MMK 3: Cutting Through Categories

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After the last talk I had the feeling that I had kind of been rushing through the chapters one after the other, skating across them and I wonder if we’ll reach the end even of the summary of the chapters. I realise that to give you a whole overview of the MMK in a weekend is impossible; so I’m not going to try. We may only just get part of the way through it, but we can continue at other retreats or whenever you like. It’s a huge work and it is very difficult to explain.

As you have seen from my summaries so far, Nagarjuna is trying to cut through the category-based analysis of the Abhidharmas and I have a book here which is a summary of the Abhidharmas - which I know Ralph has had a look at; I don’t know whether anybody else has – but I also printed out an extract from the Abhidharmas, the section on ‘matter’ so that you can see what these characteristic categories of reality sound like.

I’ll just read some of it to you. This shows you what Nagarjuna is cutting through (and then we’ll have to find what he is cutting through to):

“The Abhidharma enumerates twenty-eight types of material phenomena which are briefly comprised of two general categories. The four great essentials are the primary material elements: earth, water, fire and air. These are the fundamental constituents of matter which are inseparable and which in their various combinations enter into the composition of all material substances from the most minute particle to the most massive mountain. The great essentials are called elements because they bear their own intrinsic natures; derived material phenomena are material phenomena derived from or dependent upon the four great essentials. These are twenty-four in number. The great essentials may be compared to the earth; the derivative phenomena to trees and shrubs that grow independent on the earth. All these twenty-eight material types of phenomena are distributed into eleven general classes. Seven of these are called concrete produced matter, since they possessed intrinsic natures and are thus suitable for contemplation and comprehension by insight.”

So “contemplation and comprehension of matter by insight” – “The other four classes are called non-concretely produced matter”, then we have “the concretely produced matter, the earth element, the water element, the fire element, the air element; sensitive material phenomena, other material phenomena; these are the five sense fields which serve as objective support for the corresponding type of sense consciousness. It should be noted that the tangible object is constituted by three great essentials”, and so on.

“Material phenomena of the heart: The heart base has the characteristic of being the support for the mind element and the mind consciousness element. Its function is to uphold them. The life faculty is the material counterpart of the mental life faculty, one of the seven universal tetasikas and edible food has the characteristic of nutritive essence; its function is to sustain the physical body. Non-concretely produced matter: the types of matter in groups 8 to 11 are designated non-concretely produced because they do not arise directly from the four main causes of matter but exist as modalities or attributes of concretely produced matter. Thus they are not included among the ultimate realities.”

So it’s a very complicated and sophisticated analysis of matter.

Question: It sounds a bit like a scientific textbook, doesn’t it?

Mike: Yes, but we can see from hundreds of years later that it is not actually very accurate now. Even primary school children could give you a more accurate description of what matter is composed of than the categories here because their investigation of matter was often based on meditative insight. You can read in the early sutras about some types of meditation. They are described as having eight or nine levels and at the eighth level and sometimes at the ninth level during meditation you’re supposed to be able to apprehend or see or in some way intuit the fundamental building blocks of matter. What a modern physicist would give to be able to do that…

Participant: …modern science has these tools. So there is a difference because we have tools and they are very sophisticated, but nonetheless they are only tools and the smaller the particle the larger the tools you have to use.

Mike: That’s interesting.

Participant: [inaudible]…but people who are really advanced in meditation can see somehow into matter. If you think that an atom is a very small thing but it is really emptiness … So, really, matter is full of emptiness. So, in this sense, I think people are really able not somehow to intuit but to be [inaudible] …

Mike: Do you think so? Right, and you are a physicist?

Participant: I am a physicist.

Mike: Have you met one of these people?

Participant: Well, no; but there must be…

Mike: Have you ever met a Zen master who can do that?

Participant: Well, I don’t think… they would not discuss it with you because it is not important for them…

Mike: So, you have never met somebody who can actually do it. Ok.

