. Would that be seen anger as a positive thought rather than anger that happened? If you're looking at just the thought, then you know anger is up, but you don't have an answer. So I'm asking, is this the mindset of the thought to the film?

[38:52]

Would you say it again now? When the thought to the film. Yes. And the... That's all that's said. Anger is an option. It could be, couldn't it? I think it could be. You could be aware of objectless anger or object anger. Both kinds, you could note. Well, one way to actually see the objectless anger is to see the kind of anger that happens just as exercise of heat, just as combustion that wouldn't be actually in the cognitive realm, but would shake it. It'd be like you'd just be thinking along and all of a sudden you just get... That kind of anger, you would very well not... You certainly couldn't find... You might very well not be able to find the object anyway, but you might be able to locate the anger.

[40:04]

But you see what I'm saying is that, once again, by the example of the fireworks, you could say if you want that any kind of fireworks has an object in the sense that if you call it foreground, the background is the object. You can say that if you want. In other words, anger always has to have some kind of dualistic function in it. And so the other side could all be said to be the object if you want to. But it's not object in the sense necessarily that anger is trying to hurt the object. but rather anger needs a background in order to exist. But when you realize that, you realize that what we really mean by anger is a subject-object relationship or a foreground-background relationship. And really, anger doesn't strike out at anything. It's nothing aside from what it strikes out against. Or you can't just have foreground of anger without background of anger. So this kind of study, you'll soon find out that anger never has an It never has an object, because it's always this. Here's the anger hitting this thing, because this is anger right here.

[41:10]

This is not anger, this thing coming like this. Fireworks before it has a background is not anger. It's when the background comes up, then you have fireworks, then you have anger. What I just said is the bodhisattva way of doing it. This is emptiness that I just pointed out. If you see this, there's no anger anymore. Foreground and background are completely inseparable. There is, but the shravaka level is usually taking foreground, isolated from the background. That's why you say, here's anger. But most people can't begin to meditate on foreground and background as one.

[42:14]

If they could, they'd be fine. But they start out usually by picking out the foreground or the background. And that's the beginning. Now, we started here, and we've already jumped to the bodhisattva level in our discussion. That shravaka level is to take one side, would another way of talking about that be saying that somewhat less primitive in a more specific way that um that um that my opinion is not reflected The Shravakayana way of talking about this is trying to make it very concrete, extremely concrete, like you're actually saying you're doing this.

[43:27]

And as soon as you start saying you're doing it, right away you run into problems that you run into. As soon as you start saying, this is an angry thought, the more you say that, the more you realize, hey, wait a minute, how can I be doing this? And then pretty soon you say, well, I have to do it differently, that's how we got on this. And there's another way to do it where you're just aware, you're not saying it anymore. There's another way that you're aware, not of what happened, but what is happening. You can actually do it without any words. But if you tell people to do that to start with, they wouldn't necessarily know how. They start by saying, this is, even out loud maybe, this is an angry thought. And then pretty soon they can say it quietly. Just like the Jesus prayer, you actually start by saying it out loud, and you just say it with your lips, and you say it with your throat, and you say it with your heart, and you say it, and where is it? It's just right with the thing then. Dissolve it?

[44:33]

Dissolve it as what it was, but it doesn't make it go away. It doesn't dissolve it in a way that it's caught by being the subject of the object. Freedom of the person. In other words, The person is no longer separated from the background. So, somewhere along the path, the state is the consequence seems to, the feel that the consequence seems to rise above

[45:53]

And in this circle is a realm which is characterized by Dharma called Samyana, which notes things and the object of consciousness, the object of consciousness is in here. Any Dharma except to the object of consciousness, including Nirvana. The Samyana is the noting of the characteristic of this object. And there's some receptive function here too. working conjunction with this.

[46:57]

There's some perceptive functions we call it angia. And if it's a physical object, we call it one of the five senses. which is not going to begin in the eyeball. And if it's a mental order, we call it monos, or mind order, a mental object. Mindfulness, and mind bones, we can call it smithy, mindfulness or memory, is always present in consciousness, no matter what you do. there's mindfulness of this, of this, or whatever you want to say is what you're mindful of. Now, the perceptual realm has an object in it.

[48:08]

An object is then the object of consciousness whose characteristics are noted. Now, the characteristics are noted, and the noting of the characteristics is this function of consciousness. That's what you call cognition, or concept, or emotion, sometimes perception. This is inseparable from mind-self. It's a mental function. It all arises with mind, always. Mind arises and arises. But it itself is not necessarily an object of consciousness either. the object of consciousness appears. But the concept of consciousness is not necessarily the object of consciousness. You can have an object of consciousness and have a concept of it which is not the object of consciousness.

[49:08]

In other words, you can have something, you can have something as an object and you have a concept as another part of the concept of consciousness. So consciousness can be working with an object through the organ, noting its marks, But the noting of the mark and the noting of the characteristic was not the object of the consciousness. And yet the noting of the mark is happening to the consciousness. And if the consciousness is working with this thing here, this object, and the mark or the concept of it is like this, that's one kind of consciousness, and if it's working with the same object, so it's possible to work with the same object, and it has a different concept of it, a different notion of it would be a different kind of consciousness. So consciousness will react differently to objects of itself, for that which is taken as an object, depending on the toxic perception. One kind of perception will make consciousness go like this, another kind of perception will make consciousness go like that.

