Now, you know the practice of naming. Whatever you see or think, you name it. That's a breath. That's a long breath. That's a short breath. That's a green leaf. Now I'm a walking person. This naming practice is basic to mindfulness practice. And you're using words, but you're not using them in the context of language. You're just naming. When you name, you kind of name and release yourself. And it's actually an interesting concentrative or concentrating exercise.

[01:02]

If something, if you're in meditation, for instance, if something appears to your consciousness, you name it. and the act of naming without thinking about it just naming it is a kind of release and strangely the way we function if you just name things and then release the name you can become very very concentrated and clear I don't know why this is the case, but it's the case. Maybe we could figure out why it's the case, but let's just say it's the case. And it's, you know, and you can peel the labels off things.

[02:06]

You name something and you can peel the label off. Now, the five skandhas are five heaps. You know. Treasure heaps or garbage heaps, I don't care. All right, so... So, anything that comes into your consciousness, you decide which heap it belongs in. So something comes up and you say, oh, that's form, and you kind of dump it in the form heap. Something else comes up? Oh, feeling. That must be feeling.

[03:06]

I'll dump it in the feeling heap. That's why it's called five heaps. Because everything you notice will fall in one of the five piles. I mean, you have to sometimes be creative in which goes in which pile. Just like I have to be in the kitchen here with the various trash buckets. I don't know which one things go into. But when you do this, you get very concentrated. For some reason, yeah. Okay. So, maybe I'm sitting there, I'll shake my hands, okay? My thumbs are touching.

[04:07]

I feel the contact, the shape of the tips of my thumb. Okay, so that goes in the form-scan. But I can feel all through my hands. There's a feeling through my hands. Or there's a feeling in my chest. Okay, that goes in feeling. And then, you know, like in Zendo, you hear this pond out here from my sleeping place up there, which is right above here, I guess, isn't it? Somewhere like that. Yeah. There's this pond out here that gurgles. Sometimes I wonder if someone's drowning. In the middle of the night.

[05:16]

Or perhaps a Loch Ness monster has surfaced. Through some underground tunnel. And it's blowing snorting air out through the water. So then I would say, this is associative thinking. And if I get annoyed, oh, that's an emotion that goes in the perception pile. But then in some way I'm noticing all these things. Ah, that goes in the consciousness pile. Like that. And you just do that, it's sort of fun and game to me. Yeah, when you get tired of counting your breaths, you know.

[06:18]

Join the Skandik Disposal Club. And after a while... One, it is quite concentrated. And after a while, you get quite adept at noticing what goes into which pile. And the piles get quite large. Then you can have a feeling for the different piles. And you can begin to rest yourself in one point or the other. Isn't the decision to put something on a specific staple an act of consciousness?

[07:31]

Yeah, so then you put that in the consciousness pile. Well, divide it into two parts and put one in one pile, one in the other pile. It's not a compromise, it's the way we exist. Mostly all five are there. Yes. I'm a beginner. Yeah, me too. Can't you tell? And when you tell how you deal with all those different parts, I just have to say that I don't get to the point to, okay, I can maybe do the same thing with the thumbs.

[08:54]

But then I'm getting overwhelmed by just things like, this person yesterday said, tomorrow I will do this, and this kind of thing. You mean you're thinking about your life and work and stuff? Thinking about it. I can't stay with my breathing or stay with those. Yeah, yeah. That's why I like the noise. Yeah. Because it helps me a little bit to be there for a moment. See? Yeah. I don't know how to deal with this. Okay, you're a beginner. Yes, you are a beginner. I said that it sounds relatively easy for me, if I could mention all these impressions of the senses and do a lot of them. But for me it is like this, that maybe for a short moment I feel the breath in my thumb and then I get overwhelmed and lost.

[09:56]

thoughts like, what did this person say yesterday and what will I do tomorrow, and so on, just about my life. And I don't know how to start with that. So the sound of the bowl helps me, or the singing of the donkey helps me, or the child outside helps me to say, aha, that's it now, and that's it now. And if there's nothing else that's better, then I'm just in the structure of Okay. Yeah, you're a beginner. And as I, again, for those of you who are new, the first couple years at least are the practice of counting to one. You are occasionally getting to two or three, but then lots of thinking happens. And I think that counting to one is very important. I call it counting to one. You're trying to count your breaths to ten. but you get interrupted by your thoughts.

