Not so long ago, I went to Vail. I don't know how to ski, but I went to Vail because some friends of Louise were there from Germany. And Sophia skied. And then I brought her back to... And Sophia asked for my iPad. So I gave it to her. And it turns out she's put computer games on my iPad. Anyway, they appear when she picks it up at least. And I don't know what's going on. I've never played a computer game in my life.

[01:01]

The last game like that I ever played was a pinball machine, which I don't think exists anymore. We can't play it anymore. And then you shake it and then it goes tilt and it stops. And I was never good at it. Anyway, she's doing this and I'm driving. I can't really tell what's going on. But there's a whole lot of electronic shapes I can see moving on the screen. And suddenly she'll say, oh, I'm killed. I have no idea what she's talking about.

[02:17]

How can she be killed? So I at least figured out that she, for some reason, identifies with one of the electronic shapes as her. And I don't know why she chooses one electronic shape out of another to identify with. But it does seem she chooses the electronic shape that's most in danger. The electronic shape she chooses is constantly in danger, being attacked from all sides. And that seems to be her experience herself. Attack from all sides. Yeah, and she was able, it's about a five-hour drive, she was able to, uninterrupted, we're going to keep some of the most beautiful mountains in the world.

[03:26]

With extraordinary things along the road, and she's just... I say, Sophia... This electronic shape she identifies with is more interesting to her than the really extraordinary mountains. I find this quite peculiar, but I guess it's normal these days. Since I was in my teens, I've been attracted to the linguistic studies of Edward Sapir, Benjamin Wharf, and others.

[04:52]

Benjamin Wharf. Oh, sorry. I hope none of you noticed. It just happened. I think it goes back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who I only more recently got to know. Why are you laughing? He's what? Well, yeah, but I've just... But he's mostly known in German. Marginal interest, I know, is some German culture. No, no, no. I got to know him, yeah.

[06:02]

I got to know his work. I saw his Steffensplatz, I said. Okay. Anyway. And, you know, I was attracted to these people before I knew anything about Zen. because they they talked about language wrote about language in ways that made me that confirmed my own experiences in this conceptual way In this conceptual field that we call semantics.

[07:07]

Okay, so what I'm saying here is we live in, as these linguists pointed out, in a conceptual semantic field. And what I presented this morning I would say among other things it's at least two different conceptual fields. And as Edward Sapir says, it's not that there's one world with different labels. The labels become the world we're living in. Well, I felt so. And maybe I'm here in Germany and not in Poland or France.

[08:14]

In the field of German language. You just proved my point. So I apologize to all of you. Now I have to apologize when I go back to Johanneshoff that I apologize to you. If I have to apologize to them that I apologize to you, no. Okay. So perhaps I'm in the conceptual semantic field of German. Because there's a similarity that the English conceptual semantic field may be more similar than Polish or French.

[09:20]

I mean... For instance, I've read that the Hopis have a provisional posture. We have mental postures and physical postures. I'm just playing around with language. They have a provisional posture of something that might happen. where each thing has a vibratory dynamics which has no direction and has no motion but has a vibratory dynamics that is something like modern physics. It might do this, it might do that.

[10:32]

And you create a state of mind which waits for it to see what it's going to do. And we tend to think that Things, if they're activities, they have a direction or they have an emotion. They're doing something, no? They're just dynamic without doing. Now that's a somewhat different conceptual field that we use. And implies a rather different sense of space and time or even space and time not being separable. Yeah, space and time are just about ready to be created. We would call space and time.

[11:33]

And maybe I'm making this up, I don't know exactly, of course, it is the Hopi fields, I live in Hopi land, sort of, in Colorado, but that's another somewhat unimportant thing. And I live in the European countries, in Colorado, but that is actually unimportant. That is not Heidi Land. I took someone to Heidi Land. I took someone to Heidi Land a few years ago. And this person drove me up through the mountains, told me where we were going to stay in Liechtenstein. And what was up there but they... A Swiss military operation to protect the border with Liechtenstein.