[50:11]

These at that moment are not objects of consciousness, and yet consciousness knows it, because they have different effects on it. And the different effects is what the kind of consciousness is. Consciousness is knowing. but knowing beyond the perceptual world. Now, in addition to that particular type of immunity, a concept in relation to perception and so on, there's all kinds of other emotional stuff going on. All the buggers are running down here doing very well. And they're doing them, and they're also doing them with or without affliction. In other words, they're doing them just They're just doing them, but they may or may not get opinions or habits associated with the way they've been done. For example, there could be anger. So as consciousness, if you look at it, if you didn't look at anything, you know, like a blue, just looking at blue, or look at your breath, the way your breath looks to you is inseparable from your ideas about it that are coming up moment after moment.

[51:21]

As long as it's the object of the consciousness, you have some perception of it, some idea about it. And you have different ideas all the time, plus all kinds of emotions. So by looking at the breath, you see what kind of ideas you have, what kind of emotions you have at the moment you're watching your breath. But you can also turn your mind away from your breath to the idea, to the emotion. But then again, when you look at the emotion, the way the emotion looks, will also vary depending on the other stuff you're doing. So wherever you turn your direction, the whole system's always affecting what you see. What you eat makes it, you know, determine how much blood goes through, what kind of blood goes through your eyeball, which means this will affect the way what you think, what you see. You drink a lot of coffee, what you see will be going full of that blood. If you don't drink much coffee, So you can infer that you drank coffee by what you see.

[52:35]

These things jump in all over the place. Oh, I must just drink coffee. Oh yeah, I did. But once again, did you just drink coffee or did you have a state of mind that you learned from coffee, that you're now created from where you live? So is that clear? And that's the difference. See, we are now actually jumped over to doing, what we're partly doing, the dharma symmetry of the time now. The line between these parts are not so strong. I'm still trying to go over to what David wrote. He said, with the Tartartha, somehow this consciousness seems to include various modes after a while. All modes, as a matter of fact. So does it mean that the perceptual realm gets bigger? And I would say that the boundary between the perceptual realm is defined by the object, that which is the object, and the noting of it, that which can be noted because it gets to be the object, in the organ and the consciousness.

[53:35]

But what we just saw was that after a while, this edge here seems to kind of, it seems to, And what it is, not necessarily getting bigger, but you realize that what it is, it's influenced by all those other things, pushing and pulling all different parts of consciousness. And you realize that what somehow the way it is, even in the perceptual realm, the way the perceptual realm is, is inseparable from the rest of the consciousness. In fact, it is. And that's the same with every dharma and consciousness. They're all mutually independent of each other and none of them exist without the other one. None of them are anything but the other one. There's not one of them has anything aside from the other one. There's not one of them has a shred of identity aside from the other one. You cannot get a hold of any of them without getting all of them.

[54:41]

Nothing is not that way. Everything depends on everything else. Nothing arises all by itself, as we meet itself. So, the perceptual realm will soon be that way, that you realize that although it seems limited, it's limited like all the ergons are limited, namely, it's limited only by the extent to which you do not realize its causes. And then you find out that its causes also are never found by themselves, but are also completely ungrascible. So it's determined by causes that you can't get a hold of. You can't get a hold of this. and you can't get away with its problems because the colonies are also all those other things. So the perceptual realm doesn't exactly get wider, it just becomes something that's completely empty. And when you can't get at the perceptual realm, you also can't get it past, you can't get it present, and you can't get it future. And that's why in the diamond future it says, Moses thought, Moses thought. But the pagina knows that Moses thought of all the beings

[55:43]

Imagine that many world systems and took all the ground of Damasio on those world systems and ground them and so on. Wouldn't that be quite a few world systems? Well, then imagine those are all full of beings, you know, lots of beings. Now the Sahagata happens to know the modes of thoughts of all those beings. So does his perceptual realm get big so he knows them? Well, not exactly. But what happens is the Sahagata's perceptual realm becomes totally one with emptiness. And because it's empty, and he knows it that way, Moses thought, Moses thought is no Moses thought, the photographer knows all Moses thought really does, because they're all like this. Namely, none of them are inseparable from the total causation of his consciousness. In the same way all these are, it is too.

[57:12]

Nirvana is the way these things are all in a condition. When you see how these things are all empty, that's the same way nirvana is. That's what real nirvana is, moment by moment. You see these things as due to an immense pattern of causing conditions, each of one of which is due to an immense pattern of causing conditions. It's ungrassoable size and positive conditions and all positive conditions that are ungrassoable size and no positive conditions. That's what Nirvana is. So in the present... It may be unnecessary, but somebody does. But it's certainly unnecessary to speak of it. But now that we're talking about it, that's the way it goes.

[58:16]

It's written in all these books. You can skip over it every time you see it. It's quite all right with me. I think they have the excellent meditation. Every time you see Buddha, just jump over it. Don't think about it. If you consistently skipped over nirvana, you'd also skip over samsara. So that's why it's a good meditation. Yes? I'm really happy and I've found a question. There's found us that arrive in a healthy state of mind and a healthy state of mind. None of the things that come up are the human consciousness. Are they, from what you said here, are they What do you mean by Vijnana consciousness?

