The discussion of appearance, of course, comes from the practice of Zen Buddhism. It seems to me that the concept of appearance as a shift, excuse me, as a flow of uniqueness And a modality which shifts with context. And which has a kind of archaeological depth. In other words that you can, that within appearance is the history of its appearance.

[01:06]

which is another words for the three aspects I mentioned, plus a confirmation of aliveness itself. It seems to me that these can easily be seen as aspects of a constellation. Anyway, I just mentioned that to see if there are any aspects of what I said about appearance or anything else that you'd like to discuss.

[02:20]

Yes. Yes. What I've been thinking about and what Francisco Varela taught us, that we are surrounded by physicality. Physicality. physical phenomena.

[03:24]

That we are a closed biological system. That is structurally coupled with our environment. When I look at seeing, we know that in the back of our eye, everything is turned upside down. In fact, we're seeing everything upside down. But I do not see you turned upside down on your head.

[04:31]

You're actually sitting on the ground. You haven't practiced long enough. You haven't practiced long enough. Go ahead. My question is superfluous. No, no, please go ahead. Okay. How do we know that appearance is pure because the brain does turn things around? And how do we know So the brain is... So the brain is doing that, that appearance is a process within ourselves.

[05:38]

Where is the boundary... so that we can speak of pure sensation. It's just an example, seeing as an example, or hearing, or touch, whatever. Well, I mean, I use the word pure with reluctance, because there's no such thing. It's ambiguous. In fact, Buddhism, in the fundamental sense, says everything is ambiguous and so forth.

[06:39]

In practice, though, we're not talking about the atoms and molecules and electrons and so forth. We're talking about an experienceable realm within our senses. So within the realm of our experience, we can have an experience which seems like the essence of something or the pure version of something.

[07:40]

The pure experience of something. which is not yet, for example, structured by mind. So there's a horizon to experience. But, you know, it's not that the... I mean, you can feel... your brain thinking and functioning. I can. But I don't feel it turning things upside down. But anyway, the practice is only describing the experienceable world. I'm glad there's people who, neuroscientists, who do the other.

[08:50]

That doesn't seem to satisfy you, though, as a response. Do you say, well, I can watch myself thinking? I can feel my non-thinking, my not-thinking. It's always a question for me, it's always another form of consciousness.

[09:58]

What is another form of consciousness? That I experience my not thinking or my experiencing or that I believe I have some pure form of experience. Okay. Yeah, you're welcome. So there's no aspects of what I said about appearance that seem to relate to anything that you're interested in? Yes. You talked about like brain volume. So I assume there is a left brain one.

[11:22]

Well, with most of us, at least. Yes, for most of us there is one, I think. And then I think there is a difference between Then I think there is a difference in how we get to appearance from the right brain body and the left brain body. And I would just like to ask you I want to ask you if you have any further descriptions that can get us closer to an understanding of that.

[12:36]

Well, again, let me say that you both picked on terminology that I used with reluctance. Somebody I know, I can't think of his name right now, was the person who most emphasized in the 60s right brain, left brain differences. And I always thought he overemphasized and overexplained things with this distinction. But after all these years, 30 or 40 or more, And more neurological sophistication in the description of the distinction.

[13:52]

I've begun to say, okay, I can let go of my prejudice. And start using this distinction. But that's why I call it right brain to body and left brain to body. Because both it seems more accurate and it avoids the new age distinction. When I make this line between in the five skandhas, I would say that awareness is right-brained and consciousness is left-brained. And I would say that one of the things Zen monastic practice does is it balances left brain dominance

[15:07]

And I would say, from what I know about right brain dominance, practice, long time practice, makes you right brain dominant. So in my opinion, Zen practice, particularly actualized Zen practice in your everyday life and if possible with some monastic time really does make a physiological shift in who you are. But it's not just a factor of, you know, years. It's not just a simple factor of how much time. Well, what is it... Maybe I can bring you back... Yuan Wu.

[16:51]

I can't remember the whole thing but in the end he says, and if you do this for 30 or 40 years, you may accomplish something. But if you do it with any sense of comparative time you will accomplish nothing. So there certainly is within the community of the Sangha an understanding that decades of practice make a difference. And this idea of some one-time enlightenment changes everything.

[18:22]

There's a wonderful book about a young Irish girl who realizes enlightenment in Thailand or something and then gets killed. Not because she got enlightened. And the Japanese teacher recognizes her as enlightened. And this is really simply nonsense. I mean, you can have enlightenment experiences which change everything, but does not make you mature. Belief in that kind of enlightenment by the Japanese establishment is bereft of experience and understanding. I mean, such experiences really do change everything.

[19:25]

the craft of incremental enlightenment over time is really what makes the depth of change and the maturity. And Zen is the only school within Buddhism that has this idea that an enlightened experience turns you into a great teacher or something. And it comes out of religious politics having to do with Rinzai and Soto and so forth. In China, primarily. Yeah, there's lots more aspects of that Chinese distortion of late developments of Indian Buddhism and so on.

[21:09]

Anyway, so, but if you, as I said the other day, if you If you learn to do the Sorbonne or abacus, by visualizing it. Simple things like that make you more right brain. So it's not simply a matter of... decades or years.

[22:12]

It's a matter of, as I often say, this practice does function in homeopathic doses. And If you do simple things like I've suggested sometimes, shifting from the specific to the field to the specific to the field as a regular way of apprehension, you start functioning in a more right-brained way. But naturally enough, If you do something for decades, it penetrates the myriad things in ways it doesn't if you don't do it for decades.

