And to hold those differing views in your field of mind. So that's one of the things we're doing here. Then we can ask, how do we also practice these things? Now in general, the process of practice is first of all a background practice. A lot of stuff is being presented. It doesn't make sense, I don't know, you don't know, but you hear it. And you're doing zazen. And you're practicing mindfulness. And you don't really know much about what you're doing actually, I think, in the beginning.

[01:07]

But you usually can't do it unless you have some sort of trust or faith in the practice. Or you see some fruits of the practice or manifestation of the practice in your teacher or in other members of the Sangha. So there's at first a kind of background practice. Stuff is just going into your background. At some stage you begin to examine what went into my background. How do I actually understand this? What really has been my experience?

[02:20]

And how does this compare to what Dogen says or to the eightfold path or something like that? Then you make clear what you're doing. Now this is more foreground practice. Bringing into the foreground exactly what you're doing with much more clarity. And this begins to transform the background. And foreground and background become one. one way of being in the world. Now, what, again, in this intention intervention, Buddhism is also trying to supply you with images of what it is to be human.

[03:26]

In the form of bodhisattvas and the figures, protagonists of koans. So that in some ways we begin to internalize the feeling of these folks. So we may, you know, one of my favorite koans is about Yan Yan and Dao Wu. Just a simple koan. Ah. Yanyan is Dungsan's teacher. And, you know, Yunyang is sweeping.

[04:29]

Und sein Brudermönch, der auch sein wirklicher Bruder ist, kommt und sagt, du bist aber wirklich beschäftigt. Und Yunyan sagt, du solltest allerdings wissen, da ist jemand, der ist überhaupt nicht beschäftigt. So, you know, you get a feeling, who is this guy, Yun Yan? And you can feel in yourself, maybe. the one who is not busy. So maybe over some time of practice you learn some more about yin-yang. And not only do you internalize the feeling of yin-yang as a personality, like you might some character from a novel. But you also internalize this spiritual dimension of yun-yang, that even when he's busy, he knows the one who is not busy.

[05:44]

So you begin to feel in yourself the one who is not busy. Now this question of choice, it's rather Difficult to speak to. Now, a couple of you have gotten up and gone through the door. Was that a choice to go through the door? You didn't just bump into the wall. Boom! Boom! Now you went through the door. You hardly experienced it as a choice.

[06:54]

And many choices are really like that. We're making choices all the time which we don't experience as choices. And perhaps Dieter was referring to my... often comment on the word trivia. The word trivia means three roads, trivia. So it means even trivial things or a choice. There's a road and then forks. So part of practice is to come into the the particularity of things, and feel them as a choice.

[08:06]

And we also have, I mentioned usually at the same time, another expression in Zen, When you come to a fork in the road, take it. This is... This is to transcend the one and the many. Now, one of the things we're doing in Zazen, Yeah, you can count your breaths.

[09:23]

That's a kind of diversion. It's something, you know, because you need something to do, we give that to you to do. But it's also a way, as I said the other day, to physicalize the mind. To bring more intensely into our experience the fact that mind and body are interrelated phenomena. And it's part of the development of the two main skills of practice. One pointedness and a non-interfering observing consciousness. So there's certain skills you're developing by bringing your attention to your breath.

[10:39]

And transformations you're precipitating. Precipitating, like the rain comes down? Yeah. Precipitate means to cause to happen. Yeah. You know, I like doing this in German with you because you hear it in German and you hear it in English and then you have to hear it in your own experience which is neither So we're maybe more aware that this is something that doesn't fit into language. Now, another thing that's happening when you do zazen, is you're discovering how to be asleep while awake.

[11:59]

Or something like that. I mean, in a way, you're resting, you're relaxing. There's a kind of quality of sleep. In a way, it relaxes you and relaxes you and it has a quality of sleep. And the transition we usually feel when we, you know, after a while you learn the transition into going to sleep and you can feel yourself going to sleep. And then we don't really know what happens, most of us. But in Zazen, because we're holding ourselves upright, We have this experience of something like going to sleep, but we stay awake on the other side of that. And staying awake on the other side of that, and there's a tendency for this experience to trigger sleep.