[12:49]

What was there? A Swiss military station that protected the border with Liechtenstein. Taxi, men... So everything was full of tanks and prisoners. I'm just talking about culture. Okay. So if you have to wait for something to reveal its space or time, or something like that, it requires a certain kind of patience. And that's one of the differences between what's in the parinitas and other places, one of the most common Two of the most common words in the Buddhist list are one is energy or intention or something or effort. In a different list they appear sort of differently.

[13:50]

And it's often accompanied by another word, patience. And the translation in English as patience never feels right. Because patience has the feeling of enduring something. And in Buddhism, the patience is creating a space for anything to happen. So patience is a kind of doorway to emptiness. You're not enduring, you're opening the door. So the feeling of, okay, now I'm opening the door for anything that might happen.

[15:17]

And the word that's often translated to effort or intention is really something more like readiness. The vitality that's necessary for readiness. That's different than effort. You're not making effort, you're just ready. And you have the energy to be ready for you don't know what. Anyway, I'm trying to discover these things. And I would like to get closer to the raw material that's labeled. Und ich würde gerne dem rohen Material, das hier etikettiert wird, näher kommen.

[16:27]

And we can assume there's some kind of raw material of the world. Und wir können annehmen, dass es da irgendwo dieses rohe Material der Welt gibt. But once it gets named, aber wenn es einmal benannt wird, that name creates a space. Dann schafft dieser Name einen Raum. And it takes over that space. And then once the name becomes a word, you understand how I'm making a distinction between name and word? Is it understandable? A word is in a sentence. Sentence, I'm making a joke. These sentences go to jail.

[17:28]

So a word is sentenced to being used in a sentence. And it's also under a spell. And it's also under a spell. The spelling is the spell that holds the letters together. I'm joking, but I love joking. Because words are an energy field. They create the world our language walks around in. Okay. So, for instance, this Dino Sutra conceptual scape, mind scape. Concept scape, maybe. Kind of shows you where to put your feet down. Like it says, if you want to practice with the sense of the self as an inner reality, if you practice that, you put your feet down at the junction of life and death.

[18:59]

And you had the experience, it seems to me, that this was not just a description of the world, you had an experience of the world in those terms. And that's nothing to fool around with. It feels very... It's real. So, in other words, this Dhamma Sutra list is a little bit like a minefield. A minefield? [...] Not mind? A mind field and a meaning field.

[20:12]

That's what I mean. We're losing the words here. Yeah, I know. That's my point. So when, as I said earlier, we practice with words by a process of subtraction. Because words accumulate their power through their contextual use, their syntactical use. So, So Zen practice says, let's, the word Wado, which is what, Wado is the Chinese-Japanese term, pronounced, it's spelled differently, but it's pronounced almost the same in Chinese and Japanese.

[21:18]

The word Wado, means to bring a word close to its source. doesn't mean to its etymological source, but to the source of how it arises an experience. So this is already an interesting exercise. You're not just speaking the fabric of words and ignoring that it's a fabric. You're kind of pulling the strands apart saying, hey, this is a weave. And it's woven from the raw material. raw material, raw material experience.

[22:21]

But once conceptual categories were established, they rapidly by use establish a network of conceptual categories that basically controls how we experience the world. Controls what we notice, what we perceive, how we perceive. And my most usual example which I think we can experience, which then can be an opening, which again, if you have the mental posture, that space separates. This occurs prior to perception.

[23:37]

And what we will perceive and be confirmed as true is that space is separate. Our perceptions under the leadership of the mental posture will notice separations. But if you can change to space connects, and plant that as your mental posture prior to perception, You will begin to notice connectedness.

[24:38]

You will change how your senses work. I'm always a little embarrassed because I've been using that example. since, I don't know, 45, 55, 50 years. But if you really experience such an example in the midst of language, that can open up a whole lot of related questions And really it is an insight into how basic conceptual, how basic cultural conceptions are.

[25:42]

And I use it also because a culture based on the a Buddhist culture based on the primary mental posture of interdependence and inter-emergence. primarily and virtually exclusively notices connections and not separations. Separation is an interrupted connection and not a separation now connected. And there's a different dynamic there.