[59:20]

Yeah, they are particular dharmas. They're this dharma called chitta. They're chitta under the aspect of having one of those senses. sense fields as its object. So citta, also citta is called vijnana. So when vijnana has sense field X as its object, then it's called i-vijnana, or i-consciousness. It is a dharma, but it's just this dharma under that name. In the list of what comes up as a whole thing dharma, That's because all wholesome dharmas come up with citta. They never come up without citta. Citta comes up, all wholesome, unwholesome and neutral dharmas come up with citta. They never come up without citta.

[60:21]

You don't have to remember citta, you don't have to say citta. But once again, there's no citta, there's no consciousness aside from the dharmas that arise with it. It has no function aside from the functions. That's why you have these functions. And there's none of these functions, never without consciousness. But you want to say that there's something besides the functions. And why do you want to say there's something besides the functions? When I just said there wasn't anything besides the functions, why would you want to? What? make it into an object so you can identify it, okay, and why would you want to do that? What? Yeah, that's right, that's what most people think.

[61:28]

Why would a Buddhist want to do that? Why would Buddhists want to bring up this thing which we can make into an object and identify it? Why would we want to do that when we just said this thing that you now brought up made into an object and not safe identified is not other than the things that come up with it. Why would you want to do that to yourself, to anybody? That's right. If you bring it up, there's nothing other than these things that come up with it, but you have to bring something up so that you can now see that it's nothing other than those things. Because that's what we do with everything else, you see. We bring all these things up, make them into objects, So we have to do that with mind too, so we can see through mind even. There's no mind aside from the functions, there's no functions aside from the mind. You can't grasp mind, you can't grasp the functions, because as soon as you grab the functions, you get the mind, as soon as you grab the mind, you get nothing but the functions. And all the functions have nothing, you can't get any of them aside from the other ones.

[62:30]

But we bring up each one, even we bring up mind. Now we don't, the thing about the other ones is we don't say that each one of these functions can only come up with the other functions. Because they don't have to come up together. Because mind doesn't have to do all of its functions at once. But every function of mind always comes with mind, and mind always comes with every function of itself. So with the other ones, you wouldn't get into that problem. You wouldn't say, why do you have these other ones? Because they don't happen at the same time. So you might think, well, I could have one and not the other. Maybe it's necessary to have all these functions. But I don't need mind. You don't need mind. If you don't have mind, you won't be able to see through mind. And if you don't see through mind, you'll have mind. So you'll grasp it if you don't have it. The only way to be free of it is to have it. So that's why you have it, so you can see through it. Yes.

[63:54]

Yes. Anybody hear what he said? Anybody not hear what he said? You could say the last part or the whole thing. I'll say it, okay. He said, if you always have feelings with every state of consciousness, then would it be that anger, when you have positive feelings, anger would come up, when you have a positive feeling, Greed comes up when you have a negative feeling, anger comes up when you have a neutral feeling. Or the other.

[64:59]

But you have a positive feeling, you can get angry or not angry, right? You can get angry at a positive feeling, is that what you're saying? Right, that's the thing about feeling. It can only be those words, right? Is it equal to? It's not equal to it. It's not equal to it. But I say that. But even though I say that, you can prove me wrong by making them equal. You can't equate them, and most people do. That's called affliction.

[65:59]

Unafflicted energy, which is of the kind we call anger, is not channeled in that way. In other words, you can get angry at a positive feeling. Or you can get angry with no, not in relationship to a feeling at all. Which means positive, negative, or neutral, I can get angry. Whatever you get me, no matter what you get me, I can get angry. No matter how nice it is, I can do this thing. That's what you call just regular old pure unadulterated anger. Just pop. And that's the kind we are capable of doing. And if you study anger long enough, you'll learn how to do that kind of anger. Anger that just, you can do it. Get ready, get set, turn it on. And it just keeps happening as long as you want, again and again and again and again. Run whatever you want by. Nice, wonderful stuff, ugly stuff, terrible stuff. Whatever comes back, just keep it on.

[67:09]

And then, turn off. No anger. Until everybody's doing all this stuff happening. No anger. Turn back on. And you see it's got nothing to do with anything. No object, no subject. It's just a thing. What is it? It's a certain relationship. And if you want to, then you can go back and try it out the other way. You look at this relationship and take it and say, okay, now I've got this relationship. It's a red fire. black background, putting stuff in the black background. I'll put this stuff in here rather than that stuff. And you'll see how you can channel yourself into certain patterns. So keep putting the same one in there. Pretty soon after a while, you can't turn it on anymore. You can't turn it off. Why?

[68:12]

Because you just train yourself in a certain way to do it only with certain objects there. as though this thing made anger come up. You can train yourself that way. And after a while you can bring this up and say, that makes me angry. And then it's like... And it's like the outside world turns it on. Rather than you're turning it on. So you can train yourself into these particular modes like it's tied to this, it's tied to that, and it's tied to that. Anybody who'd make me feel this way gets it. Anything that does it, and then it's like the thing makes it turn on. So you're going into a boat, somebody's riding the boat, right? So boom, boop, but nobody's there. So that's a problem because people are supposed to ride the boats that I get angry at.

[69:15]

So I turn it on, but then, oops, ooh, God. So you catch yourself in your training, and you're sort of half-trained there. You haven't learned that one yet. But once again, like you say, it's different than what you thought it was. Yeah, I think the background is there, and it's quite clear.