[13:26]

So once you get, once you get so you can sit fairly comfortably, There's a tendency to fall asleep. Now then you have to find that trigger that makes you fall asleep, and you have to get by that trigger. Then when you can stay awake in the midst of this mind, which is neither waking nor sleeping mind, That you begin to see how energy, attention and awareness are interrelated. intention, awareness and energy.

[14:28]

Hello, Yannis. He lights us up. So, when you begin to feel, experience, the very slight difference between energy awareness and attention or intention, and awareness, you don't really have the question anymore of how do I bring energy to what I do.

[15:38]

So that's one reason it's a little difficult to answer the question, how do we bring energy to what we do? Because if you practice enough, it's just what happens. But chanting is a good time to try it. Try to bring your attention and energy equally to each syllable. This is all designed to make you experience things in dharmas. And dharmas means, from the point of view of practice, to experience things in units. So again, we have this question like when you first brought, that you first brought up.

[16:57]

What appears. Whatever appears is what appears. Don't discount what's before your eyes. Don't discriminate. Just what's there in your field of awareness. In Dogen or some bodhisattvas, there might be something else. So, what appears is... What is your name? Rudi. Rudi. Rudi. How do you spell it? Oh, Rudi. Okay. He appears before me. That's all. That's all. When I look at you, though, it's just you.

[18:09]

And I might like you or not like you. If I don't like you, that's a Dharma. If I find myself liking you, that's a Dharma. If I find myself in a mixture, that's a Dharma. So if I notice things in that specificity, then I can notice also why do I have an immediate liking of you. So I notice not only that you appear before me, but I notice that what feelings come up on that moment. And I don't discriminate them. In the sense of comparing, I just notice them. And I don't take any of them too seriously. It's just, you know, oh... There he is, good.

[19:19]

Oh, da ist er, gut. It's okay. You appear. Du erscheinst. What appears is good. Und was erscheint ist gut. Mm-hmm. And maybe I'm sitting here and, well, for example, this morning. In Zazen. I always hate to have the bell ring. It's so nice to sit there. Yeah, so I think, oh, the bell rang. I think, oh, the bell rang. And often I'm sitting there in a heap of sound and form. That's what in Koran 46 in the Blue Cliff Rectures it says, sitting in a heap of sound and form. And then it says, parallel to what Dogen says, walking on top of sound and form.

[20:38]

Okay, so this is a typical experience in zazen. So I'm sitting there. And I don't have any feeling at all except there's rustling and people are doing... Something's going on. Doesn't bother me at all. A truck could go through the sender. A heap of sound and form. Yeah, there's nobody there. It's just a heap of sound and form. But then... But then some kind of memory comes in that I have to do the service.

[21:46]

So somebody has to get up. Now, was this a decision, a big decision or a small decision? You know, I'm a Dharma dog. Pavlovian Dharma dog. So, oh, yes, I have to get up and do the service. So something appears that then does the service. Now, is this a momentary experience? Or is this the basis of my experience? Well, if you keep practicing you'll have more and more of these experiences in which there's no abiding self that

[22:48]

Let's say there's just a heap of sound and form. The word heap is a reference to the five skandhas. It means there's this practice of the five skandhas. But even without practicing or knowing anything about the five skandhas, if you keep doing zazen, and you keep bringing yourself back to the particular, The more you keep bringing yourself back to the particular, the more the glue, the more the story of yourself that glues the particulars together,

[23:59]

dissolves. And you're less and less scared of it dissolving. First you may be kind of scared of it dissolving. But you get used to sitting in this lotus laboratory posture. Yes. So you think, oh, I'm in the lotus laboratory, it's okay. Someone will ring the bell. I don't have to worry until they ring the bell. When they ring the bell, I guess I'll have to go back to being somebody that they expect me to be. But until then, oh, what a vacation. As someone said, you put down the baggage of self. You said something like that.

[25:12]

Ah, yeah. Okay. Now say that I became very angry or offended. Then this awareness settled in the heap of form and sound, flows into a sense of self, and from a sense of self flows into anger.