[11:22]

This is good. And I don't think we should think it's not good. One of the things that's happening, again, it's a kind of free associative space like in psychotherapy or psychoanalysis, And slowly you develop more and more ability to observe these various thoughts arising. As you sit there, because just sitting there, you can't distract yourself too much, so you develop the ability to observe. And developing the ability to observe, you begin to generate a background mind. An observing mind that isn't caught by all the stuff that's coming up. And the thoughts become more and more like billboards along a highway.

[12:44]

And after a while they dissolve into the landscape. So you're developing a background mind. In this process you're developing an observing mind. you're going through a process of recapitulating your personal history and concerns and worries and so forth and you're doing it as I say in chicken stock instead of beef stock and what I mean by that is Zazen mind is neither waking mind nor sleeping mind. Let's call our ordinary conscious mind beef stock.

[13:46]

And let's call Zazen mind chicken stock. All of your memory, your storehouse consciousness has basically been cooked in beef stock. Yeah, and we could make it more complicated. Let's keep it simple. Zazen mind is sort of like chicken stock. So you re-cook your karma in chicken stock. This is much healthier than beef stock. And you end up restoring your consciousness. You recapitulate and restore in your storehouse and you re-parent yourself.

[14:57]

Because you see the story as your own and make it your own by recapitulating it. And if you do this with some attention and sitting regularly, In this process of, let's say, one or two years or something, you develop simultaneously the skills that allow you to make the kind of distinctions that are the basis of the five skandhas. So everything's okay. Excuse me for that little speech, but... Okay. Yes. Yeah. We were quite confused when we started our discussion and tried to understand what the five skandhas are.

[16:05]

And not to speak about practicing them. And we came to our main question, whether an intellectual understanding is necessary to practice the five skandhas. Intellectual understanding of the skandhas. Yes. Although we did not know how the five skandhas function, we found two examples how it could work. And we would like to know where we could find examples in the five skandhas.

[17:22]

One example is dealing with one's everyday life. I take a pause and I think, what happens to me? And in communicating with other people to be able to make contact without prejudice. Yeah. Okay. So let me, maybe I should go to the drawing board. May I add something?

[18:24]

Yeah. Let me say one thing, though, is when I said intellectually, it depends what you mean by intellectual. I would say purely intellectual, how it fits into a philosophical system, no, it's not necessary to understand. Yes. But sufficient understanding of it so you can have an experiential understanding is necessary. And you're not going to have a defined experiential understanding unless it's at least pointed out in some way. and you can't really have an experiential understanding if it is not somehow raised. I would like to know if there is a relationship between this practice of seeing something, which Roshi also tells more often, I'd like to know what kind of relation exists between the practice of seeing, stopping, letting go, extinction, as you often say, and the practice of the five skandhas.

[19:47]

Let's just keep it simple. That practice is a practice that can be applied to anything you observe. And it's a process of seeing the emptiness of things. But it's also in the same kind of ballpark, it's the same kind of skill that the skandhas represent. Okay, so let me say something about the skandhas. Yes? Maybe I also can bring an example from our group? Please. We found that our entering into the practice of the five skandhas is suffering. And this is the fourth skandha, associative mind. And we try to analyze it with the example of pain.

[21:13]

to the associative mind of pain belongs the feeling, I'm waiting that it comes again, the pain comes again. Then the decision to look at it with consciousness. In this decision, the pain And within this decision to try to look at the pain outside of the feeling of it, by putting down the value, then it's possible to look at it without Only without value or without judging.

[22:45]

Thank you. But then the pain, it increased. And then there was consciousness and insight that you can't do anything about it. And then dissolving. Expansion of space. And then fear. and going back to mind. Sounds good. Sounds like a whole world. Our question is, we could find all the other skandhas, but what is form in our descriptions?

[24:06]

Is pain form or is the change of pain form? Probably. But again, these are all meant to be useful categories, not rigid philosophical distinctions. Let me just give you an everyday example. A lot of people have no trouble eating food. But quite a number of people have difficulty swallowing pills. Why this is the case is beyond me. You can give them a big piece of potato and they just eat it. You can chew it, but you can swallow a pretty big piece of potato.

