In fact, all of us know. And a continuum of compassion or equanimity. Thank you very much. Thank you for translating. Dr. Morgan.

[01:13]

Now again, of course, I'm looking forward to hearing from your groups. But first, again, I'd like to try to give us some context for this. We're at the very center of Buddhism when we talk about compassion and wisdom. And Buddhism also at its most sophisticated. So how can we talk about this? So that it's accessible. This is always my question. Okay. One thing we have to get is the conceptual part of practice.

[02:35]

If you don't understand that the conceptual part of practice is inseparable from practice, then you're suffering under delusion. Sorry, I didn't mean to tell you that. Well, at least from a Buddhist point of view, you're suffering under delusion. First of all, you're not recognizing probably that you already are in a conceptual framework. So if you don't look at the conceptual framework you have, it will simply shape your practice.

[03:52]

No. Now you might think you can learn by experience. Yes, but you know there was an Airedale dog where I was staying in Kassel. Relatively smart, Airedale, I guess. And there was one part of the house they keep separate from the other part of the house. This is Norbert and Angela's house. And so when they showed me where I would stay in this separate part of the house, the doorknob was backwards. Instead of being like that doorknob where you take it and push down, it was on the other side facing you, and you had to push it up.

[05:10]

And I asked, but also at the same time I looked at the dog and I realized what it was. The dog had learned by experience. If it keeps jumping at the door, it pushes the handle down, it can go in that part of the house. And if it kept, maybe it could continue to learn by experience. And eventually discover that if it pushed his nose up, it could get in. Yeah. Sophia already knows how to do that. And this dog is a couple years old or something. I don't know. It hasn't figured it out yet. And it's because it doesn't have a concept of a doorknob.

[06:21]

You have to have some kind of concept that this opens the door one way or the other or something. Some kind of concept has to be part of it. A dog learns by experience, but not by learning a conceptual framework. And if you want to study Buddhism by experience only, You may be part of a lineage of dogs. Oh, oh, oh. You've heard of the dark ages, the dog ages. So if you think you can learn by experience, it means you're really going to utilize the conceptual framework of your culture.

[07:33]

Also heißt das, dass du eigentlich wirklich den konzeptuellen Rahmen deiner Kultur nutzt. Ja, und auf der Grundlage kannst du viel lernen. Aber du lernst auf der Basis von einem konzeptuellen Rahmen. Or you believe somehow, excuse me, this morning I got a piece of bread stuck in my throat and it hasn't disappeared, but I'm going to manage to speak. I still have my tonsils. Any doctor here want to take my tonsils and the bread out? A quick operation in the other room, not bad. That's why I was barking before.

[08:50]

So if you think you can learn without a conceptual framework, then it also may mean you believe that there's some natural state you can assume. And that Zazen will bring you back to that natural state. You know, there's at least some, there's a partial truth to that. So if you do zazen and use your cultural framework, you might learn something more. No, what is a human being?

[10:08]

It's a lot of years of learning. I'm surprised, you know, how fast these calves learn to walk, I mean, the same day. Today is Sophia's, I guess it's today or yesterday, her eighth month birthday. What, yesterday? She was eight months old. She still hasn't learned to walk. She's stupider than this calf. I suppose that that must mean she's just more complex than the calf. But her legs aren't particularly more complex. So it must be her consciousness. And shaping the complex consciousness of a human being seems to be inseparable from the development of the body.

[11:15]

Her ability to balance things and do what a calf can't do, put thumb and forefinger together. Seems to be a parallel development of both consciousness and physical development. And So we spend a big part of our life learning and then we spend the rest of our adult years basically teaching.

[12:17]

And so I don't think a woman, for instance, or a man should have a baby until they're old enough to teach. Maybe when the lifespan was 45 and you wanted to have five children, hopefully two would live. It made sense to start at 15. Really, we should wait until we can teach a child. You don't have to wait as long as I've waited, but... And also a teaching like Buddhism or a language like English or German learns through generations.