[70:45]

The culmination of Hinayana, the background is very sharp, the foreground is very sharp. And you know the foreground, and you know the background. So the beginning of the Hinayana, first you pick the foreground, and later you learn the background. But you don't, and even you might even learn the relationship, but not too much. But Mahayana says there's nothing but the relationship. There's no reality if you can never grasp anything but the relationship. And you can't grasp the relationship. possible because the relationship is between grasping and grasp. That's what the relationship is. There's a grasping and grasp. That's the relationship. There's not another grasper you've got on top of that one. If you do have something which doesn't grasp it, which is called awareness, you can be aware of it even though you can't grasp it. You can know this, but you can't take it home. That's the Mahāyāna contribution. Himāyāna doesn't do that.

[71:46]

And that's the way the Buddha would know everything. Because there's no motive thought which doesn't have its influence on emptiness. And emptiness is no realm of thought that emptiness doesn't have an influence on. That's how the Buddha knows our motive thought. Maybe we should stand up for a minute. application of mindfulness of thought in this commentary, first they do the Abhidharma. But this Abhidharma is kind of painted by this so-called Shravakayana. kind of tangents are mixed up with Mahayana, we'll have trouble separating the two as it gets easier.

[72:48]

It will require a great deal of rigidity to maintain the Hinayana as we study this lecture, which I may not be able to pull off. So don't be surprised that as we use the Hinayana approach, we don't come up with a very solid Hinayana One reason why shouldn't worry is because the kinyon is not very solid. The theory doesn't exist. Kinyon only exists in the mind that wants to find it. So if you find it, good, because it's supposed to be doing the inspection. But if you don't find it, that's okay, because it's not really there. So the first thing it says is that the yogin or yogin asks himself the question, When one becomes attached to the body because of desire for pleasure, then who is the receiver of that pleasure? Now, who is the receiver of that pleasure? The question often comes up in Zen training.

[73:55]

So, already we've got a problem here, but we're getting on a question that already sounds like men. The response is somewhat, it's kind of a psychological response, psychological response, which I'm not going to read unless somebody wants to talk about it. But I would like to read, how can you say, from the bottom of that second paragraph, how can you say that a thought can feel pleasure Past thought has disappeared, and so it cannot steal. Future thought has not yet arisen, such it can have none. And the present thought, meaning a momentary fleeting event, also cannot null feeling of pleasure.

[74:58]

Why is there not possible to have momentary knowing? There can be momentary knowing, but not momentary This shows you how, once again, how the mindfulness of the feeling, you can't separate it from mindfulness of thought. When you first come into mindfulness of feeling, you can separate it from mindfulness of thought because your consideration is not subtle enough to look at mindfulness of thought. This is the way to feel it. But as you learn about mindfulness of feeling, then you go on to mindfulness of thought, and you find out you go back to the mindfulness of feeling. Then you realize that when you're doing mindfulness of feeling, you're also doing mindfulness of thought, but you didn't know it until you did mindfulness of thought. So now we're doing mindfulness of thought. We come back to feeling, and we see that some of the same things we were talking about last week will now apply, now will teach us about thought.

[76:05]

So there's two ways that the momentariness will play havoc with the illusory phenomenon of feeling, particularly if they're concerned with feeling of pleasure here. One is that a momentary phenomenon is cut off from past. Can't get it past anymore, there's none of that. The only way you can get the past is to imagine the past. So, we said this last time that feeling is the result of retribution in two senses. One, because feeling depends on consciousness. It depends on consciousness in the sense that feeling all of the arising of consciousness

[77:07]

The sensation always arises with consciousness, so it's dependent on consciousness. In a sense, it's a result of consciousness. And also, consciousness is a result of this. But in another sense, in order to come arrive at a feeling, you must compare it to something else. You can't compare it to a present feeling because there's only one feeling. You can't compare it to opacity because you don't have one anymore. So you compare it to your idea. This is Betana. You can compare this Betana with an idea of Betana. Now, if you could have an idea of Betana, what you say is the present. You can have ideas of Betana, why not have a present? Or go right ahead. Where does what come from? What does it come from?

[78:17]

Make it up. Make it up with your imaginary capacity. What? What? Do you want to make up the past one? Here's a concept, okay? Here's a concept. Here's a concept. It's kind of a saggy feeling, you know. It's kind of a slouchy feeling. You can tell it's old, you know. It's kind of saggy. Anyway, somehow you have a way to note that it's feeling old. It's a special kind of concept, it's a feeling of a dent in it. So it's a concept called an old feeling. You have several varieties of these. As a matter of fact, you have as many varieties as you want, depending on how many kind of past feelings you want to have, and which one you want to compare to.

[79:24]

We have quite an imagination, as you may know. We can make up one feeling, or two feelings. Two feelings is, we can have it, and we can make, we can, we dream up regular feelings, we dream up this data. We always dream up one. But in order to dream up one, we do that with a variety of other images or concepts of data. And those, although this is imagined by virtue of those, those are completely unlimited. Because you can not only imagine one past data, but you can also imagine an endless pattern of past one. So you don't just, you don't just, you aren't just limited to check, to go through your, to look for one other beta now to see what it's like and then to see if this one's like it or not.

[80:25]

You've got one thing you can do. But you can also imagine an ocean of beta now, of past beta now. And then based on that ocean and how it looks and whatever, you can think of what this one's going to be. You're totally in control of what it is and what names it has and everything else. And then depending on what you want to do with your life, then you decide what this one is. Yeah, well, like I say, you're all, I'm going to do this now, okay? You're all in a bunch of Vedans that I imagined in my past. And now I'm going to make up a new one, okay?