[25:16]

And you give them a handful of pills, even without water, you can just swallow them. Most people go... So if you're familiar with this kind of practice, you can just separate all these reactions... from taking the pills, and you can swallow the pills exactly like it was a piece of potato or anything else. So whenever you give medicine to somebody, just say, remember the skandhas, and then... Now, can you all more or less see this object? Where can we put it that you can't? Yeah, but then somebody else. So, I told you, Andreas, we have to remove these pillars.

[26:24]

I told you, Andreas, we have to remove these pillars. Yesterday I got pollen all over my robes and clothes. Okay. Well, let's abbreviate the scandals. Consciousness. [...] Mental formation, perception, feeling and form. Okay? Maybe those aren't big enough for everyone to see, but you can sort of see them.

[27:29]

Could you repeat this? Consciousness. From chanting the Heart Sutra, you after a while know them by heart. Mental formations or impulses, perceptions, feelings, form. Now normally, if I, like there's a cat out there that looks sort of like Charlie. The information that Charlie's there or this similar cat is there. And there's an instant consciousness of it. I have no experience really of going through feeling, perceiving. It's all one ball of wax, as we say. And this is... One name for this practice is the conditioned arising. is that although you experience the cat or whatever you happen to see in your consciousness, it's actually there's a series of conditions that arise to that.

[29:02]

Okay. Now, most of us, in actual fact, we start with consciousness. So what you try to do is you try to notice, maybe we can draw it like this, we try to notice the consciousness, and just notice that you're conscious of the cat. It's a little bit like seeing your mind when you see the cat. Because if I look at Bernd, for instance, Bernd, as I've said also, I see my own mind seeing Bernd. The act of seeing points at Bernd and points at my mind. Der Akt des Sehens zeigt auf Bernd und auch auf meinen eigenen Geist.

[30:05]

If you just remind yourself of that, you're already working with the first skanda. Und wenn ihr euch einfach diese Tatsache erinnert, arbeitet ihr bereits mit dem ersten skanda. Okay, so I look at the cat and it made me think of Charlie. Ich schaue die Katze an und sie lässt mich an Charlie denken. So I stop for a moment or I feel for a moment, ah, there was association there. Okay. And I'm just taking the example I just saw. So I pause also for a moment and I sense the perception of Charlie or of the non-Charlie. At least I don't think it was Charlie. There is another cat around here that looks like Charlie, isn't there? Probably a bunch of them, I don't know. So then I have to look at my perception.

[31:06]

Was that Charlie or not? So I'm noticing the act of perceiving. Yeah, so that's this. Okay, and seeing a cat... Yeah, it gives me some feeling, you know, of course. There's a kind of feeling of the garden and the kind of a little cooler summer day. And the way the cat was walking, looking around. There's some feeling there. So I notice the feeling separate from the perception or the association with Charlie and so forth. Okay. And then there's the simple... form of this cat black and white the path and I can I have to separate that from the feeling if I just say I have a feeling there's no reference to the precise things that gave me the feeling

[32:46]

So I can separate out the precise things that led to the feeling and perception and so forth. So if you want to practice with the skandhas, if it's just such an ordinary thing as the cat, you do it. And this can be a practice of mindfulness as well as, you know, like I'm standing here, as well as in zazen. Yes. Break. I don't understand form really.

[33:48]

Yesterday we had the example of the sound hitting the ear and we also had pain. In my example, there was the example of pain. It's not only the form you can see. It's also a form that I can hear. Yeah, of course. What other ways could be formed? Let's just say then form is everything that doesn't fall into the other four categories. I mean, the shape of the cat is not necessarily feeling.

[34:50]

It's not necessarily a perception. So we stick it in the form category. Schmerz? And pain? What about pain? You like yours didn't pain. The physical experience of pain, you can, yeah, you can... Say that falls in a form. The pain has different structures. I mean, it can be like a knife or some burning. This is form. Yeah, but also say, like I gave you the example, I'm doing Zazen. My legs are hurting like heaven. And my legs are hurting like heaven. Okay, I don't swear.