[26:13]

Do you understand the image? It's almost a kind of movement into a sense of self and then there into anger. You could almost lift up the anger and take it as an entity. An entity more real than body and mind. And more real because our energy is in it more than it's in our body and mind. So you're in it that your energy is in the envy of a Shakespearean character, perhaps. And the sense that you are body and mind or just resting in form and sound. is gone.

[27:36]

That's normal. We act. This is what happens to us. Mostly, mostly, We hardly know anything else but various forms of our energy moving into liking someone, disliking something, comparisons, envy, etc. And a constant dialogue with ourselves. I'm okay, I'm not going to get upset. It's like we create these rooms that our energy keeps going into.

[28:39]

And these rooms are the rooms of self, of our personal stories. How do you do something about this? Change your habits. Yeah, and Dharma practice is to change your habits at a trivial level. Okay. So say that you do develop the habit of bringing your energy equally to each thing. This is called the development of equanimity. Equanimity as a state of mind and being as a fruit of practice. The fruit of bringing yourself one of the fruits of bringing yourself equally to each thing.

[29:57]

Now, how can each being light you up Wie kann jedes menschliche Wesen euch gleichmäßig erfreuen? Wenn ihr nicht die Gewohnheit habt, eure Achtsamkeit gleichmäßig zu jedem Ding zu bringen. If you're like this big rubber bag, a house made of rooms where each room is a gummi sack, then when you meet somebody, your energy goes into this gummi sack or that gummi sack. Because that's your habit. But if you've changed your habit at the level of practice,

[31:02]

You really now have the habit of bringing your attention equally to each syllable of the chanting. So again you asked, what appears? So I'm looking here. What appears is the feeling of my body with my head turned to the left. What appears is the feeling of the red roof and white snow and gray-brown branches. When I look at that, I'm not thinking of anything. But I'm also talking to you. And I look at that and I'm not thinking about talking at all. But something is coming up. So I give my attention to that. And some words come out.

[32:20]

I say, what are those words? I only partly have decided what to say. Because I'm in a process here which is generating words. And that process includes a feeling from each of you. If you all left the room I wouldn't be sitting here generating words. You'd all peek in the door and I'd be in here. Maybe I'd be singing an irritating love song. I'm in love again and I can't rise above it. You don't have to translate.

[33:22]

So what I'm saying is part of a process in which each of you are part of it and my translator especially is part of it. Don't translate that. Don't be vain. So sitting quietly doing nothing, our discussion appears. And wisdom grows by itself. At least I hope so. So that's enough for me.

[34:29]

So I was able to continue a little bit of what I was starting this morning because of the fruit of your discussion. And this stew, this soup we're stirring, we can say, we can speak about certain things. Yeah. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're very welcome. Are we more or less here?

[35:33]

Before we start on what we've been talking about, if you have any immediate questions about what we just looked at, I'm happy to respond. I think it all was pretty clear, though, what we're doing. Going up under the roof, because he spoke about a storage. The storage is around that space, but the atrium windows go into that. And this, when we did this, not only talked with a lot of different people individually, we had two meetings in which the whole Sangha there discussed things, like how they felt about this, how they felt about that, and their ideas were incorporated into the design.

[36:58]

In such detail it would only have been possible. Usually I work with Sim Vanderen, but he can only come for brief periods. So to design these buildings more than just... between me and an architect but with the whole Sangha is only possible because Marie-Louise was able to be there for the whole three months. So it's quite lucky to have a resident architect. So, who will be the first group to tell me, tell us, share their discussion? Okay. You were all the time talking about how to study the text.

[38:24]

It was for us not clear the way how to do it, and we found out that everybody has a personal way to do it, and how to find a real entry And the outcome of it was, maybe you can translate. The text is like a tin box and there is no description, nothing written on it and there is no can opener. I thought the text was like a tiger. You said it in English, can you translate it into German, what you said at the beginning? Ah, yes. We have been talking all the time about how to read this text and how to find access to it, and some found it difficult to read it in a normal state of mind.