Participant: I have never met anybody who actually claims he can do it. I only know it from … but I can form a logical explanation how it could be.

Mike: Aha.

Participant: Yet scientists often have a kind of intuitive… They make leaps in understanding; maybe they don’t understand why. But they have to back it up with… I assume – I don’t know – that often they are wrong because their tests don’t support their idea but sometimes they are right and where that comes from I don’t know. But…

Participant: Maybe that comes from thinking a lot more, meditating in a way …

Participant: …if you spend a long time doing something, you just get…

Mike: You get a feeling for something.

Participant: If you write poems or you do physics, there is a kind of mystery to the doing of it.

Mike: Or if you a cabinet maker, you get …

Participant: You think ‘Oh, that wasn’t a good idea; it’s crap. I should have done it differently, I should have…

Mike: Yes, we have our intuition, yes. But in these early Abhidharmas they didn’t have tools and in place of tools they developed their theories based on meditative insight and this is where all the categories come from.

Question: Can I ask you a question about that? When they say ‘meditative insight’ they mean ‘thinking’, ‘a reflection about something’ or do they mean ‘sitting down’…?

Mike: What I think they mean is ‘imagining’, they mean ‘imagination’, yes.

Question: Speculation?

Mike: Yes, because I don’t believe and I have no basis other than my own experience that you can see the basic fundamentals of matter by sitting and looking into your mental area. I can’t believe that that is possible. But they did do that.

Question: They did speculation and drawing conclusions from what they experienced?

Mike: Yes, because they had no tools; they did what they could. And so they constructed a kind of pseudo-science and it’s very sophisticated for its time. However, it is just this that Nagarjuna wants to cut through.

So why does he want to cut through such a sophisticated description of reality? His whole work is really cutting through all this causal-based, category-based analysis of reality. And we can find the answer in Zazen because one of the fundamental principles of Buddhist teaching is that reality is one. We don’t know what reality is, but we know that it’s one – which means there is only one reality and it’s not in parts. And when we sit in Zazen and once we settle down a bit – my language is misleading – but we notice that we are sitting in something that is not separate because we are not separating it. If we stop separating the world into categories, we find that there aren’t any categories - I know, it sounds a very stupid thing to say.

The centre of Buddhism according to Nagarjuna and Dogen is not the state where we separate the world into categories; we know now that there is a pursuit that has at its centre separating the world into categories and we call it science. It is very powerful and of great benefit to human beings. However, the centre of Buddhism is not to divide the world into categories but to stop dividing the world into categories or stop dividing what’s in front of us into categories. If we do that it’s as if all these categories are being pulled out on bits of elastic and when we stop pulling them out, they all zip back into the middle again and we have something in the middle which is undivided.

So, when we sit in Zazen, we don’t do something to make ourselves whole, we stop doing everything, in order to make ourselves whole. It is this stopping of categorisation, stopping pulling ourselves apart that is the most fundamental activity of civilised human beings. We become whole, naturally: Our elastic pulls us back!

That’s the ultimate experience that both Dogen and Nagarjuna try to put into words, that wholeness or undivided something. Although human civilisation has separated the world into abstract knowledge, intelligence and so on and physical matter and so on, Buddhism says that the world exists undivided and in that undivided world intelligence is there, and matter is there, and spirit is there and everything is there: it is unseparated. In letting ourselves become whole we become – whole – I can’t find another word. And that’s why Nagarjuna is so focussed on cutting through what seems to be a very sophisticated and in many respects very excellent way of trying to categorise and understand reality.

The Abhidarmas are really very complex and divide reality into very minute categories. Eighteen kinds of matter born of karma; there are five sensitive organs; there are for great essentials and it goes on. If anybody wants to read it, this is just from the Internet.