[13:45]

So it's not only the teaching of adults, it's the teaching of generations. Okay, so what we've got is Buddhism is a teaching of generations. So what is the framework of conceptual framework we bring to practice? Well, for example, many times people ask the question, who am I? And some Western Zen teachers say that's a good question to ask. I don't think it is, actually. I think a much more fruitful question is, what is the world? Here we have in the word virtue that man and world are the same root.

[15:04]

Whatever that means, in Buddhism it would be, you really have to be asking the question, what is the world? The world includes your knowing the world. So when you ask, what is the world, you're also asking, what is the act of knowing the world? Also, wenn du fragst, was ist die Welt, dann fragst du auch, wie kenne ich die Welt? Yeah, then that's a kind of what am I or who am I. Das ist so eine Art von wer bin ich. And again, what am I is a better question than who am I. Und was bin ich ist wiederum eine bessere Frage als wer bin ich. What, who excludes a lot of other people.

[16:07]

And who excludes the calf, the two calves that were born across the street? And who excludes the physical, material world? But what includes the physical world and other people? Yeah. So that's already a conceptual framework. Whether you ask who or what is a conceptual framework. No, you don't have to take my word for it. But now you have a choice. You can try out what is the world, and you can try out who am I. If you like who am I better, it's fine.

[17:14]

I'll try to let you know later. Okay. The choice is a conceptual framework. You can't get away from a conceptual framework. Now, if you know you can't get away from a conceptual framework, then you can develop a teaching that takes into consideration the fact that it's a conceptual framework. It becomes a visible structure rather than an invisible structure. And as a visible structure, you can have antidotes to the structure. You know, from the point of view of Buddhism, everything is artificial.

[18:30]

Or everything is art. But if you look up in a dictionary, any of these words, artifice, artificial or art... Well, artifice means something like, in English, means something like crafty or sneaky. Artifice isn't the same as craft. He used artifice to... It means you're sneaky or something. Artificial means it's fake or not real. And art is defined in an English dictionary... as the attempt to imitate nature, or alter nature, or counteract nature.

[19:48]

All of these words imply that human-made is something not as real as natural. and everything says that something created by man is not natural. I want to show you in English how deeply embedded this concept of what is natural is. If you want to practice Buddhism, adept Buddhism, you have to get yourself free of the idea that there's anything natural.

[20:49]

It's all a construct. So the word artificial... It's a construct. It's not fake. We constructed this room. Marie-Louise and I are busy constructing Sophia. And she's busy resisting our work. And she's busy constructing herself, too. But there's a lot of ingredients around. Whether she's doing it herself or we're doing it, it's a construction process. If I look at you right now with my eyes, I'm constructing what I see.

[21:51]

Yeah. Okay, so that's all just a little riff on that we have to have a conceptual basis to practice. And a conscious, intentional conceptual basis is more able to be dealt with than an invisible, unconscious conceptual basis. And a conscious conceptual framework is better to have a hand than an invisible structure.

[22:55]

Okay. So I... What I'll try to do is... give you a conceptual basis for the practice of compassion and wisdom and the relationship between compassion and wisdom. Also, was ich versuchen werde zu tun, ist euch einen konzeptuellen Rahmen zu geben für die Praxis von Mitgefühl und Weisheit und deren Beziehung zueinander. Are you ready? No. So, let's first have some discussion from the groups. Lass uns zuerst von der Diskussion der Gruppen hören. So. You don't really expect me to do all the work, do you?

[24:09]

Yeah. All right, good. Maybe I'll go to the end of the talk. After the rather dense ending of the lecture we were at first a little speechless. Oh, I'm sorry. And we tried to talk about the terms of continuum and emptiness, And as long as we try to do it more abstractly and describe these terms, It was difficult.

[25:11]

And the more we try to fill the terms by our practice or experience, it improved. Oh, yeah, I've discovered that myself, too. That was also the feeling of the group, that each of them reported their experience, how perhaps the approach with immunity and therapy And so each of us told out of her or his experience how this feeling of being a continuum was in them. And nevertheless it stayed difficult and we didn't really resolve this continuum and continuity.

