Well, let's continue yesterday and today's discussion. Who will help us? Okay. Yes, of course. For me, yesterday and today, the most interesting point was that we talked about the relationship between the ordinary and the holy. What's the relationship between the holy and the usual, the ordinary? And in my personal practice I find it very difficult to feel it related to each other.

[01:07]

And I know that I'm doing the separation. You know that you tend to make a separation between the ordinary and the old. Yeah, I know that I tend to experience them as separated. Okay. It's about feeling that it's separated. When I have the feeling that everything is one, or a feeling of... How can I describe it? And there's a feeling of all at onceness. It's difficult for me in this all at onceness to find or feel the ordinary. And at the same time I also have a longing or a feeling for this sentence. How do you understand siblings with the same breath or neighboring branches?

[02:26]

And at the same time, there is a longing and a feel for this sentence, how do you understand sisters or siblings with the same breath or the same... Adjoining branches. Adjoining branches. Yeah. Well, can you give me an example of what you would feel was ordinary and what would you feel or define as holy? Okay. This is an example of what is meant between ordinary and holy. Well, I would say that holy is an experience where I feel where my spirit continues to feel. Holy is an experience where my mind feels wider. Holy is an experience where my mind feels wider.

[03:34]

Or as I had in the last discussion told, as if I would see myself through the eyes of the others who are facing me. But if I were in that looking from the others towards me, a kind of connectedness. But it's rather a vague feeling. And ordinary or common, I call it when I establish separation. And I have difficulties bringing this together. Okay, good, thank you. Yes, Otmar? One thing that this is about is the practice of not falling into steps and stages. But in many koans something like parallel truths are being offered.

[05:06]

Or somebody who is busy and not busy. And I ask myself then, are these really parallel truths that run parallel? Or how do I practice with them? And is there really a further step in my practice? Who is it that holds up the broom? And one of them says, there are two moons, that's where it's going, there are two moons when you are busy and someone who is not busy. Or like in this koan where there's the one who's busy and the one who's not busy and it is being said there, then there are two moons. But for me it comes back to this image of the raising of the basin and the question, what kind of moon is that?

[06:13]

Maybe it's something like in a third truth. I don't know, the third truth is already a category, but it's just suddenly this picture. Without being able to say what kind of moon the broom is, that's actually a strange question, but somehow it's coming together again, it's melting in there again. And for me it comes back together or it merges in this image of holding up the broom. That's almost like a third truth. And that's already, again, a category, so it's hard to say. And maybe it's also a funny question to ask what moon is this, but somehow in my experience it comes together in holding up the broom. Okay, good, thanks. Oh, what? Wow. Okay. Whoever was first, I think.

[07:15]

In our group we spoke about host mind and guest mind particularly in zazen and in our experience. And the theoretical background of our discussion was also the introduction of the 21st koan, where it says that illusion and enlightenment are shed. But host mind and guest mind are being set up. And we asked ourselves, where is the difference? And the feeling in that was that illusion and enlightenment are very dual categories.

[08:47]

When there is illusion there is no enlightenment and when there is enlightenment there is no illusion. while host mind and guest minds are like two poles that define one another. And that is also reflected in experience. And although there are leaps in zazen, it does not feel like, okay, well, now he has host mind and, oh, now I fell into guest mind or something. But it's more overlapping and a flowing into each other where one flows into the other.

[09:49]

Good, thanks. Thanks. Yesterday we also spoke about this image of the spatial pause. I'm not sure that this is an image. I think I don't fully understand that. You don't understand what? The spatial pause? Yeah. The operant pause. With all the things that can happen in this pause. With the four qualities or the three steps of acceptance and so on. It must be a rather long pause.

[11:13]

Don't forget, your whole life can pass before you in a flash if you were in a tragic situation. But I have an image of you in the middle of your pause, trying to make it bigger and force things in. So this is why I'm asking, does it mean something like a timeless experience, experiencing timelessly, maybe? Yeah. I mean, there's a quality of timelessness about it.

[12:17]

But not of duration particularly. Mostly I just want to listen because I'm trying to find out how to swim in your minds. I hope you don't mind me splashing around. But definitely, and Dogen is a great exemplar of it, he spatializes everything. But it's characteristic of our lineage is that Concepts are embodied and embodiment is a kind of space.