[81:26]

This one I'm going to make up, once again, as I make it up, it can't, it doesn't, it never, it doesn't come up before I look to see what you're like, you know? This one all comes up at the same time you come up. Because, in fact, all this comes up with everything else. Everything comes up at once. I can't dream up this before I dream up you. I dream up my feelings, okay? So I dream it up. I've got it. Now, what quality does it have? Once again, I can't tell quality before I look at you. Now, I can look and say, it's like him. And I can say he is positive, and then I say this is positive. I can also say he's negative, and then say this is negative. Another thing I can do is, life.

[82:34]

What I choose to be is inseparable from, and in a sense, completely determined by what I think all this is. So in one sense, it's like the feeling is determined by my imagination of this material. Once I imagine this, this has to be a certain way. I can't separate it. I imagine all this. But in one sense it's all determined and in another sense it's all our creation. Is that tension there? You make the whole thing and yet once you make the whole thing it's all determined. Right. But you make all the pieces. You cut each one. And certainly, it has to be this way.

[84:16]

But, in that sense, I think we talked about in the present, we created a whole realm of life, past lives and feelings, and these people in the universe, outside the universe, and stuff like that, and stuff like that, and stuff like that. And if I look at it closely, I can see that the feelings and whatnot that I have, I have because those are the ones I want. You know, if I decide I'm going to negative experience anger or whatever. If I look closely, it's because on some level or another, I enjoy doing that. But everybody doesn't do that. And I don't always do that. Sometimes I don't enjoy doing that. Sometimes I enjoy changing flowers instead of making a white cloud.

[85:20]

But I feel like I'm going to bind here, because we're creating all this. Why do we create one world instead of another? If there's no path that makes it, that binds us to create the world in such a way? Well, as you said, your example of a puzzle is good. You make this piece, and then because you make this piece, the next piece will have its little dent in it. But the other piece isn't determined yet, so you make this thing in here, but then the next one will be determined like that. And you go like this, and you make this, and you make this, and you make all these things, and you keep going and keep going pretty soon. And each one, in a sense, is partly determined by the other one. You didn't have total freedom when you made it, but you made the other one. But you didn't see when you made this one that it meant that this person next was going to have to have this little thing in it. But now, still you filled it in. You made this one, and because you made this little thing, you have to make this, but you made it. Then all over here you made another one that you didn't have to make, but now because you didn't have to make it that way, but you did, you made this other one that way.

[86:25]

So then you make the whole thing, okay? And you come back and there's a certain number of pieces left. Maybe just one. And that piece, you think, I don't want that piece. Because the last piece, there's no choice anymore. Even though it was made of a link of, I made this all by myself, but then this one sort of has some freedom, but not totally because of this. And pretty soon, finally comes down to a place where you feel like impelled to make this color thing. But what you said is like, you made this, and you made that, and you made this. Well, you were talking about But you do this instantly. Just like right now, I close my eyes, okay, watch. Everybody was quite well organized. I didn't have to go . Actually, there were many moments by which I construed this, actually.

[87:27]

This blink of the eye is many moments. But in each moment, there's a totality. Just like in a big moment like this one, in this half a second or whatever it is, I can put all this together by lots of little ones. And each one of the little ones also is all put together. I talk sequentially, but sequentially is included in a moment. I have the concept of this thing, of this sequential making of the public. In one moment I can think that. That's a concept. I don't need to build it up, but I can talk it out for a long time or I can take out a piece of paper and I can make the public over two weeks. It's all the same whether you say it's two weeks or one moment. There is no sequence. The language, however, talks that way. So when I talk that way, I'm speaking conventionally. We could start to try to talk, and we do sometimes talk non-conventionally. Some of the things I say here, you don't know that no one would understand, besides you, because you're in the dream.

[88:32]

Denial? I don't know why you just make a difference. In other words, the rule, exactly the rule that you make a difference, you have to do that with that autonomy to make a difference in a certain way. But, you know, you can't deny that to use yourself. And I see it even in. I don't know if you're talking. Well, maybe I'll talk about you know, What does this instantaneousness do to unconditionality? If things are instantaneous, then I mean if there aren't conditions, if there aren't conditions, then what causes them to be one way better than the other? Well, the Karma theory is to explain or make peace with people's sense of the conditioned world in a situation where Buddhism is saying it's instantaneous.

[89:36]

And the way that you make the karmic world in a world of instantaneousness, that is the karma. And karma is the thinking. But in an instantaneous world, we think about an instantaneous world in such a way that we can imagine that it's continuous so that it goes over time. In moment after moment, we create a world that has past, present and future, that has history and evolution. go for it. And the way we think about, in the moment, when we think in that way, that think in terms of past, present, and future, that way is how it explains, that way of thinking explains, or if you explain that way of thinking, that explains how you can think of all this stuff. That way it explains how you can think that you had to do this rather than another. But in fact, you don't have to do this rather than another. that you think that way and when you think that way then you have to do it that way but you're always you see you're creating that and once you see that you're doing that even though you may continue to do it it feels quite differently

[91:07]

The guy, the guy, the guy said, do you know, everybody know the story? What do you want to do, Zen's story? This is a story, this is a story about causation. Okay. One of the stories about the great Zen master who's giving a lecture and the guy comes up and says, say I talk to you afterwards. So afterwards, I said, I'm a fox. This is my 500th incarnation as a fox. And the reason why I had to be incarnated as a fox for 500 times is because, 501 incarnations ago, I was a head monk in an assembly under so-and-so, and some monk asked me about causation. He asked that question.