Participant: I suppose there are still schools of Buddhism subscribe to this stuff…

Mike: I suppose so, yes. But I’d like to make it clear that the only two Buddhist masters of the past that I have studied are Nagarjuna and Dogen. They don’t deny the value of categorisation, but they do point to something which is other than thinking or categorisation. That’s the issue here because that something other than thinking or categorisation doesn’t exclude intelligence, if you like. The whole living thing that’s not thinking separately from being is still intelligent, whereas human beings have developed intelligence as something separate from being. So if you study a lot and have a lot of knowledge, people will say you are very intelligent. And if you don’t go to school and don’t learn anything, people say you are not intelligent. But Dogen says Buddhism is beyond ‘stupid’ and ‘intelligent’. And what he means by that is not ‘if you are stupid, it’s ok’, ‘if you are intelligent, it’s ok’ but when you let go of categories and become a whole person, your intelligence is there in your whole life.

Participant: [inaudible]…From what I remember of reading Nagarjuna, is that he kind of gets you to a situation where you can’t say anything. So his analysis about movements kind of reduces you to silence.

Mike: Yes, I suppose that might have been his purpose…

Participant: He’s doing what might have made people characterise him as nihilistic.

Mike: He doesn’t seem to put anything forward; that’s right. He seems to say ‘No, not that, no, not that,’ but he doesn’t seem to put anything forward. But what he is putting forward is in front of us. What he is putting forward is ‘not putting forward’ and it’s very valuable because it is already here without being put forward.

Participant: So Dogen is coming from a slightly… Nagarjuna is criticising this tremendous scholastic categorisation and he’s come to his position. Dogen takes the same position but his background is criticising the excesses of the Rinzai people who were trying to…[inaudible] Dogen and Nagarjuna seem to come to the same position but their language is different.

Mike: Yes, the way they write is different but they both are saying ‘No, not that’ and Dogen is doing exactly the same thing in the sense that Nagarjuna is doing. He takes commonly held Buddhist concepts of his time like ‘Buddha nature’ and he says that it’s not like what people say it is.

Participant: When you talk about being whole, you say that it is the state we are in before we start discriminating and separating; it’s not something that we aim to be; it’s just something that happens.

Mike: No, if we aim to be whole, we can never be whole. But if we stop trying to be whole, we are whole. So we become whole when we act. Because when we act, we lose the ability to split ourselves and reflect on what we are doing. In other words, we can’t think at the same time as act, not if we do something properly. Of course, you can do things and think at the same time and people in my bank do it sometimes and count out the money at the same time. I always count it very carefully again afterwards. (Laughter)

Multi-tasking is a very attractive thing, but what Buddhism says is something more simple: When we act fully, there is no space or time in which we can think about what we are doing at the time we are doing it. So we become whole. Everybody becomes whole millions of times every day and without that ability we can’t live. If you imprison somebody in a situation where they can’t act, they become very stressed and you can see this in situations like the one that hostages experience: Terry Waite and Brian McCarthy, remember those two guys? If we are denied the chance of becoming whole, we can’t live as human beings.

However, we don’t notice those opportunities when we are becoming whole and we don’t talk about them and we don’t value them even. What we value in modern society are the other parts, thinking and planning. Buddhism suggests that we give value to the moments of acting.

Question: Do you think Buddhism has influenced Japanese society and their way of living? Because you were saying for example that Yoko found it very strange that people would talk and count the money at the same time.

Mike: Yes, very deeply, I find it’s so deep in Japanese society that people don’t even know that it’s there, but in their way of being and in their way of acting, yes. They’re used to just doing something and not trying to do something else at the same time and they don’t worry about whether they are thinking about what they are doing, they just do it. So sometimes that appears to be stupid.

Question: Is it not the case that there is a space for thinking within being whole, in the way that acting is a vessel?