[35:54]

And I separate myself from the problems like of swallowing the medicine. I separate myself from all the feelings associated with pain. I don't like it, etc. Then it's just a kind of vibration in my knee. That's form. That's form before all the associations are added to it. It becomes form only then when I put distance between. No, it's there, but you haven't taken the other things away from it. Okay, so consciousness is form with a lot of baggage.

[37:08]

Okay, so the form, there's a poor cat out there, he doesn't even know what's happening to him. And we add the suitcase of feeling. And then you add the beliefs of perception. And you add the trunk of mental formations. And you end up with a really heavy consciousness. I'm not kidding. When you practice the skandhas, and when you get good at this, it feels like you've put your baggage down. And if you get good at it, you feel like you never have to pick them up again. Yeah, you're welcome, Duncan.

[38:19]

Yes? How long does it take? You can both speak simultaneously. I'll have my left ear listening to one in my right ear. No, it's not serious. But it sounds really, how long? I mean, as a beginner also, how long does it take always? Then the whole day gets really long. I guess I have a chance to do it like this. Aren't your days too short already? Look, how long did it take me to do it with the cat? But you just saw me do it. Yeah, but I... No. And then... Form. Feelings. Perceptions. Input. Yeah, there you go. It's that fast. And then, no, not... A lot of other things happened already, and so... Yeah. No. No. No. I spare you 30 blows.

[39:25]

Again, please remember that... He began to wonder what his friend out there is doing. Please remember that practice is a homeopathic medicine. And it works in small doses. So a small dose like that, repeated occasionally, has remarkable effect. And we have a homeopath sitting here in the middle who will testify to what I say. Okay, so, yes. I think we are really having difficulty to distinguish between form and perception.

[40:38]

And I want to bring up an example how I am trying to teach it to myself. When I'm sleeping in a strange, no, strange, unfamiliar flat. In the moment, I wake up. It's gone. Wachheit. The first moment when I wake up I expect my own flat. There is a moment of confusion because there are all these different stories outside.

[41:49]

And they have not yet any meaning for me. Is that form? Yeah, that's a good example. You haven't added the associations of your own flat, etc. You just look, where the heck am I? And the more you perceive things without associations, The more, well, for example, I spend a fair amount of time each year in hotel rooms. Sometimes a new one almost every night for, you know, a lot of successive nights. And I'm probably... I know, I'm pretty sure this is enhanced by being able to isolate the form-scanda.

[43:08]

I can walk through the hotel once, put my bags down, and in the middle of the night, if I get up to go to the toilet, I can walk unerringly in complete darkness directly to the toilet, no matter where it is. Once in a hundred rooms I might get a little confused, like, where the heck is it in this hotel? Now, I wouldn't recommend this as, you know, one of the fruits of practice. Toilets free. But it's convenient. Okay. Now why I drew the arrows this way is because when you first start noticing these distinctions almost immediately you notice it leads back up. Fast sofort, wenn du es bemerkst, dann führt es wieder zurück zum Bewusstsein.

[44:19]

Wenn du beginnst zu praktizieren, beginnt das Bemerken des Bewusstseins dich zurück zu den mentalen Formationen. So, for example, when I'm looking at you, I have a clear sense of all the associative thinking going on that's creating the picture. Because through practice, consciousness turns immediately into associative thinking. And then the associative thinking turns immediately into how I'm perceiving. So immediately I can physically feel her voice in my ear.

[45:29]

And someone else coughing and so forth. And I'm aware of the sensation of the colors and so on my eyes and so forth. So in a sense I've reversed the process of consciousness formation. And the perception tends to lead into feeling. And then, almost immediately, so when I am conscious of this room, I walk in this room, and I'm sorry I'm using myself as an example, but I have to illustrate this some way, so I might as well use myself. I walk into this room, and I see.

[46:31]

There's an immediate sense of the associations, and there's an immediate sense of the perceptual field, which I feel the kinds of sounds here and so forth, as well as seeing and perceiving. And then I'm immediately into a feeling. And I think we all do this. It's just a little clearer if you practice this consciousness. So I come into the room and I see you all and I'm almost immediately feeling the situation. Because consciousness, with the practice of the skandhas, the direction is towards form. That's why Charlie knows where the door is. In the Heart Sutra, form is the first skandha.

