This year I've been particularly noticing how important for our Zen practice are the shifts in worldview that occur, that can occur through practice. And I find myself refining and deepening and extending the effect of these worldviews. Now, they may be particularly important for the practice of Zen.

[01:06]

And why they would be particularly important for the practice of Zen? It's because they tend to arise because you're practicing Zen. And if you... don't notice them, they keep your Zen practice right on the surface. In other words, they appear through Zen practice, but you have to

[02:09]

find a way to confront these worldview shifts. Almost as if you're opening a door or stepping into another world. And even in Japanese yogic culture, Dogen says you should know that the world of Zazen, the whole world of Zazen, is completely different from the whole world of ordinary things. So I think the key here to making use of this statement is saying the whole world.

[03:38]

In other words, he says, he means that the world of Zazen in itself has a completeness as a world. And the world of what he calls ordinary things in this statement is also a consistent world. And it's a little like he also uses the image of a bird can fly without limit in the sky. And a fish can swim without limit in the sea. But neither the fish nor the bird know the other's world. Now, is it easy for us, can we believe that it's really so different Well, it's maybe not that different.

[04:54]

But it's significantly different. Yes, the word significantly in English, of course, means the signs are different, the significance are different. And to live in a world where the familiar things are differently signed makes the world quite different. I just met with my really old friend. I mean, he is old, but he's also a longtime friend. Brother David Steindl-Rast. It was last year he came, joined us, didn't it? Well, anyway, they met me and I first went to this pretty kind of touristy castle called Rosenberg.

[05:58]

And I don't know, about 50 people decided they ought to join us. So we had a conversation sitting out on the grass or the lawn. And that was, you know... Quite pleasant and nice. I could sit beside him and hug him and stuff like that. And he's 80, I'm 76 and he's 85 I think. We used to look the same. So much the same that we could switch. I could put on my outfit and I could put on his habit and people hardly knew the difference.

[07:21]

But I think he looks a little older than me now and he seems to have gotten shorter. Now he's getting shorter too, but anyway. He's not getting shorter. But it was a very pleasant evening. And there were a couple of abbots of other Benedictine monasteries there. And then I went to a new monastery near Lake Montse. And it's quite impressive, actually. And it's fairly small, I guess seven or eight monks. That might be large these days, I don't know.

[08:37]

And they have several buildings separated by streets and things. And we just bought this new building a few weeks ago, possession of it across the street from Johannesburg. And we have to think about how to join the two buildings in a single field of practice. Yeah. So anyway, I felt I learned something from how they do it. By the way, if you're not used to sitting on the floor, we can have chairs. Yeah. Yeah. But in the second meeting with Brother David, the translator sat between us, which I think was a mistake.

[10:04]

And he was unable to translate. I mean, he was born in South Africa. He's from Durban, where I've been. And so he's a native English speaker. And I use, hi guys, I mean gals. Anyway, he's a native English speaker, but now an Austrian priest and monk. And Eric must have told you about it. But what's interesting is that I use, if you know English, I use completely familiar, usually completely familiar words.

[11:09]

But I use them in a rather unfamiliar way. And familiar word in an unfamiliar context, it seems like it can't be translated. And this guy very soon was just lost. And I would say the same familiar words again. He was like... I said the same familiar words again and he was lost. So that was a good translation. So luckily her husband Eric was there. And he was called up from the back to start helping and pretty soon he took over. But it's a kind of example of a different world view.

[12:11]

Just simply calling an object an activity and not an object. If I say view every perceptual object as an activity and not an entity, He had no idea what to say. And one of the worldview shifts really required by Zen practice is to view everything as an activity. This is an activity. I can't use it unless I do some actions around it. You know it's not a teacup when I ring it. So to emphasize things, even stones as activities, and a geologist can see, of course, immediately that a stone has been an activity, still is.

[13:35]

So somehow, When you come to see the difference between viewing the world as entities and viewing the world as activities, find some way to shift that perspective into your not just your thinking for sure, but into your moment-by-moment activity. Now my feeling is that although these worldview shifts I'm not only beneficial for practice, necessary for practice, but they're the classic dynamic of practice.

[15:00]

Because enlightenment experience is a worldview shift, a paradigm shift. It's a worldview paradigm shift that sticks, that stays with you. So I think that these kinds of shifts are probably, I'm not pretending, I'm pretending that none of you know anything about Zen practice. When I'm well aware that's not true. But I pretend that I'm speaking only to psychologists.

[16:08]

And so, but even for a psychologist who doesn't know anything about Buddhist or Zen practice, These, particularly for constellation therapists, I think, these worldview shifts can open you, I hope, I think, into how you are in this phenomenal, in both sense of the words, world. both sense of the word phenomenal, which one means phenomena and the other means extraordinary. That's phenomenal. Yeah. That phenomenon Phenomenal world is absolutely phenomenal like that.