[13:21]

So time is experienced as spatial. And I remember writing with Sukhya she once. I was driving him somewhere. And it is clear that although you are over there, from a spatial point of view, there's no here and there. But if I try to go to you, it takes time. Well, New York and Los Angeles or Berlin and Bad Sacking exist simultaneously. But to go from one to the other takes time.

[14:22]

But when you primarily emphasize space, time tends to be quite different. So we're driving along. And I said to Suzuki Roshi, then there's no time. Meaning in part of our conversation about there's only space. And I said, so there's no time. He just said, yes, there is. I didn't answer. I just kept driving. And I pondered it for a long time, some years. Yeah, okay. You know, conversation between Zen teachers and students is sort of like that, nothing much.

[15:39]

Okay, someone else. Yes, Paul? From the lecture several days ago, when you offered as a practice the motionlessness of the senses, I've been exploring this and found particularly helpful your comment yesterday that the motionlessness of the senses as I understood what you said that the motionlessness of the senses, as I understood what you said, can also take place in the activity. And relating to this topic of guest mind and host mind,

[16:48]

I feel both stabilized in the feeling, aiming at each of these minds. But I also feel an important part of the stability is the activity and the relationship, the moving, the foreground and background motion of these minds. But I have the feeling that a large part lies in this activity and the relationship of the movement between these two spirits. So the dynamic has become, rather than the object of these minds, the dynamic between them has become foreground for me. The content of them or the experience of them. Okay?

[18:09]

Thank you. Vokel? Nochmal zu der Pause. Uns haben sich einige Fragen gestellt im Zusammenhang mit der Pause. Again, back to the pause, for us there have been several questions in relationship to the pause. So first of all, is the pause something that I need to generate or is it already there and I just need to perceive it? So is being in flow or being in the zone, is that identical or is it similar at least or is it something different from this pause? And it was clear that this pause is not just non-activity.

[19:20]

And we had a feeling that maybe it has something to do with the difference between consciousness and awareness. You said, is it already there? Strictly speaking, there's nothing already there. Even if you call it already there, it's still something that you're perceiving.

[20:21]

It's created in your perceptions. So in that sense, you're making the pause. Okay. But there is a sense that it's already there. For example, the experience of duration again, as I keep saying, is created by us. But what's it created from? It's created from pauses. In the sense that psychotic scanning is really... many, many little pictures that your brain puts together as if they were all joined. And Some people occasionally, under certain states of mind, can feel the separateness of them, if your mind's really relaxed.

[21:47]

So at a physiological level, we're in the midst of pauses. But our whole body and mental apparatus is meant to produce continuity. So it's not just that the continuity of On every level, let me keep it simple, on every level there's no continuity. Now, let me just mention what I first talked about prior to my cataract operation. What I found very interesting First of all, before I tell you what I found interesting, I found out from the physician, from the doctor who did the operation, that I had only 40% vision in this eye and I had 50% vision in this eye.

[23:13]

Okay, so this eye had 50%, only 40% vision. But it presented me with a completely intact world as if it was 100%. I didn't notice that I only had 50%, 40% vision. Because my brain can put together a picture of the world from probably 20% of information. Okay. So... I noticed there are certain rings around the moon and rings around lights, but basically everything looked 100%.

[24:24]

But my brain was doing all the work. And my eye was only supplying 40% of the information. And around November of last year, I suddenly found if, yeah, the picture is complete, but a truck can go right through it and I don't see it. This is not too safe, I thought to myself. Because as soon as the information was complex and moving objects, my eye did not give me enough information for my brain to make a complete picture.

[25:25]

And as Marie-Louise knows, somewhat to her exasperation, If I'm going somewhere, by myself at least... Excuse me, what's exasperation? Exasperation? Frustration. Exasperation. Are you exasperated too? Because if I'm going somewhere, by myself at least... I pack all day. I have meetings and conversations and phone calls. And finally around 9 o'clock in the evening they subside and I decide, okay, now I drive. So I start driving in the middle of the night.