[47:50]

For the practitioner, form is the first skandha. For the average person, consciousness is the first skandha. Now, as soon as I have the... feeling of the room, I turn that into a physical sensation which I would call form. I have a sense of eliminating feeling in everything. In other words, these things are so closely related to each other, maybe it's best to understand them as going toward each other. All right, so mental formations going toward perception, we can call perception. Does that make sense?

[48:57]

Okay, so when you have feeling that's not leading up toward perception, or perception that's not leading up toward mental formation, but you have feeling which is going toward form, you're not only locating yourself in resting in form, you suddenly create a field of mind that's different than the feeling state of mind. In other words, as soon as you can locate yourself in form, right, As soon as you can locate yourself in each Skanda, and immediately a kind of field of that Skanda is created.

[50:05]

So then you have something like this suddenly, with this, you have this. Okay, do you have the picture? A state of mind is produced by an object of consciousness. Just like imagery produces a dream state of mind. And for the sake of making a distinction, let's again call it a liquid. So certain kinds of imagery and breathing, and so forth, creates a dream state of mind. In which images and dreams float. But conceptual thinking sinks. Is that clear?

[51:16]

You all know that from waking up in the morning. Your dreams sink and your panics of the day float. But if you can really go to sleep, then the panics sink and beautiful dreams. Okay. So... Now, if I concentrate at a feeling level without letting it turn into mental associations, Then I can enter into just feeling what's going on here without thinking about it. This is part of what's meant by practicing non-thinking.

[52:18]

I hope so. That's why I think artists often turn on the radio, at least visual artists. The radio and whatever it is kind of drains off their thinking mind and they can paint or whatever. Okay. Now, when you're in... The feeling skandha has its own past, present and future. Do you understand what I mean by that? In other words, there are things that have happened to you at a feeling level that you can't remember consciously.

[53:41]

But if you stay at a feeling level, you discover you have a whole history as a feeling person that's been obscured by always being in consciousness or sleeping. It's just like when you are struck, say, strongly by a perception. It can remind you of many other perceptions that were similar in the past. Doesn't happen when you're in ordinary consciousness because that perception is just absorbed into consciousness. But when you really notice, in fact often notice the form, of a certain smell of a summer day, say, it brings you into memories that you wouldn't remember otherwise.

[54:57]

So in that sense, you're a person You're another person. You're sort of another different person in each skanda. So if you practice the skandas and you get sort of reasonably good at it and so it just becomes natural. And it's part of your zazen practice. You just have a richer kind of flow of who you are available to you. Now, one of the other things that's happening here is

[55:59]

All of this is awareness. Consciousness is a very particular kind of awareness. We can define consciousness as that state of mind constructed from form, feeling, perception, associations that make consciousness. And consciousness is a very useful, powerful tool. And you need it to hold your job. Most jobs. Okay. But when you have more experience of each skanda, awareness becomes more powerful.

[57:16]

And one of the qualities of resting in the form skandha is a very wide field of awareness. So it's like as you take the baggage away, It forms a way that more and more awareness appears. Yes. I had a question one hour ago, and I think I found an answer, so just for clarification. I could never understand why... Feelings is between form and perception. How can I feel before I perceive from a scientific point of view? And the answer that I think I found through what you said is that the sensory perception, like with my organs, takes place even before.

[58:34]

And the form is something that has already entered, well, myself before and I hope that this maybe is already the answer just for clarification. The form is there and at some point I perceive it. How can I have feelings before I have perceived it? How can that be? And what I have now understood, or hope to have understood, is that I could not perceive the form as the form that exists outside, but rather as the form perceived by my senses, but not really I think one of the problems that we're having here, and that we sense something doesn't compute,

[59:38]

is in the first koan of the Shoyoroku. I think the poem goes continuously creation runs her loom and shuttle weaving the ancient brocade incorporating the forms of spring is that the first three lines Yeah. Yeah, but let's leave that out for now. But what's the first line? Continuously creation runs her loom and shuttle, weaving the ancient brocade, incorporating the forms of spring. There's one more line.

[60:59]

Anyway. Oh, it says the unique breeze of reality. The unique breeze of reality. Okay. They can hook wires up to you. And you can say, I'm going to move my arm. Yeah. And we could call that a perception. I'm going to move my arm. It's a decision or a perception or something like that. Let's call it that. Okay. But by the wires they can tell that your arm started the process of moving before you perceived that you were going to move your arm. Okay. So this is talking about what you notice.