[26:30]

Okay. Thank you. Yes. I was in the same group and I just want to add that for me that the continuum term became clearer that it's at the very bottom outside of space and time. Continuity is something which I need to do in my everyday life in order to feel the continuum underlying. That was her conclusion.

[28:11]

Good. Why do you say it's outside space and time? So each person can approach it. Me also. It's there all the time. Mm-hmm. Yeah, okay. I guess I would say in general that it holds through time. Okay, someone else? Yes? No. Yes, go ahead. People like you to be in their group because they know you'll speak. I already forgot a lot. Oh yeah, well, you're modest. So in the beginning we brought up the term continuum and it got lost throughout the discussion and at the end it appeared again.

[29:42]

And already in Kassel it was somehow a nebulous, mysterious type of term for me. And so there was the idea that the space around breathing and breath is something like that. But that term continuum doesn't really fit to that feeling. So I was confused now when you were talking about that everything is a construct.

[30:55]

And I have the question now, is also the term of continuum also a construct? Yes. It can only appear if I construct it. Yes. Yeah. I'm getting so fluent. Yeah, okay, yes. In our group, we also talk about... Deutsch, bitte. I think it's better to start with Deutsch. Do you want to translate it yourself? We talked about continuity.

[32:11]

We did not talk about what seems to have been discussed in other groups, what they call continual, and it seems to me certainly the discussion seems to go into a different direction and it seems to be two different concepts. And so, continuality, we talked about it in our group, that our personal feeling of continuity, so why do I think that 20 years ago I am still the same person as I am now, and this I that exists 20 years ago and now, that through experiences that I have in my memory I somehow construct the continuity and through that I can think. We asked the question, how or why do I think that I am the same person now as I... well, not the same person as I was twenty years ago, and that our memories

[33:22]

make kind of a construct of this I, and somehow, if I remember something from way back, it must be the same person or something. And then we discussed that, for example, in Sassen, one can make such an experience that there is no continuity, that it is interrupted. that some people, some neuroses or mentally ill people have the same problem, that they can no longer construct this ego and maybe somehow And we talked about the fact that sometimes in satsang one can have the experience of discontinuity, that for a very short moment one falls out of that kind of continuity.

[34:30]

but that somehow with people who are psychically ill... Psychologically ill? Psychologically ill. I'm psychically ill, but I'm not so psychologically ill. It is exactly there where they have the problems that they cannot construct their eye to function in our everyday world. And that somehow they don't know which of the different eyes they might have, they are, or they should identify. Okay. That was the discussion in your group. Not all discussion, but the discussion that goes with this other topic of continuum and continuity. Good, thank you. So that's three groups. Yeah. I am in the same group as Andreas. In our group we also talked about trust and that one cannot understand trust with the mind, but that trust is something that one can only feel very rarely in meditation or through the body.

[35:44]

So we talked also about trust in the same group with Andreas, and that trust is not something that one can get with the mind, but with the body. during meditation. That it is there also when we doubt with the mind that it is there. Okay, thank you. Our group had first a discussion about the German terms of Mitgefühl and Mitleid.

[36:50]

One means to feel with, and the other means to... Pity. Pity and compassion. Compassion and the other is compassion. In English it's both compassion and... Mitleid is more a Christian term, and we are all grown up in this Christian term. And so we wanted to make it more clear what means one, what the meaning is of these two terms. And then... we came to the point, what do we do in a moment when we realize in a talk or in a meeting with other people to catch the moment when we feel something is going a little slightly... Sometimes there are moments where you feel something and you make a break in a talk and people don't understand why you don't talk.