[17:18]

Yeah, right. Okay. Okay. And I used the example of Dogen, what he said about the whole world, etc., It's to show this is not just a worldview shift between Western culture and ways of looking at things and yogic Asian culture. Even within Japanese yogic culture, the practice of meditation becomes a worldview shift. So I guess what I'm doing here, and I've been meeting with you for lots of years, is exploring together with you the ways in which these worldview shifts can be brought into

[18:23]

your personal life and practice and therapeutic practice. Now, one thing I, in addition to extending and deepening my sense of how these worldview shifts the significance of these worldviews. I also, this last half year or so, have been thinking about reviewing again how we can understand self, our personal sense of self, our cultural, habitual sense of self, and the sense of self and or non-self,

[19:48]

Or less self. That's at the center of the teaching of Buddhism, Zen Buddhism. Okay. The Diamond Sutra, one of the key Buddhist texts for lay persons as well as monastics, but a key Buddhist text for Zen especially, says something that's different different lists and different translations.

[21:03]

But it says the bodhisattva, it's a refrain which occurs over and over again in the sutra, the bodhisattva has no sense of self. No sense of a person. No sense of a soul. And no sense of a life span. And I think that maybe the intrigue for us is no sense of a life span. How is it possible to have no sense of a life span? What can the Diamond Sutra mean?

[22:17]

So I'm sure that all of you had, because if you're a psychologist or psychotherapist, you have to have thought a lot about what is self. And but at least I find it useful to review it now and then. And try to penetrate what this 2500 years of Buddhist practice is trying to tell us about self. And I think, so I'm going to try to say a few things. Both looking at self as a function and looking at self as an extremely convincing experience.

[23:36]

So one sense of very convincing sense of self is self as agency. And agency, again, we have this word. What's interesting, not only, as I said, it's very hard to translate familiar words in unfamiliar contexts, It's very, very difficult to translate very basic ideas. Heidegger tried in many texts and many pages to define being and probably we could say he didn't succeed. His originary act.

[24:45]

Can you make a distinction in German between original and originary? What a sweet book. I have to think about it. Thank you. Good, thanks. Kukai, who was the founder of Zen, founder of Tantric Shingon Buddhism in Japan. Which you're is also kind of built into Zen Buddhism. He uses the word kekkai, K-E-K-K-A-I, to mean when you offer a stick of incense and create a world.

[25:48]

And the way he uses that is it's an originating point, an originary point. In other words, you have two choices in looking at the world. It had a beginning or it's endless. It had a beginning, a starting point, Big Bang or Big Buddha or Big God or something. It either had a beginning or it's endless. So Buddhists like it when somebody says there's big bangs, it came before big bang, which came before, you know, et cetera.

[27:08]

Bang! So Buddhism made the choice that we can't know. How do we know? Buddhism basically says the conceptual problems of thinking it's endless are simpler than the conceptual problems of thinking it as a beginning. The conceptual problems of thinking it's endless are less than the conceptual problems of thinking it as a beginning. First of all, it eliminates the problem at the beginning of what was before the beginning. And we're not going to go into all that, but... Yeah.

[28:29]

But anyway, Buddhism decided it's better. Let's just call it endless. Okay, if it's endless, there's no origin. And this also folds directly into the practice and understanding of interdependence. It's endless and everything is flowing together and so forth. So that presents you with a problem. You need some beginnings now and then. So... Kukai says, offer a stick of incense in the beginning to start your day.

[29:31]

This is the beginning. And I said in the previous seminar, Some people do this with a cup of coffee. And there was a guy sitting right there who was going to come this weekend but couldn't, so he came last weekend and he said, yes, that's me. And it has something to do with the caffeine. But it also has something to do with just simply being a ritual act. You feel better when you've done it. If you haven't done it, you miss it, even though you, you know. So agency.

[30:33]

Agency comes from the word A-G-E-R-E, agare, or something like that, which means to act, to do, to put into motion. Excuse me, I was going to say about Heidegger. The originary act for Heidegger because I understand it, is that he no longer had a worldview that had a God as creator. And he no longer had a worldview that allowed the world to be given. And he no longer had a worldview that allowed the world to be given. And so he had to start with sort of nothing. And then there's appearance.

[31:53]

And that's basically very much like Buddhism. It's the same, basically. So you have what's in English called, I don't know what it's called in German, but the cosmogonic question. Which is, why does anything exist at all? And not just like that's an interesting intellectual idea. But I think Heidegger was in a continuous process of astonishment that anything exists at all. And I would say that's also Buddhist practice. Mindfulness is a continuous astonishment anything exists at all.