[39:33]

And then we came to the idea if it is possible to understand this text with the body, or maybe to learn it by heart, with different ideas. And we had a question out of this at the end, what are the qualities of awareness? How do you develop them? The qualities of awareness. Okay. So our question was then, what are the qualities of being? And how do you train these qualities? We talked about birth and death and the real human body and we also talked about

[40:49]

precepts and compassion. So precepts and compassion. The real human body is not just me and my flesh, it's everybody here. If I translate this, the real human body is the whole world. And in relation to birth and death, there are different births and deaths. What does it mean for me personally if I know that I have to die within the next 10 minutes?

[42:14]

And on the other hand, the moment where we discussed an hour ago is dead and we are here right now. And Dogen said we should master birth and death. What does it mean if someone is 50 years old to master his birth? With the precepts we said, since we are part of this larger body, it makes sense that we say we vow to save all sentient beings. Compassion means, in that sense... To be willing to step in others' shoes.

[43:25]

In the shoes of someone else. Okay. Next. Yes. We basically talked about the precepts. And the base was the description of personality. And many people in the group could identify with this personality. Many people in the group feel drawn to these precepts physically and because of the precepts.

[44:42]

It's a strong drawing towards. And there's doubt and being afraid. And we try to feel into that. And people say that they are afraid to be fundamentally alone. To be afraid to be overwhelmed. To give up things that kept oneself in balance. And also being afraid of pain. We also talked about that this individual human body is not my individual body.

[46:06]

And the next question was, are there doubts or are there no doubts in the body? And we were talking about that the body, so to speak, stores being heard, for example And that way there also could be doubts in the body We also talked about body and mind and how far you can separate the two. about decisions and choices?

[47:37]

Do we have then, on that base, have to make decisions? He's reading the sentence, what am I without, and he doesn't know how it was continued, and he just left it that way. The group just decided to left it. Yeah. What you meant earlier was, can you make decisions through awareness rather than consciousness, you meant? Okay. Next. First we shared the feelings of your talk and it was a very intense teisho.

[48:48]

And we were very much touched by the human potential and the embodiment of what you said. Second, we tried to... We try to find out the balance between, on the one hand, bodily and neurotic suffering, on the one hand, and the other... Neurotic or erotic? Neurotic. I didn't even think that. It sounded like you said erotic. Sometimes the same. And existential suffering on the other side.

[50:12]

What does it mean we can help with existential suffering and not with bodily suffering? It was noticeable that we found it more difficult to distinguish between neurotic suffering and existential suffering. It was very difficult to explain the difference between the neurotic pain and the existential pain. It seemed as if it was easier to define the difference between bodily pain and existential pain. Physical pain.

[51:21]

Third point. We talked about the consequences of practicing zazen, mindfulness. We talked about the consequences if you practice Zen and awareness. For example, my daughter doesn't like it if I read one of the texts called Doppeltes Lottchen, Double Lottchen. Because I start crying quite fast. And sometimes it's easy to drive a car after meditation and sometimes it's complicated and difficult as another consequence.

[52:26]

Sometimes there are times when I am already happy about the basis that I have through awareness, but meditation is a risk because I need consciousness a lot. sometimes I'm happy to have a kind of base of awareness, but to meditate is a risk because I need a certain amount or kind of consciousness. Sometimes. Yeah. That's cooler. Yeah, that's why better. Okay. Well, again, maybe I can respond to some of the things that you brought up.

[53:47]

But mostly, again, I think that we have this question soup. And we should keep stirring this soup. When we do a sashin, we are more explicitly developing a sangha body. Now, I think the ideas like Sangha body or Sangha mind are a little, I mean, they may be comfortable for some of you and uncomfortable for others.

[54:50]

And not really believable for some. Although I think there's a lot of scientific evidence that in sâshin a definite common metabolic body is generated. And I think Coming back to this question of together, together, together alone, alone together, etc. I think the hundreds of thousands of years of humans like us living, silence, The silence of the hundreds of thousands of years of humans living, being alive, again is changed when we begin to live together.