[26:38]

Well, on that trip to Denver or was it Colorado Springs? Anyway, in November. Yeah, I reached the tipping point or the blind point. I really couldn't see driving. I couldn't figure out where the sides of the road were or where the truck was on my side or the other side. So I was doing a lot of concentration there. This was this side of the road a few minutes ago. But I'm not too smart, so I had one more trip like that in the middle of the night, and I said, uh-uh, I can't do it, this is crazy.

[27:47]

So I made an eye appointment to... Yeah, okay, so in the midst of all these pauses, trucks were passing through. Where did that truck go? I pause. Where did that truck go? I pause. Just a quick anecdote. I spoke at the U.S. Air Force Academy a few weeks ago. And I talked about, in the context of situated immediacy, Or like this pausing for the particular and then the field of mind.

[29:02]

And a fighter pilot instructor came up to me afterwards. So that just sounds like what I try to teach the pilots. Because you can't look at the instrument panel if there's enemy planes flying over your head. Okay. Who's up next? First we spoke a lot about the pauses, but maybe somebody else can talk about that. And then we shifted to speaking about breath.

[30:03]

And several people had... to have similar experiences, particularly in relationship to spine and breath. And I also agree with the experience that through the connection between the breath and the spine, micro-movements or very fine movements occur in the spine that interact with the breath. And also we spoke about the experience that in the relationship between spine and breath and the fine-tuning of spine and breath that there are very tiny movements, micro-movements happening in the spine that are fine-tuned to the breath.

[31:34]

And especially my question is that I can observe it with interest and while the breath and the spine act accordingly. And my experience is that particularly in zazen I can watch this, I can watch that with all my interest, how spine and breath are negotiating this thing. And also very interesting about spine and breath, that I don't often see it as movement in the breath, but rather as a field surrounding the spine. And what's interesting is that recently I experience breath particularly not so much as an emotion but more as a field that is located around the spine.

[32:43]

Not moving up and down. Okay. Thank you. That helps. Oh, wait, and he also said that, I thought that was interesting, that it doesn't make a difference whether he's breathing in and out in this field. At least for a while. Of course, breathing in and out does take place, but in this field or in this pillar around the spine, it doesn't make that much of a difference. That's not in the foreground of what's happening. Yeah. The entry to that feeling is through the breath, but in the end it's not really breath. Someone else? Yes. I have a rather rough question for orientation.

[34:00]

This morning you spoke about the discursive mind and the intentional mind and how different they are. This morning you spoke about discursive mind and intentional mind and how they are different. Now we also spoke about not inviting thoughts to tea and about host and guest and about consciousness and awareness. And for me it's not so clear how the relationship between intentional mind and awareness works. Are these three concepts or ideas on the same level?

[35:23]

Intentional mind, discursive mind and awareness? I can't categorize intentional mind. Intentional mind, discursive mind and awareness, are these three terms on the same level? Where is intentional mind? Oh dear, yes. Experientially, of course, I do feel a difference. Well, what counts is your experience. What we name it is something else. Okay. You want to trust your experience. Now, then the question, does the naming point at useful inflections of your experience?

[36:27]

And that's the, you know, I've been creating this kind of terminology now for a few decades. And I have to keep sorting it out. And I have to sort it out again and again. We are such subtle beings that no matter how carefully I develop the terminology, our subtlety is more subtle than the terminology that I can make. But I think that the terminology for all of us and for me has been useful in developing our acuteness. So let me go back a minute to Volker.

[37:44]

We have to start somewhere. So we have these concepts of consciousness and awareness and so forth. And mind and enlightenment and illusion. Okay. So there's various ways to kind of notice this experientially. One of them is to notice, to develop a pause in your in your experience. Now, you've got to start with the simplest sense of a pause.

[38:46]

And I tried to suggest that the entry into the simplest sense of a pause is this phrase I used, to pause for the particular. So every time you notice something, you have a feeling of pausing for a minute for the notice, to let the noticing happen. So if I hit the bell... In this case, with the bell, there's quite a long pause before I hit it again. But for me, there's a sense of a pause, lots of pauses in there.