[62:02]

Perception is what you notice. Feeling proceeds what you notice. So by the time you have a perception, perception means to grasp, we're not talking about knowing. This whole thing is knowing. Okay, now if you think all perception is knowing, then that's not what this means. Perception is to grasp something, grasp a feeling and turn it into a specific conscious thing. Okay, so there's knowing that precedes perception. Okay, that's why feeling is there.

[63:03]

If feeling Then you have a perception that arises out of non-graspable feeling. That's often the case unless somebody drops an apple on your head. Then probably perception precedes the feeling. Yes. Try again to come closer to this. Imagine a newborn baby. Specific perceptions are born within the baby.

[64:17]

For example, to be able to recognize the eyes of the mother or any person. Everything else is like just a flash is going by and things going by. You remember this? It's a concept of... reconstructed baby, of course, of Daniel Stern. I refer to Daniel Stern. I think it's a very nice theory. Yes, I can remember. When I'm in a special state of body work, then I'm back to this. And this is, I think, what you mean with remembering field of form.

[65:21]

Yeah, OK. I don't want to cut this off, but what I would like to say to it is that it feels to me like a kind of intellectual game. And I can say that because years ago you already taught this and I loved it. I mean, it was so exciting to see, is it form, is it feeling, the perception, what's the difference between emotion and feelings and blah. And it's really, it's always the same points where we get really interested. When I look back now, it really doesn't help now at the Zen practice.

[66:27]

What helped was, yes, it was to know that there's a concept of five heaps, which you can put everything you can imagine into it, and there's no self. and you still are living in the same world. And then I started, so in my practice I never, in my meditation, I never practice on this conscious level with the five skandhas. But I try to get really to this concentration point of, let's say, just form. So I try just to hear. Or sometimes I get to the point, yes, that is feeling. Or to this point, everyone knows this is pain.

[67:31]

that I have no associative thinking with it anymore. So suddenly it's so clear what's the difference between emotions and feelings. And you can have endless, endless discussion about this, but on a certain point it's so clear what is dislike and like and what is neutral and what is neutral and still feeling. And to the Five Scandals, I think now when you are able to concentrate and when you have this self-organizing process in your body, in your mind, and you really split up your mind in all these little parts, I have the impression that suddenly it falls It's a feeling like it falls into categories.

[68:34]

It falls automatically, for me, that was my meditation feeling, into this category. Into these categories. Into these five standards. And I really thought, yes, that are heaps. But years ago, this word heaps never made any sense to me intellectually. But in the meditation experience it really feels like it. And so sometimes I think the way had to be, at least I can't just speak for myself, it has to be the other way around. I never practiced the way like this that I really analyzed all my yeah all my thinking stuff what was popping up in this way and then i come to this point oh there's no cell it was another concentration part and then it dissolves into the fives so that was my okay

[69:41]

She had an entirely different experience in German, so... I would like to ask you with interest how you really try to grasp it, with the divisions, is it now perception, is it now feeling, and I know it very well, so years ago Mr. Rorschach already taught it in four seminars, and I even found it absolutely exciting to look at it, and there were such exciting discussions about it, until at some point I realized in my meditation practice that I never work with it. and that for me it was somehow, at least in this sequence and in the divisions, it was meaningless, it was more and more the other way around, I suddenly noticed that I no longer connect my pain in meditation with childhood dramas, with projections on Hoshi, on the stupid radio, or what do I know, but that it was really just pain,

[71:07]

In this area of experience it became clear to me what the difference between feeling and emotion was for me, and then I just continued to work with it to see how I could concentrate, for example in this non-aggressive observation, and then I realized that I could put my body parts into myself, and I can also divide my mind into different parts, into different observers, and then I had the feeling that it was more than But what then opens up, automatically falls into the five standards. And then it is a very liberating feeling to see, yes, that's where it goes in, and that's where it actually goes in without itself.