[56:14]

And something happened, my own feeling is, when we started living together. On a large scale. So we began developing a common language, etc., I think one reason China is so influential is because again 221 BC until now it's been a huge population united under one written language. Now, our much more divided Western culture has also been very productive, of course. Unsere westliche Kultur, die viel mehr aufgeteilt ist, ist natürlich sehr produktiv. But it's definitely been productive through working together, despite different languages and so forth.

[57:32]

Und ist natürlich so produktiv, weil wir zusammengearbeitet haben, trotz verschiedener Sprachen. And proximity. The European countries are quite close to each other. Und die Räumlichkeiten der verschiedenen europäischen Länder sind natürlich sehr nahe. Now, I'm speaking about this because I'm trying to put this, what we're doing, into a context of human civilization. Yeah, in a context of human civilization. what we're doing in contrast to our own civilization. That's always implicit in what I'm talking about because I actually find it the case in how we practice. Okay.

[58:33]

Now, again, I brought up this idea of agon from Greek culture. The testing of ideas through conflict with others' ideas. Mm-hmm. And it's a productive way to polish thinking over generations. Now, again, going back to Harold Bloom, he's written a book called The Anxiety of Influence. And he makes basically the point that People will talk about who influenced them, but as much as possible they hide the main influence. They want to take credit for it as if it was their own entirely. And it's a lot of competition in our...

[59:35]

who thought of it first, etc. And his point is that the person who influences us most causes us the greatest anxiety. And we're challenged by that and then incorporate it and make it our own and hide the source. And I can certainly see that work in the poets I know and scientists and others. No. This is a productive way to develop what we like, science and so forth. And of course, both Western and Asian civilizations are different emphases only, so whatever's in one is pretty much also in the other.

[61:00]

But the particular emphasis, again, of Chinese yogic culture is to develop a shared body and shared mind. And I think it's a little funny for us. And I think that when Again, to try to... because somebody brought up again, fundamentally alone. What I mean by alone in this phrase is different than I think you mean. It's really... It's a little difficult for me to try to describe what I mean, but I'm trying.

[62:16]

So I think group cultures are what I call together-together. You can't differ much from the group. So, clearly, complex societies need the participation of everyone, not just an elite or something. So the trick of developing a... You know what people say, well, we're basically aggressive or we're basically something else. I think We ought to look at that as a kind of nonsense. You can also say we're basically loving and so forth. You can also make You can also look at apes and say they cooperate more than they fight.

[63:28]

There may be something basic, but still my own sense is most of what we are is generated by our culture. And civilization and a greater civilization depends on our learning how to do things together. And I, you know, excuse me for sounding like a preacher, but... But I really believe that we are at a very young stage, early stage of civilization. Hopefully. Hopefully, yeah, okay. That's good. Okay. And I think when you extend your consciousness beyond your own lifespan and your parents' lifespan, you find yourself...

[64:48]

Consciousness immersed in a sea of sentience. And Buddhism is always talking about how to make that leap, we could say, dive into the sea of sentience. Okay. So our society, I would say, has extended the power of living together by functionally living alone. In other words, we accomplish in our workaday life and living together, etc. But we live in our own apartments, our own families, etc.

[66:03]

Now the vision of yoga culture is that you, because of meditation, you are You don't need your own apartment. It's perfectly okay to have your own apartment. I'm not planning on... I'm not planning on moving in with any of you. At least not without an invitation. Okay. You know, I've never talked about this before, exactly, so I'm trying to feel my way into how to talk about it.

[67:11]

One of the fruit... And so maybe I have to just give some mosaics. One of the effects of meditation is that you... feel the same in a group of people as you do by yourself in your apartment. This is what I mean by being fundamentally alone. I mean whether, I mean there's a difference between sitting here with 40 persons and sitting here with 40 trees. But we experience a very big difference between sitting in a small grove of trees and sitting with 40 people. A meditator doesn't feel so much difference.