[23:26]

Yeah, okay. Someone else. Yes. Go ahead. Yeah, it's fine. Actually, my work, she has this as a finding, because as a young kind of girl, and what I did was to assure her of her mistakes. I'm treating a young girl that has something called lis... Lisencephaly. Lisencephaly, which means... It's a brain, it's only... It doesn't communicate with the two heads. It's a brain. What? It is a brain. It's a brain, it's just strings. It's not a usual shape. Really?

[24:27]

My goodness. And she's not supposed to be alive, but she's pretty clean now. And she's living in a house that's for the children, so she has no left or right or anything like that. And we communicate on this level of awareness all the time. She's right there. And it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. That's great. Will she live long? She's supposed to be dead for about a year. She's supposed to die. Yeah. If she hadn't had special care at birth, would she have died at birth? No. She has this lightness around her.

[25:28]

For me, it's always invigorating. It's great. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, you asked if what you said about appearance relates to what we encounter in our work. If I understood correctly. Yeah. Yeah. While you were speaking, it seemed to me... If I was only beginning to develop the question of where and what Skanda feels we are meeting the client,

[26:54]

In different moments of working with the column. We often begin in a field that is consciousness or that has to do with consciousness. Depending on what question... Depending on what question is brought up or what client we're dealing with, there can be this kind of sinking into these other layers. Sometimes I feel invited to move forward through associative mind.

[28:20]

Sometimes it's more perception. Sometimes I think it is pretty much a pure, just a pure sensing sensation, or the direction, directionality. Yeah, and I think transformation also seems to happen in different layers depending on where the client is approachable. Yeah. And I'm remembering, now I'm remembering a client from a few days ago where I see myself having been in a purely perceiving state of mind.

[29:44]

Yeah, and his reaction within the constellation was that I noticed, now I have to explain to him what I see. And then only after sensing that he was able to make a connection with that particular concept was I able to enter into another life. So the first one is when I asked what comes home. Yes, I'm thinking of it as a kind of journey. And through what you said I feel invited to pay more attention to these layers.

[30:50]

One of the problems I see when you work with somebody, there's so many more impressions than when you're just sitting by yourself. ... I'm so engaged with the situation that I can't always simultaneously know where I am and what I'm doing. I just know that the work does make you enter realms that are not governed by consciousness. I remember a seminar where for three days I had an uninterrupted toothache.

[32:30]

When I was sitting with the group doing a constellation, I didn't feel anything of the toothache. It just wasn't there. And during the break, it came back. I understand. Well, you know, ceremonies are... Again, you have to... I want to remind you that I grew up anti-religious, aggressively atheist, I refused to wear a tie in college and high school so they wouldn't put my photograph in the yearbook and so forth. It wouldn't even let me eat in the Harvard dining halls. Because Harvard was still formal like that, you had to have a tie.

[34:00]

So they finally accepted I could have a white scarf. And I refused to have a Harvard degree because I didn't want any formal anything. Because I really wanted to start with nothing. So the fact that ceremonies have some power was a real revelation to me. And it's amazing that a 20-minute ceremony, say to get married, can change your life. You could have had five or three or four, two or three or five year relationship with someone else, and it's like in the past.

[35:01]

But the marriage, 20 minute ceremony or half hour, changes you. What is this magic? And in Zen training, at least in our school, the ceremonies are a kind of tantric conception. And there's so many complications. Let me just make it simple, but I can. But the idea is that when you come into, if you know how to do ceremonies,

[36:03]

Also die Idee dabei ist, wenn du weißt, wie man eine Zeremonie leitet, you should have the ability to enter a room and transform them. And have a way to have everybody in the same mental state. Und zu bewirken, dass alle Anwesenden in dem gleichen... and it seems to me that what is done in my experience with you at the beginning of a constellation is a kind of don't ask me what I mean by tantric tantric ceremonial practice Just asking someone to choose another person to be an aspect of themselves is amazingly transformative, I think.

[37:22]

This can and I think does precipitate a deep shift. And then when you choose the person. And in the way you do it, you approach them from the back and move them around. They're giving up at that moment their own choice about where they are. And where they are starts to be nowhere. They're just pushed around the room. It's like Castaneda finding his his seat on the porch.

[38:50]

So you move someone around by pushing them from the back. And then you tell them they're going to be someone else. Related to a person they hardly know in front of them. You know, sometimes, you know, I've been struck when you, at the beginning of a movie, it may just show a street or it may show ocean waves coming in. I've seen a lot of streets and a lot of ocean waves in my life. But you see them sometimes just in the beginning of a movie and they have a timeless quality, like... The Aegean Sea, the wine-dark sea or something.

[40:13]

Well, I think you do move people into a kind of timeless realm. Yeah. And now, among yourselves, not with clients probably, but among yourselves, if you experimented, You might say, or I might do if I were involved. Let's try a consolation which begins with non-graspable feelings. Let's have everyone stand for one minute in feeling only without thinking. Just feeling like the space of the room. Or you might do sensation only.

[41:24]

Please spend one minute noticing the sensations, whatever they are, oral, visual, etc. And then you start the... And you might find that starting from one skanda produces a more Constellation with more depth or power than starting from another skandha. Or starting with the feel of the eighth vijjana, the alaya vijjana. In any case, I think this whole What I like about the way you start a constellation, it seems like just the kind of normal thing to do that's a way of getting started.

[42:41]

It happens rather invisibly. If you stand up and say, oh, okay, I'll be someone else, why not? I've got nothing better to do. But actually what you're doing is a tantric transformation of a situation. Tantrism is actually a form of enactment. An enactment of a different space where something else happens. That might be worth discussing in small groups after the break. Okay, let's have a break. Thank you very much.

[43:39]

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