[92:11]

What was the question? Yes. And he said, no. And because he said no, he got 500 fox rebirths. So he said a little while ago, he said, denial of karma. I wouldn't deny karma. but also wouldn't affirm it. Most people affirm it, and they get 500 births as a whatever. If you deny it, you get 500 fox births if you happen to be in those circumstances, and you're a head monk. Well, if you affirm it, you get lots of trouble. If you deny it, you get lots of trouble. You know, not trouble so much. It's not exactly trouble, because you get trouble even if you're a great bodhisattva, you get trouble. But if you get bodhisattva, you sign up for the trouble and ask for it. If you say yes or no, you get to trouble mechanically because you cut the puzzle that way. If you call it this, no, and you cut it, yes.

[93:19]

If you think that way, if you think the denial way of karma, you get this pattern. If you think the affirmation of karma, you get that pattern. If you don't deny or affirm karma, you get, you say, I want to give me another one. I'll take whatever you got, I'll take it. And then you don't deny or affirm that, you get more. Just keep gobbling it up. It doesn't matter. But if you say no, you get that one, say yes. And then over there, too, if you keep doing it, then you get projections of reverse on top of reverse. So he said that. So he says, then he said, what would you say, Hyakujo? And he says, well, he says what he said, basically. He said, well, I say what he said. Maybe. Just don't deny it. Don't affirm it, don't deny it. Don't get caught in that bag. The guy says, Woo, goody. I'm free. Okay? The rebirths are over. So then Hacker Joe gets together, okay? Gets his monk together and says, okay, we're going to have a funeral ceremony.

[94:21]

So they go over to this place, you know, and find this dead, poke it through the bushes, and come look at the dead box. They say, okay, bury this dead box. As a monk. As a monk, do it as a funeral ceremony. Now this may sound to you like Yeah, well, if you think about it, this is one of the greatest Zen masters in history, taken from the greatest assemblies in history. He had people in his assemblies with people like Fu. That's nonsense. No, not nonsense. Wang Ho, like that. Ngong Donjo. These are the kind of people that are in Zen assemblies. Also the greatest Zen masters in history. He's dragging him out to do a funeral ceremony for a fox. And these people, they didn't fool around. To do a funeral ceremony for a monk or a fox violates precepts. And all these guys are standing around doing it. They think he's crazy.

[95:23]

How can he get by with it? The reason why we're still hearing about this story is not because of what he said. Because what he said you can find in sutras. Buddha said the same to him. from Shostas where they explain why you say it that way. But not only did he say it and liberate that guy, but then he went out and buried a fox. It shows that people who don't affirm or deny karma can go bury foxes and give them a monk funeral and get by with it. That's what you call it. That's what the not denying or affirming karma. You can do stuff like that. In other words, you're completely free You can get false demons in mind. You can cut people's fingers off. You can kick people in the chest. You can scream their ears off. You can do whatever you want. So they put those stories in there because these people got by with it. They did it, and yet we still know their name. They weren't kicked out of that song before.

[96:25]

Ordinarily, people would get in big trouble for that stuff. These guys now didn't get in trouble for it, but they got however many hundreds of great monks to come along and do it with them. without, as far as we know, a peep of resistance. We don't hear one thing about one guy saying, now wait a minute, did you know that this is, they didn't say anything about that in the story. Maybe they did argue about it, maybe he squelched him. We don't know. That's not the story. The story is they just went and did it. So that's the difference. And the difference is that he knows the way the mind works. He doesn't have to take a position on either side of it. Living in the present moment, present understanding of how he creates the universe with his consciousness, moment after moment. But all this karma theory, the great chunk of Buddhism is to make peace with people with this very uncomfortable teaching of total impermanence, absolute impermanence.

[97:37]

where the past does not crawl over into the future at all. It's completely cut off. You can't get at it at all. If you can get at it at all, in the slightest bit, then you don't get away from it at all. And that's what this next section is about. So the first reason why feeling, you can't get at it because of momentariness, is because of this kind of thinking. Namely, that it's just in the present moment comparing it to ideas of past. And momentariness, if you really knew momentariness, you'd realize it's just ideas of past. And a feeling is just a concoction. You can't arrive at a pleasurable feeling because you don't have a past to refer to. There's no past. Therefore, you could not come up with a present positive feeling. You can come up with a positive feeling, but this positive feeling is just totally a concoction. It's not really a positive feeling.

[98:38]

It's just something... which you say is positive. How do you know it's positive? Because he's positive or she's positive or they're all positive. Therefore, this is positive. But what are those? Are they positive feelings? No, they're just ideas. What's this? It's not an idea exactly. It's a way I relate to my experience. But the quality it has, the positive quality it has, I arrive at by total magic, total concoction. I cannot determine it actually. I can't get at it. Because these are not, because how do I get at these? The more you think about it, the more you realize you couldn't really establish a positive feeling. A positive feeling is just erroneous thinking. Even feelings, but definitely the quality. You just sort of, basically, it's not just erroneous thinking, it's a lazy thinking. It just means you haven't thought about it enough. You haven't really looked at your feeling long enough to realize that you couldn't really arrive at a positive feeling, except that you want to, therefore you can.