[72:10]

And it's like the whole world falls into it. Because you can actually use it to explain everything that we perceive and think. And it falls into it. I agree with everything you said, except one thing. I think the teaching of the five skandhas has been very fruitful for you. Okay, I agree. It's true that much of what we're talking about here is sort of unnecessary. It's intellectual stuff. And I am not really trying to create an understanding here. I'm trying to create permission. In other words, if I can answer most of the questions you ask,

[73:12]

fire or gently present to me, it will give you confidence that maybe there's some truth to this practice. It would work almost the same if I just gave a real quick sketch of it and never mentioned it again. But then you'd have about 35 or more objections to it that would kind of knock it down. So if I present this, if I can respond to your objections now, And you have the feeling, oh, so there is a response to the objections.

[74:29]

You can have some faith in the process. And it makes me think of like when you're talking to a psychotherapist. You tell the psychotherapist 50 things you've thought of yourself. And the therapist adds one or two. And you say, oh, I already thought of those two. But there's a difference. Because the therapist, let's assume it's a good therapist, even a bad therapist, there's been a topography of his or her reactions to everything you said. And they reacted strongly to one or two things, even implicitly, perhaps not even saying anything. And hardly reacted at all to all the other 48.

[75:31]

And that reaction gives them a different reality in you. He says, before that, it was just, I've told myself all these things and they all have equal weight for you. The weight changes when someone interacts with some of them. So if you have a teaching like this, it may not be different than already you're practicing. Maybe you have noticed it, but it's already what you're practicing. Once you've heard the teaching with any kind of experiential You can't forget it. And at later points your practice folds into this teaching. That's the danger of presenting a teaching.

[76:41]

It makes the shoe fit. So we have to be very careful to present teachings which fit your foot. I'd like to end with coming back to the experience you talked about, Jeanette. Would you be willing to describe it again? and then the feeling, I had a feeling and then I could make a decision whether I share it in good or bad and at that time I decided for good.

[77:49]

From this came a memory of a scene with my mother in the kitchen when I was very little and then I was attached to this feeling. and then feel it back. So in meditation for a second I had this picture, I don't know, I had a feeling, or I had a, no, there was a smell, okay, a smell, and there was a feeling and then I could make a decision if this is a good feeling or a bad feeling and I decided it was a good feeling and then there was a memory of being as a little child with my mother in the kitchen baking or something and then there was an attachment to continue the feeling and then the experience fell away and I was just sitting

[78:55]

Okay, now if I was going to describe that as a meditative experience using the categories of the five skandhas I would say, first of all, in consciousness your consciousness is not refined to hardly notice a second. When your consciousness is residing in the form skandha, which is usually what happens when you get fairly skilled at sitting still and locking your awareness into your body, Things appear very clearly in a kind of sphere of awareness. That sphere of awareness I would call Form Skanda Awareness. In which very minute lengths of time in normal thinking are very clear units.

[80:12]

Sorry? Where minute lengths of time are very clear units. And in that you saw a perception a smell and then you saw in the skanda and then you saw the associations and so forth and so through your meditation practice basically I would say you have your meditation is good enough so that you can base awareness in the form skanda And observe clearly perceptions and associative thinking, etc. Clearly enough to make a choice among them. Yeah. And, you know, as they say, and that people have the experience of,

[81:32]

serious accident or fall or something, of having your whole life appear before your eyes. Where in just a moment there's a simultaneity of consciousness and many things are perceived simultaneously and not consecutively. Many things are perceived simultaneously and not sequentially. And that also is a form-scanda kind of mind. Mm-hmm. Okay, so you've had this experience, which I described in this way. What's the point of learning the skandhas?

[82:35]

Well, this experience just happened to you through your meditation and other forces in your life. If you notice that the mind functions this way, and you can make choices, you know, if you talk to athletes, often they'll say that at certain points everything slows down and they see the ball coming very slowly, etc. This is simply entering this kind of scandal. They call it zoning in tennis, for instance. And it probably happens when they are so concentrated and so involved in the immediate form of playing that all this other stuff drops away. So... Once you have that kind of experience, and you then, say, develop your skandhas, the skandha practice, it simply increases your capacity to have that kind of experience.

[84:14]

until that kind of experience is virtually all the time when you sit in meditation. So the skandhas are a kind of technique to develop and open up what sometimes happens naturally in meditation experience. I'm very sorry I went on so long. But I think we talked enough about the scandals now. It's a scandal if we talk any longer about the scandals. Thank you very much.