[39:59]

When I brought the bell here, I did it in a series of pauses. I brought these two together and I felt them as two things which I'm holding together. I mean, you must do things like this as a daily work as a surgeon. Normally, you just, I mean, I think before I started to practice, I would have just brought these over here with a kind of visual image in my mind of the possibility of moving this from one point to another. One of my first insights into this, experienced insights into this,

[41:01]

I was working with Charlotte Selver at the very first seminar and I started with her almost identically studying with her almost at exactly the same time as starting to study with Sukhi Rishi. And she said, come up to standing. And she said, come up to standing. So until then, no one had ever said anything like that to me. They always said, stand up. So stand up is a concept which asked me to move from position A to position B. Okay, but what she asked me is to go through position A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, etc.

[42:37]

Come up to standing. So I found, just because she directed my attention that way, that I moved through a series of postures which resulted in my doing what's called standing up. But there was never a position called standing up. There was a position called standing. A gerund like tree or twin. So there was standing, which is a series of positions.

[43:47]

Okay. So if I... Then I took the bell and put it down separately. So what I'm doing is I'm not moving... I'm not acting within generalizations. I'm acting within a physically defined territory and not a mentally defined territory. So when I pick up the stick, for me there's a little pause just picking up the stick. And then I move the stick so I can hit it. But what I experience is not so much the move, but the pause before I hit it.

[45:10]

And a pause to get it there. And my pause when I let the stick, as much as possible, hit it and not me. So I've tried to describe this, the earlier version of trying to present this, was I said there's two things you ought to work with in your moment-by-moment activity. One is to do things so that you feel nourished as you do them. And the second is to do things so that each identifiable action feels complete. And to do things within a field of a series of completions

[46:20]

is what's meant by dharma practice. But that means that you have to physically embody the series of completions which is simultaneously the moment by moment flow of awareness into the action. Okay, so in a way we could say it's a flow of completions actualized through awareness. Mm-hmm. So if I bring my hand up I bring it up to the point where it feels complete.

[47:33]

If I straighten my shirt here I do it with a feeling of each thing I do it completely. I don't just do it. There's a feeling of moving in a field of a series of completions. When you see a Theravadan monk walking very slowly down to sort of like the neighbors at the coal-burner's wall and then back and then back. What he's doing is moving and we do in Kenyan is a series of completions. Now, as I often say If you do things each moment with a feeling of completeness, the end of the year you're going to feel complete.

[48:59]

If you're always doing things not quite complete and distracted and worried about this, you're going to feel shitty. It's just simple. A plus B equals, you know, shit. This is Zendergarten Buddhism. You know, basic stuff. When you start practicing you start doing this consciously. First of all consciously and then awarenessly. Somehow the shift will, I presume, be that you don't have to do it consciously. That's right.

[49:59]

You practice it consciously first and then it disappears into a bodily awareness. Okay, let me go back to Volker. Yes, so if I wait as you say, the shitty, then I don't need to wait long, but I feel like I'm already at the end of the day. I see, I'm about it, yeah. From shit and more, and out of it. If I do things shitty, then I don't need to wait that long. I see already at night that I feel entirely burnt out and shitty. Yeah, that's right. It's right. You don't have to wait until the end of the year.

[51:01]

The feedback is fairly quick. The feedback is fairly quick. Can I compare the pause and the zero moment? Yeah, sure. You can even join them if you'd like. You know, practice is really simple. Look at these just two simple things, nourishing and completeness. You've heard the idea. The idea doesn't mean anything. You have to decide somehow, a bodily decision. I will pay attention to my physical and mental activity, postures.

[52:12]

And notice when they're nourishing and when they're not. Okay. And once I've really got a feel for when my physical movements are nourishing, like speaking to you right now is nourishing. This morning during Teisho, I can try to say something white, the speaking was not nourishing for me. So I have made a vow that I will never do anything that's not nourishing. Period.

[53:18]

And if I do something that's not nourishing, I spend whatever it takes after that to kind of recover from it and discover how not to do that again. I sum that up also as never sacrifice your state of mind. So if you just take a kind of intention to really live within a field of nourishment and completion, all of Buddhism will open up before you. And I'm such a thoroughly unhappy person if I'm not in the field of nourishment that, you know, it made good sense for me to stay in the field of nourishment. The vow wasn't that hard to take. And when I get into a territory where I don't feel nourished I feel like I've fallen off a boat or something.