Mike: It’s a difficult area because we are on the borders of what we can describe. There is not a space for thinking but there is a space for intelligence if you like. So just that we are not thinking in an abstract way, doesn’t mean our actions are non-intelligent. It’s a very difficult area to talk about and one ancient master said that there is a state called ‘different from thinking’. There is a famous koan story; I think it’s Master Nangaku. A monk says to him when he is sitting in the Zazen posture, ‘What are you thinking about in that still, still state?’ And the master says, ‘I am thinking about not thinking’ which has a kind of humorous angle to it. And the monk says to him, ‘How do you think about not thinking?’ The master says, ‘It’s different from thinking’. By ‘different from thinking’ he is suggesting that what he is doing does contain some intelligent behaviour but it’s not thinking. We don’t have a word for it. He says ‘hishiryo’ or ‘different from thinking’.

Participant: It’s quite difficult not to think.

Mike: Yes, though it’s not denying thinking.

Participant: When you sit there thinking ‘I mustn’t’.

Mike: Yes, we go through different phases in Zazen. First of all, we sit down and we are thinking or fragmented thoughts come and go and then we try and stop. And when you try and stop, if you consciously try and stop, you’re kind of like a zombie and you can sit like a zombie like that. But after we do that for a bit, we enter a state where we are not like a zombie denying our thinking, we are not consciously thinking, there is another state, which doesn’t exclude some kind of cerebral activity, but it’s not thinking as we normally talk about it.

Question: And we get there through practice?

Mike: Yes, you do.

Question: If we keep practicing?

Mike: No, you get there every time you practice Zazen. If we have had a very busy week or if we have been thinking a lot, our Zazen is full of thoughts for quite a long time. But they will eventually die away if we keep at it.

Participant: Because of the inherent nature that we have – in other words, it’s not a case of having a lot of knowledge and then putting it into practice. It’s a case of practicing a physical action which actually includes our inherent nature, our nervous system the way it is, our bodies the way they are, etc. There is very little you actually have to do except …

Mike: …Stop doing.

Participant: But just get the posture; the posture itself creates this circumstance where our inherent nature is allowed to be the way it really is.

Mike: Yes, we have to keep creating models of Zazen because we are talking about reality and none of the models hit the target. I often say, ‘We sit in a balanced posture, not forward, not backward, not to one side or the other’ and I say ‘Thinking pulls us to one side and perception, that’s our senses, pulls us to the other side. Somewhere in the middle is balance.’ But that is a model; it’s not really like that. But then, it is something like that.

Question: Our default condition?

Mike: Yes, it’s being natural. It’s what we do; it’s what we are when we stop trying to be something else. But to stop trying to be something else is incredibly difficult.

Participant: I have been downloading some talks from the San Francisco Zen Centre site talking about this subject and the self and all those sort of things, how you drop the self, etc; and he said that. He said, ‘This is our default condition’ and when we start ‘grasping’ at things that’s when our self arises. That’s when we become this thing that [inaudible]…in fact if we didn’t do that, if we just stayed in this default state, that’s our natural condition. It’s only when we start grasping at things and thinking about things that what we consider our self comes up.

Mike: Yes, we can say in a more direct fashion, as Dogen does, ‘Thinking is self’. So it’s not ‘I think and then my self appears’, which suggests some kind of process. It’s ‘Thinking is self’. So ‘no thought’ is ‘no self’. We sometimes have a self and sometimes we have no self. Buddhists who say there is no self have only got half the story because self comes and goes. John Hart plays sax and he was saying the other day that when he plays a solo with his group, he disappears. And people say, ‘Oh, that is a kind of subjective feeling’, but for John it disappears, there is no self. This does not mean there is no John. People see him on the stage. In other words, to say there is no self is ridiculous; but to say there is no self and there is self, both - the paradox - is true.

Question: Can we talk about a ‘nominal’ self and an ‘apparent’ self…?

Mike: Well, these are all the categories that were invented through the ages because Brahmanism also has a concept of anatman. That came into Buddhism and was misunderstood. So there is a whole school of Buddhism that denied the existence of self. But, you know, who is this, if it is not me? We have to accept a simple interpretation of our life even though there may be a philosophical interpretation. We have to accept more than one view. Otherwise we can’t make sense of things. If you go to work and say, ‘I am a Buddhist, so I’m not here’ (Laughter) or ‘Reality is the present moment – so, don’t tell me to do anything tomorrow’.

