Well, I like our association with Guni and Walter and constellation practice. And I guess I like it because nobody knows what constellation practice really is. And no one knows what Zen practice really is. But it does work. And constellation practice does work. You know, I mean, you know, we have these basic questions. The biggest basic question is, why does anything exist? And which is not really something we can answer.

[01:10]

And if we do start thinking about, well, was there a beginning, then we have the problem of what was before the beginning. And if there's boundaries, what's on the other side of the boundaries? And if everything was just always, it's always been like this, it's amazing how many ways always has found to be always. I'm always curious if she could translate that. Something like, how many ways always can be always. Okay. But, you know, the tantric Shingon practice in Japan, Kukai, the founder of it, I had a word, Kekai, it's in Japanese K-E-K-K-A-I.

[02:29]

And it means basically just to start somewhere. So if there's no beginning and no end, where do you start? Well, Kukai's emphasis was you start where you are. The basic act of starting with others is the offering incense. So I offered incense here at this white marble Indian, North Indian temple.

[03:33]

sculpted for a Brahmin Buddha. His father loved Buddhism, but his son inherited the statue and didn't know what to do with it because he was Hindu, so we ended up with it. But basically, you are, for instance, under the altar, if we have an altar, and it creates space. So since it's all, yeah. So since it's all arbitrary, we have to start somewhere. And most of what look like formal practices in Zen, Sangha practice, are really...

[04:50]

opportunities to recognize that we're creating space. Now, physicists and Buddhists agree, really contemporary physicists and Buddhism for a long time, that space and time don't exist. Zeitgenössische Physiker und Buddhisten stimmen wirklich darin überein, dass Zeit und Raum nicht existieren. They're just interactions. Das sind einfach Interaktionen. And so, if they're just interactions and there's no inert... Inert? Ja, inert container, separate from us, called space. Is inert like inherent? No, like dead or not alive. Okay. Now, intellectually I've understood for decades that space and time don't exist except as activity. But understanding that, what that means incrementally over years has been shocking to me.

[06:21]

But to understand what that means, step by step, over the years, that was or is something shocking for me. Because the assumption that time and space exist is built into our language, into our culture, into everything my body does. So understanding, really understanding this so it's embodied, natural, has taken me a long time. And I'm mentioning this because I think constellation practice has its power actually because time and space don't exist. So again, we don't know why this craft, this practice of constellation therapy is effective.

[07:42]

But we can look at what we do know. Just the word constellation is an attempt to give some actuality to the practice. There's all this mass of stars every night. And going away back into prehistoric Mesopotamia and then pre-common era Greek, classic Greek thought. There was a developing identification of patterns in the stars called constellations.

[09:01]

And in the English word, constellation, you hear the word star, stellar. And I think Virginia Satir, who I knew slightly, was one of the founders of... of this therapeutic practice. I think she called the practice sculpting and I think when I first became acquainted it was called sculpting. In sculpting, if a sculptor looks at a stone or a piece of wood and he turns it various ways and he can see something in it.

[10:17]

So when we make a constellation, we are making a pattern and we don't know what it's going to be. Now, one of the, I think, implicit practices within the practice, one of the implicit concepts within constellation therapeutic practice It's what I would call imaginal space. Imaginal space is like if you're going to sleep, You have to kind of believe that sleep is possible.

[11:40]

If you just lie there and think, I can't go to sleep, I don't believe sleep is possible, you might as well get up. So you create the conditions for practice, or you create the conditions for sleeping and then you believe it's possible and it might happen. And I found out that it seems like a dumb thing to find out but it wasn't so long ago I found out that if I don't want to get up yet but I'm not really going to go to sleep I dropped the idea, the imaginal space of sleeping. And I imagine a hanging around in bed space.

[13:00]

So I don't plan to go to sleep, I'm just going to hang around in bed and often I kind of half sleep. And one of the dimensions of the four seals of Buddhist practice is the potential of enlightenment. The practice and the teachings to be effective have to function, really, if it's going to be transformative practice, have to function within the imagination that enlightenment is possible.