[38:05]

But for us it is important to make this break or to say, at the moment I don't know what's happening, to catch this moment and not to overpass it just by continuing what everybody is doing at the moment. We were discussing a lot about this, to catch this moment and how to deal with this moment to make it grippable. Okay. Deutsch, bitte. In unserer Gruppe haben wir erstmal eine Weile die Begriffe nochmal geklärt zwischen Mitgefühl und Mitleid und uns klargemacht, dass wir alle eigentlich mit dem Begriff von Mitleid grew up and changed and that we are also strongly influenced by it. And during the discussion or the conversation, it was about getting the moment within a conversation or at a meeting with people

[39:19]

where you have the feeling that something is not going right and how do I deal with it? And what possibilities do I have to really Thank you. Pardon me? He wants to add something. We have tried to understand what is the reason for the ability to feel. We have tried to understand what is the reason for the ability to feel. We tried to understand what the basis was of having the capacity to be compassionate.

[40:41]

And some people said that it's the capacity to resonate with other people. And somebody suggested to avoid the difficulties which arise with this term. With the problem that in German we have these two terms of compassion and pity. Different connotations that make it difficult. Somebody suggested that we should maybe use the term kombin. We asked ourselves what we can do to bring this feeling of equality and diversity into the background of this feeling of being human.

[41:54]

And we asked ourselves how we could bring in equanimity into the background of compassion. Because we found that if we go in resonance, it might get even worse since it might bring up something in us which worsens the problem that already existed and doesn't help the person. Oh, yeah. Okay. And then we looked at what possibilities there were, and one possibility was to take a break to reconnect with oneself. Another possibility that was said was the feeling that if I act here in the front, that I take myself back and, so to speak, take myself out of my activity in order to open up to Christ.

[43:11]

what happens in the group, so that it is a return and maybe something like emptiness or this giving and equality in my mind. To do that, to pause, to reconnect yourself with yourself and another technique when you're here and you're acting kind of, you know, in the front to lean back and by doing that you might be able to integrate or integrated background of emptiness or bringing into your action the giving without content become. Sounds good.

[44:26]

Afterwards I asked myself, on this discussion of pausing or waiting, what is right in me? Is it only a matter of time or not necessary to feel that something is right? Mm-hmm. Is it necessary to see the grass grow or not? Sorry, is it necessary to see the grass grow and then Deutsche Bitte? What does it mean to let something mature? Or to have a feeling that something has become mature? Is it just a question of time or what does it mean to let something mature? Okay.

[45:39]

Yes? But before you started to say something. We spoke about a sunset. It's the right time of day. So when we see the sunset, we don't keep just seeing it, but we kind of label it with the label of how nice it is. And instead of that I just noticed the sunset, there comes another concept in addition?

[46:46]

Oh, pass auf, du machst schon wieder Konzepte. Das ist aber frisch. Which comes in is, oh, you're making concept. That's false. That's not good. So on top of the other one. Yeah. Yeah, Pessoa has a poem where he says, looking at a sunset on the beach. Yes, Pessoa wrote a poem about a sunset on the beach. Yes, how beautiful the beach is. Did I really see it at all? And Goethe supposedly said, who can watch a sunset for more than 20 minutes? We talked about the term of emptiness and there was something confusing about it.

[47:57]

As long as it's dealing with forms, I can have some feeling to it, but when it comes to perception, the term loses usefulness for me. But maybe that's also because it is part of this conceptual framework? Could that be? That the term is difficult because it isn't part of any ordinary conceptual framework, or the term is difficult because we are trying to think of it in a conceptual framework. In a conceptual framework. Yes, that's certainly part of the difficulty.

[49:20]

But we still have to think of it within a conceptual framework, but it's rather difficult to do. For 2,500 years people have been having a problem So you're part of a long tradition. And someone else somewhere was going to say something. You were, yeah. to see that we have come to the conclusion that, as Megawashi said yesterday, who still has the Tatsuo cross, to feel the breath or Another thing in the concept of continuity is the concept of continuity.