[54:37]

Yeah, and I'm being pushed under water and I'm trying to find, where's that boat where I'm nourished? Or the dock or something like that. Somebody else wanted to say something, I think. Yes, Lolita? I totally agree with you, but sometimes, this happened during this week, for a short moment I was not careful with myself, and when I feel not nourished and I didn't notice it soon enough, I get kind of somatic pain, like we're back now. The feeling is, and we can avoid it, sometimes it just happens, but how can we train ourselves to be more aware in our daily life?

[55:57]

Sometimes you have a pretty hard job where a lot of people draw on you, return to your breath. Sometimes I just go to the toilet to take a deep breath and go again to my office to be more protective. I agree with Froschi. I was very attentive this week and I summarize the short part of Neymar's book. The main secret is the strength and clarity of your intent. Das wahre Geheimnis ist die Stärke und die Klarheit deiner Absicht.

[57:04]

And your willingness not to suffer the consequences of not sacrificing your intent. Und bereit zu sein, dass du die Konsequenzen erträgst, deine Intention nicht zu opfern. And I've wondered, if we take what Immanuel Kant said, The starry skies, the wonder of the starry skies above us and the moral law within him above me and within me are constantly before me and are joined in the consciousness of my existence.

[58:05]

That can be extrapolated straight into Buddhism. My experience of big mind let's just put it that way and my rootedness in not harming anything my rootedness in ethics or virtue, allow me then to not sacrifice my state of mind, shall we say. That's why ethics and virtue are so powerfully emphasized in Buddhism. Now, I don't know how people are strong enough to be criminals.

[59:10]

If you're doing something where you're dealing drugs and harming children and I don't know what, let's say, take a real negative view, How do you ever have a calm state of mind? They must have enormous ability to kind of block everything and just act through the most primitive emotions. That's an extreme example. But if you have that kind of job and you're a Buddhist, you ought to quit. And that's what Buddhism says, right livelihood.

[60:19]

But if you're a stockbroker, say, in New York, and you're always sort of a little bit cheating and lying, and you say, why is my state of mind so bad? Well, you just ought to quit your job. But in most of our cases we have responsible jobs that benefit others. But they still can be very demanding. Your job is understaffed and you have to do the work of two and a half people and somehow you've got to find a way within that to... live a nourished life or change your job. And I'm not in any way saying you should change your job. But you gave me some ingredients.

[61:45]

And the important thing here is that we can't always make every situation work. Some situations which are okay for some person may not be okay for you. So right livelihood means how to match the way you earn your living, live your life, with practice. How to match it with practice. And if you look at the demography of the Dharma Sangha in Europe, it's composed of people who mostly have done that. Okay, Marie-Louise? No, you just asked who wanted to say something, and I said Christa.

[62:47]

Oh, Christa. Oh, okay, Christa. When you spoke about the satisfaction of what's happening, I know that very well. And in the beginning, I had difficulties with this practice of pausing. But now I find that to be a very powerful practice.

[64:02]

Particularly because through that one can interrupt the habits of daily life. And there are various ways to practice with it. And there are various ways to practice with it. And there's one thing that I experience as satisfying. And that is to focus several actions into small units. And then to create beginning, beginning, duration and end. and then to emphasize the end.

[65:09]

So that the end becomes the pause. Because when the end becomes the pause then one moves on very consciously into the new thing. Yes, just like you said with the bell As you said that about Kin Hin with the bell and, you know, first bring the feet together and then walking. And then I also know something very helpful, namely And then what I find very helpful is to pause by entering different rooms. because what happens there is the perception of time.

[66:23]

You can feel the time that's in the space and you can also feel the time with which you enter the space. And this pausing in general for me has a lot to do with time, with perceiving different times. Yeah, good, thank you. So let me, we have to stop soon, so let me say a couple of things if I can. I would say that the pause defeated General Motors. Toyota defeated General Motors because of the pause.

[67:31]

I think it's the biggest corporation, maybe General Electric is, biggest corporation in the world, down the tubes. Go ahead. The religion in Japan is being Japanese, not Buddhist. Some of them are also Buddhist. But I would say it's the most yogic culture in the world. More than China. So the culture has absorbed this sense of doing things in very aware ways. And when they first started coming into the market as real cars, not junk, The repair, as you probably all know, but if you rated cars on repairs, a Toyota would last for, you know, would have five repairs in ten years, and a Chevrolet would have five repairs a month.