[99:44]

But that's where the positive feeling comes from. It comes from your desire, from your conception, from your view, from your idea of pleasure. And if you have an idea of pleasure and you want to have pleasure, you can pin it on feelings and you have various ways of proving that it's right. That's one way that momentarians will show you that you can't have The other way is to look at the actual phenomena of momentariness, like the distinction here does. To look at what momentariness really means. Namely, is this momentary reason really momentariness, or does momentariness mean that it's kind of a little bit more than momentariness? If it's really momentariness, you cannot arrive, you can't get a hold of some pleasure in momentariness. Because it doesn't last. How could you How could you have a pleasurable feeling if it doesn't have any duration?

[100:53]

Well, yes? I don't know the question, how do you, if I move on to the treatment, is it how do you think you have a choice for the human state situation that you're going to form, or at least like down the last post, The first thing to do to maintain your sense of choice or to maintain your freedom is to not maintain it. Don't worry about maintaining it. Forget it. Did you do it yet? Don't worry about being free. Okay, now that you're not worried about it, you're not trying to maintain it, what's your question that you have? See if you can ask a question from there. If you ask a question from trying to maintain it and trying to keep it going, protect it, the question, you can't get a good answer. Try to ask a question about how to maintain it without really not wanting to maintain it.

[101:55]

That's the mind that can do it. If you ask me from there, almost anything I say will help you. Everything will be an example. It will be useful. But if you're really trying to maintain it, you're coming from the wrong point of view. There's nothing I can say to help you other than what I just said. I mean, there's something like that. Try to get you back to ask it from where you were. And it felt good to be there. Now go back there. But then don't maintain that. Then go back there again. Go back again and again to the mind that knows the source of all this. Go back to the puzzle puzzle. Don't go to, don't try to maintain it. Because then you'll hold on to it and you won't go back again. You'll sort of see, now what did I just do, rather than what am I doing? Try it. See if you can do it from another place. Is there another one? Yeah?

[102:59]

Yeah, it means memory. Excuse me, it means memory, but also it can be to remember. It's not memory like categories of consciousness, like that part of your set of concepts that you label past. It's not that kind of memory. It's to remind. It's to stay with. floating on top of the spring. And it's always there. And yet it's different whether you celebrate it or not. So usually what we call mindfulness practices is to celebrate that function of mind which can remember itself all the time.

[103:59]

And you can remember to remember it as it just happens. And that always happens. Or you can try to remember it in a particular way. Or to remember certain varieties of it. For example, normal human beings will, as they conduct their life, will quite frequently have senses of their body. Almost nobody lives for, in daily life, almost no one goes for more than, I don't know how long, a second? two seconds, five minutes. Anyway, not very long before you sense your body. And not very long before you sense a color. When you sense your body or sense your color at that moment, there is mindfulness of that, always. In other words, the mind is always knowing and also being aware of and remembering that it's doing what it's doing.

[105:01]

But you can, as an exercise, as an exercise, you can say, I'm going to do a mindfulness practice. And as a beginner, you choose to be mindful of a certain section of the kind of things that normally happen to you. I don't know if this is clear. Think about the names of these things, okay? Okay, now, I didn't know what I wanted to do. Okay, so what happens is that something happens, okay?

[106:07]

And when that happens, That's a moment, okay? And it has a full complement of mental functions. And one of them is what we call mindfulness. And this object of conscious, this conscious has an object. Here's another moment of conscious, this conscious has an object. Here's another moment of conscious that has an object. And so on. Each moment of conscious has an object. And there is mindfulness of this object. Some things are quite, some objects are quite common, like your body. They're quite common objects. In other words, not your body, but the feel or the sense of touch. They're quite a common object, okay? They follow me?

[107:12]

So if you, so let's say in this sequence here, one of these was, okay, But actually, this is the second. But actually, there's many more pieces of data we can get in the second. And in this second, you get several, probably. Several of these will be consciousnesses whose object is the field of touch. Let's say a hundred pieces of touch in a second. A hundred times consciousness arises when an object is the field of touch. So in a second, you get a hundred pieces of data on body touch. So if you choose to be aware of your body,

[108:16]

and mindful of your body, what you're doing in that case is you're saying that among all these mindfulnesses that come up in this second, among all those mindfulnesses that come up in that second, thousands of them, those few hundreds that are mindfulness of the body, those you're gonna have to really be committed to knowing. Actually, each one of those, all of them, you're aware of. And all of them are mindful of. Mindfulness is functioning in every million or whatever number of moments there are in that second. Mindfulness is functioning in all of them. But as a beginner, you say, I'm going to zero in on the physical, okay? And maybe you do. Maybe you pick up a good section of it. So in that section, you have some, okay, one Mississippi, okay? One Mississippi, one Mississippi. You all had lots of experiences with your body that I could walk around with.

[109:24]

And talk and move my jaw and all. I had a lot of physical experiences. Plus I thought it was a whole bunch of things. I even saw, you even heard a car going by and snout going and so on. But I didn't recreate my whole body. You know, I didn't recreate my lower back and so the hair on the back of my leg. There was a lot more I needed to do. I could have a lot more experiences than I could do in a second. Actually, if you really try to recover your whole body, it takes more than a second. It takes millions of moments to really play your whole body, and it's not meant here, or on top of the surface of the body, without moving. But anyway, what mindfulness practices is, is it's like a kind of a selection of the mindfulnesses which are automatically occurring with every state of consciousness.