[26:57]

And a different energy. The energy involved in interrupting a connection is different than the energy involved in making a connection. The energy involved... involved in establishing a connection your energy is always trying to establish connections because they're not there that's very different than relaxing into I hope connections that are already there and then you have to deal with what happens when they're interrupted Und dann musst du dich damit auseinandersetzen, was passiert, wenn sie unterbrochen sind. Re-establishing a friendship is different than establishing a friendship. Eine Freundschaft wieder zu begründen, ist anders als sie zu finden.

[28:04]

You're repairing, but not... Do you understand? Also, ihr versteht das. Okay. Okay, so, if we accept... Also, wenn wir akzeptieren... that language establishes a conceptual semantic field that's loaded with energy because all of this holds the culture together. And I remember a exiled South African writer and he was a poet and he loved writing in North African because the language is still being created there wasn't poetry there weren't words for North African And he found an incredible excitement in creating a language and creating categories and words which don't exist.

[29:26]

instead of using the categories in an already established language. And I don't know enough about German, for sure. But it's clear that Shakespeare basically created English language. Bringing the French and German languages together in English. And he had an incredible vocabulary, 40,000 words. And some people say Ed Johnson really wrote it, but Ed Johnson only had a vocabulary of 8,000 words. But it looks to, from what I've read, that Goethe, Schiller and other people and Holerlin and others were at a point where German language was coming together as a national realm.

[30:51]

Okay, so if we're aware of that, then we can say, how am I dealing with Japanese ideas? How do we fold that conceptual field into our conceptual field? How do we pry it apart and look for the raw material? Now it does seem, that I don't know quite why, that the Japanese language and concepts are anticipate where English and German are going.

[32:11]

And I'm sure in a parallel way, somehow Western languages are anticipating where Japanese is going. Both are widening their conceptual field. And I don't know enough about Chinese to say. I know that no plays fit in very well with our aesthetic. But so far, I don't think Chinese opera fits in very well with our aesthetic. But somehow, Shun in Tang Dynasty poetry falls right into our conception of the world. But I know I can repeat a statement that the Japanese congregation in San Francisco made to somebody.

[33:32]

It's this woman who was a student of mine. decided to go to one of the Japanese congregation's meetings. And they didn't like Westerners coming into their meetings. I mean, when I used to go to, occasionally had to go to meetings with Suzuki Roshi, he said, don't be too clear. Don't be too smart. You have to let something happen, and if you're too clear too quickly, it won't happen. And our tendency is to be as clear as possible and intelligent and take over.

[34:53]

But this woman went to the meeting and I don't know exactly how it happened, but they didn't mind her coming. Because they said, she won't understand what our bellies are saying. Because their language is much more connected to bodily postures and... and vocalized breath than it is to our languages. And so they said, well, we can talk about anything. She will really know what we're talking about. Edward T. Hall's books, if you know the books, are very good on this.

[36:01]

Okay. We should have had a break a little while ago. No, we should have a break in a little while. Okay, so what I'm trying to say is we've got this... I'm trying to go back to why we call Minka, Minka, Igor... You're good. They're nicking. You said it so well.

[37:01]

If you change a word into a name and what you're doing is you're subtracting you're subtracting the semantic configuration. Syntactical rather configuration. But you're keeping some of the energy. Okay, now... somebody says that consciousness has a directionality.

[38:08]

And what we're trying to do is change that directionality. And to change that directionality also gets you closer maybe to the raw material. And you're changing the directionality of language, of the energy of language, by taking words and turning them into names. So instead of, just as I said before lunch, Instead of using language to describe the world, we're using language and phrases and so forth as names to call forth the world.

[39:15]

Okay. I believe a word heard and a word read function very differently in the brain. A word that you hear and a word that you read, the same word, what happens in the brain is very different. And As I said, a name, once you name something, and then put it in the context of other names as words, you create a conceptual field. And concepts have energy in them to put things together conceptually. And so when I'm speaking, so each word is a space.

[40:25]

We can think of it as a space. When I'm speaking, speech makes space. and my speaking right now is creating a space and I'm trying to speak in a way that you can inhabit that space And one of the things that affects how I speak is I can feel when you're not inhabiting the space. So I go on to the extent that I can feel you're inhabiting the space, speech is created. So that's one of the reasons sometimes at the feeling I spoke about something you wanted me to speak about.