[32:57]

Okay, so one example of self is what I'm calling agency. I mean, the simplest example I can think of Und das einfachste Beispiel, das ich mir ausdenken kann, ist meine linke Hand entscheidet sich, meine rechte Hand zu berühren. Und meine rechte Hand spürt, das ist so nett von dir, mich zu berühren. Und da ist ein Gefühl, dass die linke Hand es tut, And what is that? I mean, that's sort of like our experience of self. So we can say self is in this case the left hand.

[33:59]

But the concept of agency, if we're going to use it in this way, has to also include reception, doing, because the right hand feels in this case it's receiving and the feeling of receiving is kind of confirmed self and it's interesting that I can shift the feeling of self into the right hand and left hand is receiving. Now is this experience of the right hand doing it or the left hand doing it?

[35:06]

But we have this, it's a convincing experience. But does it say anything about A substantial self? Can you shift it from the right hand to the left hand? I have a feeling that I'm speaking here. I don't have the feeling that I'm entirely... I don't have the feeling that I'm the sole source of the words. Because clearly if I was sitting here by myself I wouldn't be saying these things. I'd either be practicing or nuts.

[36:12]

I'd either be practicing or nuts. There's some guy in there giving a talk. And if it was a different group of people, I'd be saying different things. So if it's a different group of people and I'd be saying different things, then somehow you're also the source of what I'm saying. And if I have self-referential thinking if I think self-referentially while I'm speaking I really don't know what to say. So the less self-referential thinking I can have now and just kind of act in this situation Am I doing this? Is self doing this? What's going on? Okay, now I'm bringing these things up in this way hopefully to get it to

[37:17]

you to also think of categories that are convincing about self. Okay, the second thing I would emphasize as a convincing aspect of self is presence. Yeah, there's a And by the way, presence is another word that's very difficult to define. I find it difficult. I don't know. Again, I leave the hard work up to Christine. But presence means in English something like the feel of the mind. The feel of the F-E-E-L, the feel of the mind. Or the feel of being.

[38:40]

Yeah. To be present means to be bodily present. So anyway, I think we all know, though, and somehow, that presence, the sense of a presence, and the sense of her presence next to this presence, is somehow to do, has something to do with self. Now, third category. English word.

[39:40]

English word. Person. Yeah, which most of you would know comes from mask persona. But now I'm using person to mean one who can love or suffer or feel pain, etc., We feel grief. And we feel grief arising from our attachments, our memory, etc. There must be somebody there. So what the heck is Buddhism talking about no self or non-self? Yeah, okay. And then there's the experience of continuity. Continuity. We were the same person in the past that we are now.

[40:53]

Yeah, I mean, I know I'm not exactly the same person I was when I was in high school, but there's a heck of a lot of continuity. And that continuity is a convincing sense of self. And another example is the unity of experience. Right now, while I'm speaking, with very little effort, I can remember last weekend. I can remember being here last year. And I can have feelings about all of the different sensorial information here. And it comes together as a unified experience.

[42:00]

And certainly if I listed what The ingredients are my unified experience right now. It would be different than her. list of what is her unified experience. So the particular unity of experience that we're in the midst of all the time, kind of seamless unity, I think is also convincing experience of self. So I'd like to explore some of these things. And we could add what organizes our experience.

[43:01]

Organizes our memory. Our sense of the protagonist, a narrative protagonist. When we organize our sensorial experience, is this the self doing it? Okay, that's enough. I feel like I haven't given you said quite enough.

[44:20]

If you think it's enough to get started, stop now. Because I'd actually like to give you a couple of examples of worldview shifts. But if I do, I should repeat them tomorrow for the missing person. So maybe I should wait. And those two or three of you who were here in the last seminar, either now or tomorrow, please tell us if there's any aspects of the seminar we just finished that ought to be brought into this seminar.

[45:29]

Because, you know, when I give two seminars so close together, any seminar I give is tapping into my particular examining process I'm always involved in. So there will be some connection between what I said last weekend and what I'm saying now. And usually, since I don't like to repeat myself, unless it's absolutely necessary, in the context that I'm always doing nothing but repeat myself, then once I've At last weekend, I reject everything in that weekend, so I don't have to repeat it this weekend, but maybe sometimes I should.

[46:56]

And a lot of my life can be explained as a way to avoid boredom. And I have to brag a little and say that I've freed myself from that mild form of mental suffering. But I still worry sometimes that I'm boring you. So then I avoid saying things that I too obviously said before. Even when they're absolutely necessary. But the translator likes it because they get good at saying it.

[48:00]

She doesn't look like Christian Dillo or her husband. But I'm so glad you're able to take this time and translate. Christian really wanted to come, but we're in the middle of our guest season. We always are on the edge of financial ruin, so he's staying to see if he can make the difference. So we'll start tomorrow at 9.30, is that okay? Isn't that usual, I think? Okay, thank you.

[48:52]

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