These are truths, but they are not true. They are true and they’re not true. So without conflicting paradoxical views we can’t understand our lives.

Question: But in terms of Nagarjuna’s writing: when he talks about the thing that moves and then does something and that that actually isn’t originated by the thing that moves in the first place, is that to do with what you have just been describing, in the sense that we enter into this different state during the course of an action which really does leave behind this thing that we were two seconds ago? In a sense we vanish from that thing because the action itself doesn’t involve what that thing was two seconds ago…

Mike: Yes, it’s all wrapped up in there. It’s almost impossible to put it into words, isn’t it?

Question: Yes, but is that what he is getting at?

Mike: He is not getting at anything specific, but what you say is a part of what he is getting at. What he is saying is that what you see as me moving is one way of looking at it. This is where Stephen Batchelor’s rather poetic rendering of some of the MMK is very nice. If anybody is really interested in what Nagarjuna says, it’s worth reading Stephen’s book although he has a different take on things. I have never met Stephen Batchelor but he has a kind of theme to his writings and thinking which is ‘What is this?’, ‘Who am I?’ and he has used that theme in here. Nagarjuna doesn’t write in a questioning way, but Stephen Batchelor has put it into a questioning way and sometimes that’s very effective.

“Walking” he calls that chapter:

Is walking not the motion between one step and the next?
What moves between them?
Could I not move as I walk?
If I move when I walk there would be two motions,
One moving me and one my feet,
Two of us strolling by …

So some of what he writes captures something very, very well. Nagarjuna doesn’t write like that, but it still captures something about the chapter. So if you are interested, it’s worth reading that. I don’t think it’s worth reading most of the others.

Participant: But it ties in with what you were talking about, all our invisible little actions which we overlook in the name of what we regard as more important. We can overlook those things but they are actually more valuable than sometimes we give them credit for.

Mike: Yes, in fact they maintain our life. Our actions maintain our life but we don’t realise it. When you were saying, Rory, about the explanation from the San Francisco Zen Centre, if we hear an explanation about our ‘default’ state, it’s easy to think: “Ah, I want to get that; I don’t have that, so I want to get that ‘default’ state”. But that’s not it. We all have it; it comes and goes. It maintains our life. Everybody, every living thing has it. But we human beings have developed our intellectual area so much that we miss these little important actions which we are doing all the time, all the time.

Question: Do we recognise it, are we going to sit there and wonder and then say ‘Ah, that’s it!’

Mike: Answer me; I don’t know. Are you ever going to?

Participant: Well, you say, we do it every time we sit in Zazen; we reach that state.

Mike: John recognises it clearly because he actually remembers that when he plays the sax and plays a solo, everything is gone but everything is there.

Participant: [inaudible]

Mike: Interesting. This is one of the places that Dogen writes about Nagarjuna in the chapter called ‘Bussho’ (‘Buddha nature’). He quotes the story about Nagarjuna giving a talk and during the talk the audience and Nagarjuna become one. Historically that has been described, I suppose by people who were there and then wrote down that Nagarjuna ‘appeared as a full moon’. There are several hundred years between Nagarjuna and Dogen and in Dogen’s time there was this story that Nagarjuna gave a talk about the Buddhist dharma and he changed into a full moon. There were pictures of a seat with a full moon and Dogen asked the head monk of the temple ‘What’s that full moon on the seat?’ And the head monk answered ‘It’s Nagarjuna who changed into a full moon.’ But what that story is about is exactly what you say, Barbara. There are moments when you are giving a talk or if you are a teacher and you are teaching a class, where something becomes undivided and you know it.

Participant: You don’t know it, surely, until afterwards; if it’s undivided, then it’s in the nature of it …

Mike: You know it at the time but you know it as an experience.

Participant: Yes, you experience it. You don’t reflect on it.

Mike: No, you don’t reflect on it. It’s not necessary to reflect on it.