[68:19]

Because there's an intactness you develop through meditation that is sealed. Not armored, but sealed. So I said like sitting in the heaps of sound and form the other morning in the Zendo. The truck could have driven through the sender. And I would have thought, Gerald just had a very loud robe. It's just, what is he doing? Actually, I have one. I gave you this. I'm sure. It's just more sound and form.

[69:32]

And if I don't name it, it's just sound and form. Dogs, people, what difference does it make? So the emphasis is And one of the things that happens when you meditate is you have to be able to go into, and I've always often said this, you have to be able to go into experiences that aren't shareable. They may be shareable, They may be instantly known at an awareness level by others. At least to some extent. But some things may be basically unshareable.

[70:34]

Okay. But we are so constructed that we are a little bit afraid of what's not shareable. We want to be able to talk it out. Or at least be able to imagine telling someone else. And again we feel maybe like we're going crazy if we have experiences that we can't imagine other people have. Which basically means we don't live alone. In a fundamental sense, we don't live alone.

[71:40]

We have to imagine all our experiences shareable. That means we live fundamentally together. Do you see what I'm trying to say? So if we live fundamentally together, and you can also look at your narrative story, there's hardly an item in our personal story which doesn't involve other people. Except that time you embraced a tree when you hoped nobody was looking. Where does this come from? You know what I'm saying?

[72:41]

Yeah. I've embraced lots of trees. So the way we construct ourselves is very involved with other people. This is stuff I've gone over before. So our inwardness is a form of outwardness. But if you meditate... seriously, you come into an interiority that is not something, not in language. Which is not shareable in language. Or is not, doesn't enter into consciousness.

[73:41]

Okay. So we, that's why I say we in the West tend, our emphasis is to live fundamentally together. Or we define ourselves fundamentally through others. But we live functionally alone. We go home to our separate room or apartment or family or something. This is perfectly okay and I live this way myself. Okay. The vision in that we can try to introduce into our own society to some extent, is that we define ourselves through original mind,

[74:55]

not shared mind. Or we define ourselves through emptiness, not through, again, other people or the contents of consciousness. So what does this mean? So I need to talk about it in some ways that are familiar to you, in some ways that are new. And because we're doing this practice together. And luckily, because we have the confidence of meditation, The confidence of being able to sit still, no matter what.

[76:08]

We can enter these somewhat challenging realms without much fear. And because we have a text here we're working with, Dogen's text, It throws us into deeper water than if I just worked with the topic directly, then we might otherwise. Because, for instance, Dogen says, no abiding self in things. And you probably hardly noticed when you first read it that he said things and not people. But this is one of the two big dividing lines between the earlier Buddhism and Mahayana Buddhism.

[77:10]

The difference between, the two main differences are the emphasis on the Bodhisattva And the other is the selflessness of phenomena. What does it mean to say the selflessness of phenomena? I started on this yesterday, but what can I say? Again, I've never spoken about this, so I'm trying to... smuggle my way into your consciousness. Smuggle. Smuggle. Is that a German word? Smuggle. You have smugglers in Germany as well? America? Okay. Sure. Okay. So, the idea in yogic culture is not to develop an agon-basist, conflict-basist mind, but a cooperative-based mind, a shared mind.

[78:47]

And I don't like the words. I don't like exactly how I'm saying it, but I haven't found, since this is the first time I've talked about this so explicitly, it's rather crude. Okay. So if we call a seshin a shamatha week and we call this an insight week or vipassana week or something like that, then the point of our talking together and looking at a text together is to develop a common mind as well as a common body. Now, Buddhist study is based on the assumption that it progresses through a common mind.

[80:00]

I think the Dalai Lama said the point of Buddhist study is to develop a good mind. And in general, intelligence, for instance, is understood as the energy that flows through the wires And intelligence is described as energy that flows through the wires and it comes from values and needs. Yeah, so intelligence is a factor of your character, energy, aspiration, as well as your genes. Now, part of this again is to develop something as subtle as Buddhism in a marginal... And to carry it into the next generation it needs a kind of more than one person to do it.