[14:02]

If you don't imagine that Enlightenment, whatever it is, is everywhere possible and always. The teachings and the practices won't find the soil in which they can transform. then the teachings and the exercises will not find the ground in which they can do their transformative work, in which they can transform, they will not find the ground. So this place, Johanneshof, Kuala Lumpur, is, we've tried to create and hope we are creating the conditions for the potentiality of enlightenment. Yeah, so let me go back a moment. This idea of creating a arbitrary line in the middle of space and calling it offering incense or an altar.

[15:10]

Now, one of the practices in... when I lived in Japanese monasteries for the... One of the practices when I lived in a Japanese monastery for the... If you are, say, working with a broom, which is common, you hold the broom for a moment and you don't do it so people notice particularly. But you hold the broom for a moment and line up your spine with it. Another time, if there's not brooming, you sometimes put your thumb here and draw a line down your front and then start to work.

[16:35]

And this isn't about that you sweep better when you've done this, though it might be the case. That kind of activity is code for using your situation to define your bodily space. Okay, so just as... Just as we can in space draw these lines which we call an altar or something like that.

[17:39]

Or we can define the space of our relationship with someone else by bowing to them. Where the basic practice starts, the most fundamental practice, your life has started with an in-breath. And it will end with an out-breath. Sorry to remind you of that. And there's lots of breaths in between. And those breaths in between, really, breath practice is not really breath practice. Breath practice is inhale practice and exhale practice. Atempraxis ist Einatempraxis und Ausatempraxis.

[18:52]

It's a generalization to say breathing. Es ist eine Verallgemeinerung, einfach Atem zu sagen. Practice is really about the movements of the body that accompany the inhale and exhale and the difference between them. So as offering incense is this idea of kekkai, more fundamental on that is the attentional inhale and the attentional exhale, which locates you attentionally in the activity of the body, the actual activity of the body.

[20:01]

And it's understood in Buddhism that all the in and exhales, in and exhales, I like that, in and exhales between the first and the last are really, when they're attentional, are the source of wisdom and compassion. And that's recognized in the words spirit and soul and so forth. And in some Christian stories, God breathed soul into Adam. But he forgot Eve, I think.

[21:02]

So I don't like the story too much. But in any case, all of these stories Wisdom practices start with breath. And I find constellation therapy a wisdom practice. In the patterns of your life and the patterns of your life with others and your generational patterns, Or really what I should have said, in your generational and personal life, there are patterns. And how are you going to recognize these patterns?

[22:10]

Yeah, I think of a caterpillar. How the heck is a caterpillar going to recognize that it's going to be a butterfly or a moth? Wie zum Kuckuck soll eine Raupe erkennen, dass sie ein Schmetterling sein wird oder eine Motte? It just hangs upside down and then there's something interesting. It's called imaginal discs are part of the caterpillar, which become the butterfly. Die hängt einfach kopfüber und dann gibt es da so etwas Interessantes wie das, weiß ich nicht, was er meint, imaginierte... Scheiben? [...] Those imaginal disks become all the parts of the butterfly or moth.

[23:29]

And you mean imaginal like imagined? It's the word, same word, imaginal. So we could say that Caterpillar has the imagination of the butterfly within it. Okay, so I think within our activities, We have the imagination of resolution, of transformation, of recognition, of acceptance. Recognition.

[24:39]

Resolution, recognition. Not important. I know it's hard to translate a list. Lists are not good. I should give you the list in small units. So if I were a... doing Zen constellation therapy. Maybe I'm doing Zen constellation practice already. Isn't our Sangha a kind of constellation? Yeah, I would say that like we're sitting in a circle or we're sitting in a room. And I would, first of all, feel this body creating space. By bringing attention to the inhale and then attention to the exhale.