[50:23]

I have already asked myself if not every moment, when we are in touch with the thing, the thing, with us, actually with all senses in touch, if that is not also continuity, what we basically want to practice here. My question was because you mentioned yesterday to give us a little bit about talking about continuity, to be in touch with the good game and stuff like that, and I was asking while we were discussing If not every moment we are in touch with something, with all our sense, we are in touch with the person, with something we're doing, with going down the stairs and putting our sense, one-wordedness, in that direction, isn't that also continuity, or a continuum?

[51:29]

It's more of a continuum. Yeah. So we're always in continuum when we're practicing. We are always in this continuum when we practice. I want to come back to that, so I will come back to that. And there is something else. We also talked about the help business. I was talking about the September 11th, that we watched TV and we felt all helpless. When we saw this happening, when we were little, our father was doing something and we felt helpless, and the same helplessness is in daily life, always. in the moment we try to go into equanimity and try to practice, in that moment we feel helpless, equanimity, something changed, there is a totally shift

[52:52]

actually in daily life when we are confronted with every moment. This helplessness we know from childhood on. I briefly mentioned yesterday that helplessness and serenity actually go hand in hand with each other. In the sense that we talked about September 11, when we all said helplessly what happened and also felt the powerlessness. Or if we remember that as a child with our to be confronted with older siblings or fathers and how powerless they were against what they were doing or what happened there, we can actually, if we only mention these things, I have felt that actually every moment in which we are helpless, if we do not also practice serenity or go into serenity through helplessness, into serenity, to accept things too.

[53:59]

Okay. Okay. Yes. To the concept and perception. What I don't understand, and what you just said, Gisela, is that the fact of seeing it somewhere is simply a prerequisite. And only the meaning that we give would make it something terrible or not. If it had been a film or something, then it would have a different meaning for us than what actually happened. And that's why we have brought something to this perception as a concept, that it has become so terrible. And that's why I don't know what the perception is now and what it is that we then add to it, so that it gets the meaning, namely these terrible events. And that's where I don't know what really happened at the time. In addition to what Gisela said, there is one part, which is this process of seeing this event happening.

[55:10]

And if it would be a film, it would have another meaning as if we are looking as a real event which is happening. And we add something to this experience, which makes us then real. event which triggers this feeling in us, compassion, feeling helpless and all these things. And what is going on there in terms that we are somehow in the process of perceiving things and then giving them constructs and adding something which then triggers other feelings in ourselves. And if we talk about concepts and all is constructed, I'm not sure where is this difference of what is really going on in the outside world and what we are making from this real thing in our mind.

[56:12]

In other words, if seeing a movie on television and seeing a real event on television are both constructs, how do we make a distinction? This is one part of it. If we see a film on television or a documentary, how do we make a difference in the meaning, in our feelings? Well, I have to make a distinction between somebody who says they're going to hit me and somebody who hits me. If he hits you, then you can feel it. Yeah, I know. Before he does it, before he is acting, I also make a difference. Yeah, well, he might change his mind at the last minute, you know. So just let me stay with my example a minute.

[57:27]

If somebody is thinking about hitting me or wants to hit me and restrains themselves, it's a construct. I'm thinking about what he's doing, he's thinking about what he's doing, and so forth. Once he hits me, I'm also thinking about should I respond or should I not respond and so forth. They're both constructs, but there's a difference. And I got to know the difference. Yeah. You know, there's something in California called the Winchester House. And it's down south of San Francisco. And it was built by the widow of the man who invented the Winchester rifle. And it's a huge house where she kept adding rooms all the time.

[58:39]

Because after her husband died, she didn't seem to mind spending the money that the rifle made for the family. She might have done better giving the money back, but instead she built this house. And it had secret stairways and secret doors and all kinds of things. And she had secret doors and stairs everywhere. Because she felt that everyone who had been killed by a Winchester rifle had come back as a ghost to get her. So she made this a men's house. To fool the ghosts.

[59:48]

Which room she might be in. If you're in California, you can take a tour of it when you drive south. Okay. I think one of the... causes of the situation we're in. As I told you, by the way, that I was in this Buddhist conference in those buildings just some weeks before the event. There are immense ugly buildings. It's one of the most ugly parts of New York. They're out of proportion. I mean, I don't think they should have been knocked down, but they were knocked down.