[81:32]

It means this recognition and functioning of the true human body. Not the true human body. Not the true human body as a philosophical idea, but the true human body of the coming and going of birth and death as your actual experience. Okay. So we're playing a game of silent mail. And we've had 90 generations from Buddha passing this silent female or male to us. So now we're spending a certain amount of time together to see if we can together pass this to the next generation.

[82:50]

And if our sense of civilization is dependent on togetherness, is it the first generation four or five hundred thousand years of what we know as human life was silent because people didn't really know how to live together on a big scale. As a friend of mine says, if slavery can be outlawed as it is in the world, so can war. And as a friend of mine says, if slavery can be abolished, then wars can also be abolished. I have a friend who's Saul Menowitz, who's dedicated his life and formed organizations on the premise that if slavery can be outlawed, so can war.

[83:51]

And some kind of outlawing of war is going to be necessary if we live together on a more... fulfilling scale. And it's thought that Buddha mind, which is a real thing, When all things are the Buddha Dharma, there are Buddhas and sentient beings. So it means if you're practicing Buddhism, you have to accept that Buddha mind is not just, as someone said, a cloak of...

[84:53]

Angel hair. Something that's, and there's nothing underneath the cloak. What's a cloak, actually? Umhang. Mm-hmm. Okay, so if you're practicing Buddhism, you have to believe that Buddha mind is a possibility that we live in a world of both Buddhas and sentient beings. And Dogen says this is the case when all things are the Buddha Dharma. But it's understood that this Buddha mind can only be part of an evolving civilization if a small group, at least some group of people, each generation pass it to the next.

[86:22]

That's the basic vision. So it takes a horizontal lineage in each generation to make a vertical lineage through the generations. So I know this is only possible with and through you, through us. So I'm letting this soup of questions, first of all, be just a soup of questions.

[87:26]

And again, learnedness does not Buddhism is not an object of learnedness. The study of Buddhism is designed to change your mind into a mind that can study Buddhism. Does that make sense? So some of you are having trouble studying Buddhism because it's a tin can without an opener and there's a tiger inside. So you have to beat the tiger and suddenly you can get out.

[88:27]

So the study of Buddhism is to develop a mind which can study Buddhism. So you want a mind that can dissolve in front of another person's mind. Without feeling you're losing your identity. Or without feeling you're opening yourself to the evil influences of the other person. Now you can go out and Say that you look at one of these beautiful mountains. Mountain of snow outside the windows. So you're standing in front of the mountain. And you're there and the mountain's over there.

[89:52]

And you're outside and it's... You're outside it. But sometimes you can feel connected. Almost as if you were feeling the mountain from inside the mountain. Can we call this an epiphany or something like that? What's epiphany? An experience of realization. And if you look up the word epiphany in the dictionary in English, it must be similar in German. It defines one of the categories of enlightenment experiences. Oh dear. Shall I stop? No dinner? We're tough, you know. Turn off the stoves.

[91:08]

Heat up the tin cans. That tiger's going to jump out. So you can practice with trees and mountains. To see if you can kind of dissolve the barriers of self. And this is part of what Dogen means by no abiding self. Can you be with another person any person, not just somebody you're in love with, and feel your abiding self dissolve. not into each other, but into a common mind.

[92:15]

So part of the practice of discussing these things is to, in our primitive way, I mean, a Buddha field is somewhere between, what we're doing is somewhere between a kindergarten and a Buddha field. Yeah, I mean, some of you are going to Johanneshof, they have these group discussions, it's like kindergarten. But it's kindergarten because we're not used to really doing things together. So how do we as adult intelligent people of surprisingly wonderful qualities, how do we generate a common mind and a common body? And I'm speaking to your common mind and common body right now.

[93:29]

And I can feel it in my own body and mind. So whether this question or that question, you know, They are floating to the surface here. And this true human body is sometimes lodged in you. Sometimes it moves into me, into you. And we feel the activity of birth and death. Things changing, appearing and disappearing. Now let's go back to this experience I'm trying to get to this point where I can speak again about this experience of sitting in the heaps of sound and form.

[94:39]

A common experience in meditation. And if you have a non-interfering observing consciousness, you can observe this experience of sitting in the heaps of form and sound.

[95:08]

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