Participant: What’s more curious, is that apparent dominion that we think our thoughts have over our lives….it’s just odd that people kind of think their thoughts are them.

Mike: Yes, but it’s very, very powerful; usually, when I say that Buddhism says you can act, just act, you don’t need to think about your actions, people find that very, very strange because our whole civilisation is based on planning, in other words, ordering our reality in our mind in an abstract way and then organising our body to follow that abstract picture. That what’s happens when we hear about something like enlightenment, you feel ‘Oh, enlightenment – I want to get that’ and then you try and get it; but you can’t.

Participant: It’s like somebody who wakes up during the night and then goes back to sleep and thinks he’s never slept…It’s just mad.

Mike: That’s nice.

Participant: Like so many people enjoy playing sports. They enjoy it and they know it is beyond thinking. I think that’s a kind of a contradictory to the common philosophy of our modern civilisation.

Mike: We can say that sport has done far more for modern societies than many religions have because it has allowed people to find their natural state. However, sport has developed into lots of other things besides now. We are in danger of practising sport and throwing away what we get from it. I noticed this in my health club where I used to go for a work-out every week and there were always people there who were on the treadmill or something and they would be chatting away. That’s something else and to me that is throwing away the nice state you can get from doing sport. They’re just throwing their benefit away. Other people who are doing work-outs for the sake of making themselves stronger or bigger or faster or something also do this in a way; if you are extreme about it, you are throwing away the benefit of sport. You can see it in the Olympics which have got bigger and grander and bigger and grander and bigger and grander – the Chinese Olympics were just something else, weren’t they? I was glad to hear that the London Olympics were going to move away from that because sport is in danger of losing the benefit of sport.

Participant: [inaudible]

Mike: No, not special moments; Dogen says this very strongly in the Shobogenzo that ‘realisation’ means just ‘making yourself real’. (We use the English word ‘realisation’ for the Japanese ‘satori’. This is because ‘satori’ is often translated as ‘enlightenment’ which is really a kind of carrot dangled way in front in the distance)

Participant: Be ordinary…

Mike: Be ordinary, yes. Realisation is a normal state which we don’t need to know about. In modern western civilisation we want to be right, we want to be good; not only do we want to be right and to be good; we want to know that we are right and good while we are doing it and be acknowledged, yes.

But none of these are the aims of Buddhism.

Question: Could you say something about constructive thought in the sense that when I am faced with a problem, I often have to think about that problem, I can’t just act. Generally, it’s when I have got quite a few problems and sometimes I make space to sit down and write them down and make decisions. So I am actually thinking, using my imagination to think ‘Now, what’s the consequence of this?’ and then make a decision to follow things through. Now where do you put that in action?

Mike: We can’t make one picture because what you are talking about is a mode of living which Nagarjuna calls samsara or ‘daily life’. Samsara means ‘going round’ – so in our daily life, our normal life in society we function using shared concepts, like ‘pin number’. You can’t pick up a ‘pin number’ but we all know what a pin number is. Or a ‘deadline’, everybody knows what a ‘deadline’ is, but where is it?

We have a kind of level of living where we live according to human values which we have created and shared in human society and we can’t deny them because you can’t function unless you live at that level. But that level is a different level to the level that Buddhist philosophy is trying to grasp and Nagarjuna says that there are two levels or two truths: the truth of the ordinary world and the ultimate truth. But then he proceeds to say that they are exactly the same because it is not that there are two things, one underneath the other or one above the other, but there are two ways of talking about or describing reality. So, you sit down and you think about a problem and you work it out, and I do too, and then we put it into action. That is what we do, it’s true; and we can’t function without it. I plan what I am going to talk about and then I talk about it. But at a fundamental level that is not actually what happens. The gap between our thinking and planning and our actually acting is huge, but we don’t notice it. We feel, we are taught to feel, we learn and believe that our thoughts flow into action, but they don’t. We stop thinking at one point and we start acting at another point. At that point …

Question: Doesn’t the planning have an effect on what happens when it happens?