[110:28]

But actually, finally the mindfulness is fully developed. You start with the body, you use the eyes, you know, you use the ears, you come, you use the mind. Pretty soon you start to get a sense of the density and omnipresence of mindfulness. And pretty soon you start to, not pretty soon, but anyway, some days you have a sense that it never stops. And then you verify a function of the mind, which is very important, very fast. Because this is one of the things that characterizes, particularly with Buddha, is that they're able to know, be aware of their mindfulness in every moment, and they never stop. And you can arrive at that simply by work of doing a selection, of doing selections of the different kinds of mindfulness. And pretty soon you start to see that you can do more than one at once.

[111:31]

Not more than one. Only one habit at a time. Only one kind of mindfulness happens in a given moment. But you can be committed to noticing mindfulness of different kinds in a given period of time, in a given hour or whatever. This is what we call Shikantaza. Shikantaza is not any longer just watching your breath or just meditating on some koan. You have totally dense mindfulness to fully develop Shikantaza. Shikantaza then has that characteristic that the Buddha has, completely uninterrupted mindfulness or memory. So what is it? It's remembering remembering to celebrate the fact that the mind is always mindful, which is what the mind is already doing anyway. But it's not memory like looking at the past, category of the past and something, that's memory. However, that kind of memory could be the object of your mindfulness.

[112:37]

And for example, if you want to do recollections of former births, And that's exactly what you should do, is you should go to your memory bank and just go in there and just say, that's... Among these are the memory bank, comes up there too. You can say, I'm a zero in that section of my thinking. And just take you, keep working away at it, and you get to know it. Pretty soon you find that you'll find out the way you think you were created. You'll find out the way you think you arose. And the way you think you arose is the way you arose. Nobody else made you have the series of rebirths that you've had. You have the ones that you think you have. People come up and tell you what they are, but you think of the person also who's telling you that. And you don't have to believe them. But if you do, that's your business too.

[113:44]

Anyway, there are several interesting points in this section which, if you want to, we can discuss next time. Otherwise, I would suggest that we go on to study the mindfulness applied to dharmas, which actually we've started to study. You'll find, as you can see, that we've already started to study them very much because we've been talking about the dharmas tonight and how they work with each other. So the mindfulness of dharma is just a subtle, a sophistication, a subtle development on mindfulness of thought and mindfulness of feelings and mindfulness of thought. We've started to get into that. Any questions? Yes? I said earlier about...

[114:54]

The Hatha debate is basically saying that the result of shmirti-yurta-stana based on the dharmas is that none of the dharmas, all dharmas, are marked by emptiness. And these mindfulness practices are, first of all, to tune into the The foreground of these things. Turning the foreground of the body, realizes doesn't exist. Turning the foreground of feelings, I go over. Foreground of consciousness, now the foreground of all the dharmas. To see the background, and then to see how the foreground and background are acceptable, and then finally you see what marked by conditionality, by relationship, by ungraspability, by unattainability, and all those other things. Any other points before we start?

[116:29]

Yes. Pardon? Well, The heat that I was speaking of, I don't know if it actually raises your body temperature. It's more of a neural heat. It's more like a neural or psychic combustion. I don't know if actually your head gets hotter or anything. I've never measured my temperature at the time. Neural or psychic combustion. But I don't know if actually your head gets hot or anything. I never measured my temperature at the time. But it's like fire because it flashes. It goes very fast. But I really don't know if it's temperature. I think if you keep wailing away at it, it'll probably start to get hot. Five or ten minutes of it.

[117:30]

Even then, I'm not sure that you don't necessarily get warm. However, you do get sick from it. Anger is a great thing to study. Since we do it, we should study it. But it isn't good for your health. It does lead to various forms of mental and physical burnout. But even so, I think it's good to... It's good to study it intensely sometimes. That's one of the things good about monasteries. People think monasteries are often places where people go to be calm and so on and so forth, which is true. But in our senses, a monastery is a place where you can really get into your emotions without any distraction. Day to life, you know, you can't be angry for six months straight.

[118:37]

People say, come on, come on, knock it off. Take a break. Say, okay. Then they go away and you start again, but in a monastery you don't have to take any breaks. Nobody says, what's the matter? The situation is structured in such a way that it doesn't bother people because they don't talk to you or whatever. so you can really get into it. The life of a monk, the monk practice is primarily directed for emotional penetration. Contrary to popular belief. Whereas lay life is not so good for all the people thinking of it. come out a monster and then you get involved in the world, and that's so you can get into emotions. That's not the point.

[119:39]

You do get more into the emotions, it seems, but you should have already penetrated them before you start doing these things. So now it's more like you've driven to the source of the emotions, and now it's like seeing how you can put it out there without being caught. You can't study them and get as much into them because you're actually on show. Anything else? Once again, I'd like to say that If I'm going too slowly on this, please let me know. I can jump onto something else. But there are various things I think I feel you becoming better at doing.

[120:50]

And it seems like staying in this rather confined space, you're getting better than jumping someplace else before you've fairly well mastered what they were. I'm so sorry to stay here a little bit longer. You're really good at this exercise. Which I think, by the nature of the conversation, you're getting better at that. I mean, we're all there. Getting better as a group, too. I'd like to just not carry out of here, but at the same time, we can leave here if you'd like, or please let me know. spending too much time on these four practices.

[121:36]

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