[60:57]

At least while anybody was around. But, you know, part of the cause of this is we shouldn't have made, we shouldn't make anthrax. We shouldn't have nuclear weapons. I mean, people, you cannot keep people in the borders of any country. They disperse. You can't keep ideas locked up. You can't keep nuclear weapons locked up. I mean, I think, and I've thought this for 20, 30 years, and I've told my family too.

[61:58]

My brother was in the helped develop the Atlas rocket and other things. He's a really nice guy, but I told him he was a criminal doing it. Those things you cannot say, I'm going to make something that's that everyone's going to get it. Well, right now it's pretty clear, I'm told, that from the Chechens, bin Laden has two nuclear weapons, at least. And the Russians made something like 80, no, 300 suitcase bombs as powerful as Hiroshima.

[63:02]

You can put them in a backpack or a suitcase. And supposedly, Russia denies it, but supposedly good sources say there's 80 missing. This is the world we've created. We created it. We're stuck with it. If we make things like this, everyone's going to have them eventually. So, I mean, I feel deeply responsible for these things. In the United States, there's, I think, 1,200 labs which have anthrax. And all of us talk about how difficult it is to make this weapons grade.

[64:17]

I think with a few thousand dollars and some laboratory equipment, you can make it. So it's going to be everywhere. What can you do about it? We shouldn't make such things, that's all. Wir sollten einfach solche Dinge nicht machen. Unser Leben ist aus der Proportion geraten. Ja, und wenn jemand kommt und versucht, Sophia zu schlagen oder zu verletzen, Yeah, because she's an American or because she's a German or because her uncle developed a missile. I'm not going to say, I'm still going to protect her. There comes a moment as a human being, despite being a Buddhist, and I'm going to fight.

[65:30]

So the question here is, at a societal level, is what happened at the World Trade Center the same as someone trying to kill Sophia? There's no question I'd fight to defend any one of you. How big a hit does it have to be for society fights? Maybe we should wait till there's a nuclear explosion. I'm not saying when that point is. I'm just saying I think there is a point where a society then has to fight. Yeah. We've been eliminating... Oh, I don't want to go into it anymore.

[66:39]

Okay, so let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about compassion and wisdom. And we can come back to some of these questions, but I think it's time to take a break. Now the question is, can we make sense of this together? The question is whether we can make sense together. Yes, the summary of your reports from the groups have helped me. Let me find the ingredients.

[67:41]

As Katrin and various of you have pointed out, there's this distinction of some sort between continuity and continuum. Well, they're just words, but we can try to make some distinction between them. I mean, we speak about the space-time continuum. Yeah, we can... It would sound funny to say it's space-time continuity. We could say there was a continuous sound that... In the city or something. It would be something different if we said there was a continuum of sound.

[68:57]

That would be more like saying something like the Hindus say that there's this kind of going underneath everything. Now, any of these practices, we have to find some way to touch them. Touch base, we say, from baseball. And so... Let's go back to Sophia. Excuse me. I haven't done it much. She has a continuous interest in her mother. Her attention to her mother, there's a great continuity there. She loves her father, but she likes to love her father from her mother's arms.

[70:16]

Sie liebt ihren Vater, aber sie liebt es, ihn zu lieben aus den Armen ihrer Mutter. She gets in my arms. If Marie-Louise is over there, her head goes that way. If Marie-Louise walks this way, her head goes this way. Sie kommt in meine Arme und wenn Marie-Louise da ist oder dort, geht ihr... I can turn around and just know where Marie-Louise is. Ich kann mich einfach umfassen und schon wissen, wo Marie-Louise ist. Yeah, so Marie-Louise is kind of my north star. Okay. But she's trying to establish a proprioceptive continuum. Is the word proprioception or proprioceptive common in German? No. Okay. It means the ability... It's used by poets and other people, but initially it's a kind of medical term. It means... Actually, the word means to receive on one's own.