[41:33]

Okay. So maybe we should have a break right now. And leave that space that speech is creating. And you know, I've never spoken about this stuff before. I think when I'm coming to this seminar, I'm going to bring you up to date with everything I've been speaking about during the year. I don't want you to feel left out. But what happens if I start saying things I've never said before?

[42:34]

It's your fault. Yes. But anyway, I'm exploring these things and it's nice to do it with you. What could I do without my fellow explorer? I just found the more space they have between them, the more they feel connected. That's true for all partners Really?

[43:45]

Are you speaking from experience? Yeah. Anybody want to say anything? If we go back to the list before that, the one where you listed the things that make up the self, then we notice these are only nouns. In spite of that, we are talking about, we said that it's activities.

[44:48]

My question is, is it intention? Is it like that in Japanese, or did it happen like that in translation? Well, the first West had nothing to do with Japan. The first list has nothing to do with Japan. No, I meant that it has nothing to do with Japan. That's all about me. In the West, trying to identify how we as Westerners experience the persuasiveness of self. So it's a relevant observation that there are bounds. And one of the strategies of a culture based on interdependence is to create removable categories. Categories that aren't linked inextricably to other categories, but you can just read them out.

[46:22]

They're removable. It doesn't do it, sorry. Well, like a Japanese house, it's built, it's constructed in the wood journey, right? You can just take a pillar out. So, like if this were a Japanese house, you need to take this pillar out, put a new one in. It's not quite that easy, but that's the concept. And the Ise shrine demonstrates that by they take it apart every 20 years. To show, demonstrate that everything can be taken apart. Everything is a construct. Nothing is an entity. So one of the things the Dalin Sutra and the Heart Sutra are doing, as you pointed out, is taking away all categories.

[47:41]

Which, if it's all a construct, you can take away all the categories. So that's a Buddhist strategy, to take away all the categories. Das ist eine buddhistische Strategie, alle Kategorien wegzunehmen. But also a cultural strategy is to create removable categories. Und eine solche kulturelle Strategie ist auch auswechselbare Kategorien zu schaffen. I had to think of an example. I haven't thought of one yet. but what you again would know much more about than me is it the case that when soul with soul ceased to be the gate of God and ceased to insulate us from tragedy

[48:53]

In other words, tragedy requires that not the God that made you do it, you made yourself do it. Is it the case that with Freud the soul ceases to be the gave of God and becomes the carrier of wounds? I don't know. Okay, yes. Last year I did a seminar on stage work and constellation work.

[50:09]

We always take texts. What we are doing is we are taking texts. And last year we took the text, the ox and his shepherd. And one method of the stage work that we do, the bibliodrama, is... One method we use, it's called bibliodrama. We take out all the verbs, the activities out of the text and we bring them on the stage. This reminded me of that. This is a very deep access to all these old texts. This reminded, what you said reminded me because this is a very deep entrance into, toward these old texts.

[51:35]

And we do this also in constellation work that we bring in the works as, yeah, constellation. Yeah, okay. Good. A question to the difference between name and word. My feeling is then when I allow a word to become a name then I'm I'm away from an activity I am doing and I encounter an appearance which which I encounter now this This is my making a distinction between names and words.

[52:45]

It's a strategy within Buddhism. But it's also a strategy I'm using to see if we can get underneath the constructs of our consciousness. Now, I couldn't remember before, but it's Merleau-Pointy who says, Consciousness has a directionality. And that directionality is sustained by the language that creates the way we see the world. Okay. When you change the direction, reverse the directionality of consciousness, you can think of it as a kind of energy stream.

[53:51]

And disestablish the... the directionality of the constitution of the world in our worded consciousness. We create contrasts and differences and openness which allow us to have things appear to us differently. Which makes me think that if you're willing, I'll go through the five skandhas tomorrow. You seem to be enthusiastic.