[85:49]

Thank you for translating. I think we're lucky to have it. But it looks like it's going on. But I think we should be aware that, remind ourselves that it really functions because of very few people that decide to live here. And it's not an easy decision to make because you have to give up the great rewards that society offers to you. Financial security, status, etc. Yeah. I mean, if you live here, you have to explain to everybody, why are you doing that? So, that Grodn Gisla and Sabina and... Dieter and Neil and Jeanette, Petra.

[87:21]

Who else? Monica and Gertz. And live here and then also, like Eric and Christina, come for extended periods of time. And David tries to come regularly and so forth. It's a fragile place we have here. And all of you coming here, and Andreas coming to help? All helps, but we're never clear it's going to still be here a month from now. I mean, I have faith it will, but if you start looking, who's going to stay and why is anybody going to stay, it looks pretty flimsy. I mean, I have faith in it, but if you look at who will really stay here and for what reasons, then it will be quite thin.

[88:27]

Like Monika and Götz, who go back to their jobs in a short time to Heidelberg, because they just can't stay away from their jobs any longer. And so I'd just like us all to give a bow to all the people who stay here and make this place continue. Thank you. Okay, I'm happy to entertain any questions.

[89:36]

It's an expression that doesn't mean entertaining. It means to look at any questions that you want to bring up. On the skandhas or as I suggested, something about the path. And this morning I couldn't feel out how to make the transition to speaking about the path. That's one reason I stopped a little early. So maybe you can help me. Some feeling of the path. So... Report? Yes, or whatever. Okay, I report. Yes. Okay. Um... First we all found that we have the feeling we are on a path, all of us in the group, and then we asked ourselves, what does it mean to be on a path?

[91:02]

Can you translate as you go along? Yes. First we all realized that we have the feeling to be on a path, and then we asked ourselves what it means to be on a path. And we found first of all, or not first of all, it requires a decision, that you are on a path. And what the path does with us is it changes us, it develops us, it unfolds us. This takes on different shapes in persons, what they require of the path. A path is something you practice.

[92:07]

You have mental and physical practices which you put in your everyday life. And a path is something which connects you with other people, in the sense that it only becomes a path because you can share what you experience with other people. So it's the practices that constitute the path? Yes. And then the question, what is a Buddhist path?

[93:24]

We talked about the characteristic of a Buddhist path is that there is no God. It was the topic we talked about. And for some people it's different. They still can find God inside. There is not an outside God, but God is somehow inside all of phenomena. And the question, what is a Buddhist path, we spoke about that it is characteristic for us that we do not believe in a God outside. And for some people there is something like God within the system, so not outside, but in all phenomena and in all people. And then we talked about what are the problems on the path or difficulties and difficulties are that we sometimes we get the feeling we have lost the path or we ask the question, are we still on the path and we feel somehow

[94:34]

We have to question again and then we talked about the difficulties on the way and for some it was that they felt they had lost their way or they are somehow in a hole and they have to ask the question again whether they are actually on the way or not. Another difficulty was to be in a teaching situation and have the feeling that you don't understand, and still you accept the teaching, but you feel somehow you don't really understand. And then we had... topic of teacher, how do we find a teacher? Just a rich discussion. How do we find a teacher?

[95:36]

How do we find a teacher? How do we find a teacher? Maybe I should leave the room. No. And for some persons the question was, if you have a teacher, how do you shape the relationship to the teacher? And this was the point where we stopped our discussion and we think it's important to stay with this question. And for some people the question was, if you have found a teacher, how do you shape the relationship with the teacher? And that was the point where we stopped the discussion and we find it important to stay with this question. For us it looked like we realized at the beginning that we were all on the same path, on the same path of life.

[96:57]

And just like you can't communicate, you can't be on the same path. In the beginning we found that all of us, we are on the path, on the path of our life, and as we cannot communicate, we also cannot be on a path. Each person felt they were on a path, but because they can't communicate they weren't on the same path? No, no, no. So as you cannot not communicate, you cannot be not on a path. Oh, because everything you do is communication. No, being alive is being on a path. No, this is just the two-person conversation. Okay, all right. But the difficulty is to see where this path leads.

[97:59]

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