[71:19]

Yeah. I need more of what you want to say so that it makes sense. So in our muscles and various parts of our body there is a kind of receptor which tells our body what its position is. And she can't walk until she establishes that. Okay, but at some point you establish an ability to know where your body is. And to monitor your posture.

[72:28]

As a... Gisela said all day long you have a feeling of where your body is, going upstairs, downstairs, etc. Now the dictionary says that this is an unconscious process. Practice is to make that more conscious and intentional. Also die Praxis ist, das mehr bewusst und absichtsvoll zu gestalten. So you tend to sit, if you sit at chairs, unless it feels weird, you tend to sit upright without leaning back. Ja, und wenn du dich setzt auf einen Stuhl, ohne dass es sich komisch anfühlt, dann setzt du dich so, ohne nach hinten zu lehnen.

[73:28]

Sometimes it looks unfriendly. Everybody else is sitting around with a beer and you're sitting here. Makes you look like a young monk or something. A beer? Oh, I'll sip it. Yeah. But in general, you become conscious of uprightness. Now, we could say that's a physical continuum. And I think if you can be aware that you are always in a physical continuum monitoring your posture, Or being aware of your posture. Even during the night, if you shift in bed, often you know when you shift and so forth.

[74:29]

Okay, so that's a continuum. Now, once you... If you become more aware of that, we all have it. Now you can use that to understand what it means in Buddhism to establish a mental continuum. you have a need for continuity. Practice is to recognize that need for continuity and try to shift how you establish that continuity. And as I continuously point out, my pointing out is almost a continuum.

[75:45]

At some point you can find your continuum in your body and your breath. And then people have questions like, well, does that mean I have to, like I bring my attention to counting my breath? Do I have my attention on my breath all day? Well, yes, you try to establish a continuity with the breath through an intentional effort of attention. But at some point that becomes a continuum. When you no longer need to find your continuity in your thinking, and the problem with thinking, one of the problems, a structural problem with thinking as where we find our continuity,

[77:06]

is that thinking is not a continuum. It's affected by our moods and all kinds of things. So there's an inherent structural instability by defining continuity in our thinking. So practice says, wisdom practice says, find your continuum that's more stable. The breath is used to direct that process. Your breath is like someone saying, well, don't go down that road, this road.

[78:15]

And when you shift this sense of continuity to your breath... You have begun the process of establishing a continuum in awareness that's not a continuity in consciousness. This is not something you're born with. Sophia will not do this unless she has teaching. And it's taken generations to... to learn this. But lots of things we do. Our language took generations to learn.

[79:16]

We take it for granted, but it took generations to be created. So we could call a language a multi-generation wisdom activity or teaching. So this shift from continuity to continuum is a multi-generational wisdom teaching. Now that's your choice whether you want to do it or not. Whether you see the point of it or you have some big problem which actually it turns out that that's a remedy for the problem. And Buddhism says, actually, we all have a big problem.

[80:21]

Suffering itself. And this is a solution. Okay. So here we have the Four Noble Truths. There's suffering. There's a cause of suffering. And there's a freedom from suffering. And that freedom from suffering is a shift from continuity to continuum. Okay. So... We talked about the root cause or the root of compassion.

[81:27]

And I said it's the mother's love and the search for what is good. And to make this decision, the root is there, but whether you turn it into a cause is up to you. If we know the possibility of mother's love, or we know the possibility of falling in love, if we have this capacity and we have this experience, why is life in such a mess?

[82:33]

You know, I don't know why, but I know when I was very little I could not I grew up in the Second World War. And every day there was a ritual, like right now, of listening to the news. Every morning and every evening, at least every morning and every evening. For six years. Yeah, from, I don't know, 1939 or something to 1945. We listened to the news in my house. So from the time I was three till I was eight, every day was a ritual of listening to the news. And what did I hear? All about casualties and filthiness. And I grew up deciding I would have to, particularly being a boy, I would have to fight in a war sometimes.