[69:07]

And if you had to rate the cars because of the frequency in which they had to be repaired, then it was like a Toyota car in five repairs per year, or at least significantly less than a Chevrolet. And the General Motors car was conceived of getting you from point A to point B. And the Toyota was the experience of being in the car moment after moment. Not worrying about where you're going. Getting there was secondary. The satisfaction in getting there was what counted. A friend of mine made a movie called Kentucky Fried Chicken.

[70:11]

I should get it. You'd like to see it. But it's Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tokyo. Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tokyo. And they teach the clerks never hand something to another person unless you're fully facing them. And when you're going to go pick something up turn and take it with two hands bring your whole body back face the person fully and then hand it to them.

[71:17]

Exactly like we do the ordination ceremony. The atmosphere in a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Tokyo is simply different. You feel there's real people and there's a feeling of the presence, human presence. So you can even have a Kentucky Fried Chicken that's a yogic chicken. You can transform your job. And you'll have the most successful Kentucky Fried Chicken on the block.

[72:23]

Or Starbucks or whatever it is. Yeah. Okay, I could riff more about this stuff in California and new businesses, but I'll stop. Now, who spoke first today? You. Okay. So you brought up some things I will try to respond to maybe tomorrow. Also du hast ein paar Dinge angesprochen, wo ich versuchen werde, darauf morgen noch zu sprechen zu können. And then Otmar spoke. And then Otmar gesprochen. Okay, now Otmar brought up the fact that in all these koans there's a kind of this and that. The one who's not busy, the one who's busy, etc. Otmar hat diese Tatsache herausgestellt, dass es in allen koans immer so ein Gefühl von dem und dem gibt, der, der geschäftig ist und der, der nicht geschäftig ist.

[73:28]

This is the way we humans function. We make a distinction or we don't make a distinction. And to not make a distinction is a distinction. Computers are based on ones and zeros. Google manipulating one and zero can give me the etymology of a word faster than I can move my hand to my teacup. With a flash. All this stuff. I mean, if I looked in a dictionary, I mean, it's all ones and zeros. It's also black and white, the dictionary. Yeah, okay. All right. So, but once you have one and two, you have three.

[74:33]

You can add them together. And so you start getting, just with small units, you start getting a lot of complications. Or complexity, rather. As Dieter said, you can have one and one separate or you can have one and one overlapping. And you can have one and one make two. And you can have one minus one and you have zero. everything falls into these categories. Okay. That's one of the things that makes it so difficult for me often to find out how to speak with you about these things.

[75:34]

And I realized this morning that I've reached a point in discussing this one and these three koans, I'd lost a feeling of how to take the next step. So this morning I spoke a bit about what we need to do to take the next step. But I was unable to find out how to take the next step. So it's been very helpful for me to listen to this discussion. And I jokingly said, but there's some kind of feeling that I'm swimming in your minds.

[76:42]

Because you say something and I can feel the ideas and things that back that up and around it, etc. And I can discover what kind of water is necessary to float the boat. Because, again, we're talking about ones and zeros and two and three and minus zero and so forth. It's the same ingredients every philosopher or teacher or whatever has. It's the ingredients of how we think. And in alternatives.

[77:47]

But there's an alternative where you have an alternative and you decide not to have the alternative after you've decided to have the alternative. That's a different kind of alternative. So where can I move in these alternatives, these possibilities of the way we think, and move us into a new territory? Almost drowning this morning, I think I've found out how to swim. So tomorrow we'll see if I can keep my head above water. You didn't know giving lectures was such a weird thing, huh? Splash, splash, I'm taking a bath. I'm surrounded by Saturday night. It is Saturday night.

[78:52]

Friday night. Splish, splash, I'm taking a bath. Do you all know that song? Splish, splash, I'm taking a bath along about Saturday night. The whole image is a New York flat where the bathtub is in the kitchen. In Berlin, too? The whole family's around and you're sitting in the bathtub. By the way... Michael Jackson just died. He had a heart attack at 50 years old. So let's have four bells for Michael Jackson.

[79:23]

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