Mike: Yes, it does; but I have not seen anybody who can explain how that effect from thinking comes into action. We somehow believe that from thinking automatically we act, don’t we?

Participant: [inaudible]…my thinking is a suppressed speaking… In my thinking I just kind of suppress the volume.

Mike: Yes, but while you are talking, you are not thinking about what you are talking, are you? I don’t mean your brain is dead, but you are not thinking what to say.

Participant: I am saying the opposite. We think that speaking is a kind of manifestation of thinking. It seems to me that my thinking is a manifestation of my speaking. It’s just quieter.

Mike: Maybe. Yes, it’s very difficult; I don’t know how best to put it, but the other day I was talking again with John who teaches music and music technology. I am learning to play the accordion and because I haven’t played a musical instrument for many years, it’s taking me quite a lot of effort. When I practice something, practice, practice, practice then if I stop and later come back to it, somehow the practice has transferred itself into what I am doing and I don’t know how that happens. John describes it as a ‘practice bank’. So, using the same analogy, we can say that when we think about something, there is a kind of ‘thought bank’. Our plan goes into a bank and then when we act, it mysteriously is there in our actions.

Participant: So you don’t have to think because you have already done the thinking…

Mike: Well, we don’t think when we act. So there is a gap between thinking and acting. But we never notice that gap because we say we are thinking what to do, and then we do it. But even Wittgenstein, who was both mad and very sane at the same time, said that he finds a gap between thinking and doing.

Participant: Watching …[inaudible] they mentally visualise things. When it comes to the real action they have already done the thinking; they just act.

Mike: Yes, yes. I wonder if that is true. Is it true?

Participant: It was my experience. When I was younger, I did a lot of practice on the flute and got good, then I gave it up and it gradually tailed off and for ten years I didn’t play at all. And when I took it out again, I couldn’t get a note out of it. But within two weeks of very intermittent kind of messing about with it I was playing again and then very quickly got better than I ever was. I got technically better, things I used to have lots of trouble with I don’t have trouble with now, which was counter-intuitive. I thought ‘I haven’t been working my fingers, so what’s been going on?’ All sorts of other things…

Mike: All sorts of other things are going on which are not ‘thinking’ as such. We could say that they are different from thinking but they are certainly not ‘thinking/planning’. Between thinking and planning and doing there is a gap; just that we don’t see it.

Participant: It’s not true at all that we visualise a situation and then put it into action because the real situation is never what you visualise.

Participant: [inaudible]

Participant: The marathon winner in Bejing literally said: “Well, I sat down with my team and we planned the way I would run the race. I went through it in my mind;” and then, very interestingly, she said, “at a certain point in the race I realised that this was the time to go”. She didn’t say “I thought about it”; she didn’t say “This was the point when I had to put my plan into action”. At some point in the race it was just NOW.

Participant: The one who won the cyclist gold said ‘it all went to plan’.

Participant: I suppose the learning of a saxophone requires quite a lot of thinking initially, practising, using your fingers,… We were talking about the spider yesterday going about weaving its web. But a spider can’t play saxophone.

Mike: Never seen one, no.

Participant: I just find in that way, thinking is very good for human beings because we can learn these new things consciously. When it comes to the actual activity, they kind of become more automatic, so they don’t require thinking. But initially, when you are playing football, for example, the teacher will say “OK, now you trap the ball like this…”; they teach you how to do that. So, it’s kind of quite useful initially…

Mike: Yes. Nobody is saying thinking is not useful. I am not saying thinking is not useful; I am just saying that there is a gap between thinking and acting. That’s all.

Participant: [inaudible]…I know from my own practice of Tai Chi that you learn and learn and learn and you repeat certain movements and then they start to flow into each other and then you don’t think you just act. If you have forgotten something, you get stuck and then your thinking appears. But until that moment it just flows; but it requires a certain amount of preparation.

(The bell rings.)

Mike: Thank you very much.