[83:40]

So I spent a certain percentage of my time when I was young thinking about could I do it, would I do it, should I start training? And at some point I decided I wouldn't do it. I didn't care what the conditions were, I wouldn't do it. No, I'm not so sure, but then I was sure. And particularly when the nuclear weapons were developed, we dropped the bomb in Hiroshima, I decided I'm not going to fight in a war which has nuclear weapons. So the search for what is good has to come out of some kind of, you know, often some kind of experience.

[85:08]

Either psychological suffering or seeing societal suffering. And deeply wondering if you can do something about it. And a decision not to give up. It's like you don't grow out of it. Most of us grow out of it, but some of us, probably us here, don't grow out of it. So the search for what is good arises from a feeling of compassion. Okay, now what is the root of wisdom? Okay, the root of wisdom is... The search for the truth.

[86:14]

But what is the experiential root of wisdom? Experiential. Well, that's a little harder to say. Yeah, it's not mother's love. Yeah, it's... Sometimes I think it's an experience, as I've often said, like sunbathing. Because sunbathing, I think people actually have an experience of freedom from self for a little while. The great sun god, O Tanmi, is worshipping you. And you forget the time and you hear sounds and so forth. Yeah. And you... I think graphically people sunbathe often.

[87:34]

I don't know if they go to tanning studios for the same reason. Maybe that's more vanity. They kind of have a kind of tuning out. Okay. But also the... Yeah, the search for the truth also becomes a kind of search for the self. So one of the roots of wisdom is when you can't really find a self. Now, not everyone's going to be so inclined. Most kids aren't inclined to... Philosophical enough to say, you know, they just live their life, right? But sometimes you do wonder, what is myself? You know, I can only share some of my own experiences. I don't know what it means. But I remember in college, working as a waiter in the summer on Cape Cod.

[88:57]

I suddenly woke up and I slept in a bunk bed. I remember they had four waiters sleeping in one room. I woke up in bed in the middle of the night and said, I'm an American. It was actually when I stopped being an American. Because I woke up and I could not figure out what that meant. I remember a Japanese sociologist said that people are always asking me what it's like to be Japanese. And he said, I don't know. I've never been anything else. You have nothing to compare it to. You have nothing to compare it with.

[90:08]

Am I geographically an American? You know, Americans, if you live in America, it's not a homogeneous country. There's virtually as many kinds of Americans as there are many kinds of Europeans. So Americans really don't identify with America unless they're fundamentalist Christians. Also, die Amerikaner identifizieren sich nicht so mit Amerika, außer sie sind fundamentale Christen. Any more than French people identify with being German. So I couldn't figure out what it was to be an American. And that made me figure out what does it mean to say I have a self when I'm a particular person. So that little observation was a root for me of wisdom practice.

[91:15]

I didn't know it at the time. But somebody who was a And an old friend who was a disciple of mine for many years. A root of wisdom for him is when he went, he's Jewish, and he went from New Jersey to Michigan to go to college. From New Jersey to Michigan. When he got there, he found everyone had an accent. But they said he had an accent. And that made him realize it's all somehow relative.

[92:16]

So, really, he's decided not to be a rabbi and to become a Buddhist priest. So these roots of wisdom can be something very commonplace, but it depends on how thoroughly you notice it. So the search for what is self is a root of wisdom. And the search for truth is a root of wisdom. To try to know things as they are. Not as you're told they are, but as they are.

[93:32]

Okay. Now the word compassion is probably, it's not so useful for us to, a more useful way to look at what compassion means in Buddhism. Also eine nützliche Art anzuschauen, was Mitgefühl im Buddhismus bedeutet. What to say, we're looking for a shared basis. Würde sein, dass wir eine gemeinsame, geteilte Grundlage suchen. A common basis. Eine gemeinsame Grundlage. as Christian brought up, the idea of a basis. What's the basis? So what is a common basis? Well, in...

[94:25]

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