[54:58]

Anybody else willing to? We need repetition. This sense of substitution, I thought of some examples. In one koan it says, this is a Sayendhava. And then it says, That's the point. It says, this is a signed up. And it's not translated. Because it says, in some contexts this means horse, in others it means salt.

[56:03]

And it has other meanings too. So we don't really know what it means. Well, that's kind of amusing. And there's a koan I'm going to speak to you, I think, my ideas, to speak to you about koan 92 in the book of Serenity tomorrow. All right. Sunday morning above 11.30. So we have the proper tension to make it work. I'm sort of joking. It says in the Koran, it says, Luzu talked to so-and-so. And I forget what the other name is, but down below it says, some chendong is wrong to say it's luzu, it was really so-and-so.

[57:23]

All right, now this is a text that's a thousand years old. They had time to straighten it out. They just lead it. You don't really know who it is. Is it Lusso or the other guy? It's a Derridian Jacques Derrida. It's a Derridian deconstruction. It's a point where you can deconstruct the whole text. Another example, I'm In that koan, there's a phrase which he carries the lamp, he carries the triple gate in on the lamp. So I did this ceremony with Dan Welch.

[58:23]

And I'm studying the text, the manual for ceremonies written in 1850. And now that's quite a long time ago. 150 years ago, right? It says at this point the new abbot goes through the triple gate. And then it says, but we don't really know what is meant by triple gate. This is 150 years old.

[59:39]

They could have figured it out. But it's perfectly all right to say, we don't know. You figure it out. And the ceremonies are so constructive that it's a bunch of categories you can fit together. And there's always the implied category of spontaneity. It's all scripted, but there's places where you just sort of turn around and start singing or something. or recite a poem that you've just made up. And the ceremonies are so detailed that the human mind can't keep the details in mind. It's like phone numbers are meant to be long enough to remember.

[60:55]

If we intentionally made phone numbers you couldn't remember, this would be this kind of idea. So by intentionally making a ceremony too complex to keep in mind or rehearse, It throws you into a situation where you have to somehow make it work. Now that's a different world view. And in that case, Sukhir, she said, there was a big ceremony that was done at the Heiji when he was there. And here's all this Heiji, which is the Omzal, the head temple, of 25,000 temples. And here's the top guys, and they're doing a ceremony.

[62:04]

Of course, they've all inherited somewhat different lineages of how you do ceremonies. But he says that everybody was there, and they got at a certain point in this big ceremony with a lot of people. Ground to a halt because no one knew what to do next. It would be like at the president's inauguration if suddenly somebody in the United States. If someone didn't know what to do and everything stopped and they said, what do we do next? Does he put his hand on the Bible or not? So anyway, it just stopped for a bit and then suddenly an old man slowly got up in the back and

[63:29]

the way he got up everybody understood what to do and then the ceremony went forward. And for Suzuki Roshi this was an example of real Zen. So I took a ceremony which is 27 or 8 pages in this 250-year-old text. And lasts for three days. Okay, and I had Tsukechi's son and grandson coming, so I had to do it in a way that made sense for Japanese people, too. And the ceremony has a lot of things that happened off-scene. You know something's going on, but you can't quite tell, but you can hear a bell or a drum or something.

[64:49]

But for Japanese people, that seems to create kind of anticipation, excitement. But for Westerners sitting in a room for an hour and a half with nothing happening, except a few tinkles off there and another one up there, you get quite irritated and bored. So I decided to keep the ceremony conceptually vital. But I decided to make the ceremony conceptually available to the people in the room.

[66:15]

But they weren't, you know, we had a whole way in which the audience was participants and they, but I'm not going to explain. You're the person who asked me to talk about the ceremony, right? So here I'm doing it, but I'm not telling you the secrets. I have to figure it out myself. So anyway, come. So I reduced 27 pages now three days, to an hour and 15 minutes. But it worked. And, yeah, that's enough. I didn't become faster.

[67:30]

Faster? What do you mean, faster? Oh. No, no, I stayed. Somehow I did, I must say, I did quite well. But I've been doing this stuff for years. I'm doing it sometimes quite well before I perish. Okay, something else? So let's have a moment of bowing.

[68:43]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_72.75