To practice Zen means to observe the fact and process of knowing. Consciousness is the most visible face of our mutualized knowing, a knowing through others and within the proximal spectrum of phenomenality. To closely and dispassionately observe the activity and functioning of consciousness, it is necessary, additionally, to actualize a transformational ‘awareness-observing-consciousness.’ This is a shift in kind: a shift from a self- referencing, comparative consciousness to a non-self- referencing, non-comparative awareness. This ‘non-self-referencing, non-comparative awareness,’ allows us to attentionally notice and study, to deconstruct and reconstruct, the perceptual and organizational processes of consciousness. This process of deconstructing and reconstructing consciousness is called the Teaching of the Five Skandhas. The five attentional categories for the analysis of consciousness are: ‘Form,’ ‘Non-Graspable-Feelings,’ ‘Perception,’ ‘Associative Consciousness,’ and ‘Consciousness.’

Zentatsu Richard Baker is the Founder and Head Teacher of the Dharma Sangha Centers in the United States and Europe. In the United States he lives at the Crestone Mountain Zen Center in Colorado; and in Germany, at the Zen Buddhist Center Schwarzwald in the Black Forest. He has been teaching Zen-Buddhism for 45 years. 

Baker Roshi is the Dharma Successor of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi (author of the book Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind).  In 1966, with and for Suzuki Roshi, he co-founded the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in California.

Baker Roshi subsequently founded the Green Gulch Zen Practice Community and Farm in Marin County, California in 1972. During the ’70s, he pioneered a number of businesses related to Zen practice. In 1983, he founded the Dharma Sangha.