[26:05]

And that's like drawing the line. Just drawing a line. And then feeling this space that as being created. It doesn't exist except by our creating it in the room and the columns and each other. So I would say it starts with feeling your own body, your own, but anyway, the body, your own body, actually making space. And that space is made by your context, too. Already, this context is... Context sounds kind of dead, it's fixed, but Constellation may be better because it's related parts.

[27:25]

So from my point of view, right now you are each in a constellation. And your internal, maybe traumatic constellation or internal personal constellation is affecting how you join or part of this constellation. No, I think when we go into the Zendo in the morning, or into service, I have some feeling like drawing a line and entering into the constellation of the room, the space of this body and the space of the shared bodies.

[28:47]

Then I have a feeling that I am drawing a line and that I am entering the constellation of the space and the constellation of this body and the common space or the common body. Now I might enter the zendo with the imaginal space of, geez, we've got this problem here of the house, the... some members of the Sangha wanted to purchase, to live near Yohannesov? I could enter this room with this imagined room, with this problem, where I remember, oh, now we have this problem, that some Sangha members wanted to buy a house nearby. Which now sounds like it's not possible for various reasons, at least at this stage. So I go into Zazen and that imaginal space is present.

[30:04]

But the imaginal space is also present that the potential of enlightenment and transformation and resolution is also present. So my concern with how we're going to manage this problem occurs in the larger space of resolution and transformation is possible. And my own feeling and my experience is somehow the dynamic of these interrelated imaginal spaces usually starts Solving the problems.

[31:06]

In a way, I set up the conditions like setting up the conditions for going to sleep. Yes, so I set up the conditions for this to be resolved or learned from, etc. And then I kind of step aside from it personally and just let these imaginal spaces their actuality function. So that's how I see, again, constellations. I mean, I'm an amateur. I don't know much about it except as a friend and observer.

[32:07]

But my sense is, if I were going to be in a constellation, I'd first locate myself in the attentional body. And then I would feel the wider space, the shared space. And then the protagonist of the constellation has a particular wish or problem they present. So then I would take that as my imaginal space as well. And I would assume that in this configuration resolution is possible. Or perhaps incremental recognitions are possible. oder dass vielleicht schrittweise Erkenntnisse oder Anerkennungen möglich sind.

[33:46]

But I would, in the way, step back from it, enter it fully, but step back at the same time and let it happen. Und ich würde dabei aber gleichzeitig zurücktreten, es gleichzeitig auch voll hineintreten, aber irgendwie gleichzeitig auch zurücktreten und es geschehen lassen. Mm-hmm. Somebody defined, some physicist defined a quantum photon as a collection of positions. So our life is a collection of positions. I like the phrase. And it's really, we're in the midst of them, so it's really difficult to see the collection of positions. So here, with the help of others, with friends and the presence of Gunni and Walter and all of us, I think it's possible to create certain kekkai, certain dimensions, which allow the constellations of the sculpture which reveal this

[35:04]

give shape to this collection of positions. Some of the positions fall away. And then the positions that are left that begin to cohere, Somehow are often hard to accept or hard to see. But it's worth trying. And to be open to, geez, somehow this appeared. And then let it work in you.

[36:28]

Because it is, our lifetime is trying to open ourselves to the collection, to the patterns within our collection of positions. And again, while we don't quite understand what's happening, this practice like Zen practice also tends to work. But we have to create the conditions for it and then let it work. So I'm very happy this space and this practice center can be used in this way. And of course I don't know if anything I've said is useful, but it's what occurs to me when I think about constellation practice.

[37:49]

To let your heart into the patterns that appear through our shared interaction. Thank you for translating. Thank you for letting me say something, Guni. Okay, I believe in 15 or 14 or 13... fast approaching 12 minutes, there is lunch. Is that right? One o'clock? Yes. Is that right, Dorothea? Is that possible? 13-2 or something like that.

[38:44]

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