Good afternoon. Oh, hi. A-pa-pa, O-pa-pa is with O. Emily. O in Japanese means ... precious or honored or something. Like ocha is honored or precious tea. Or O-Kesa. The Kesa is Buddhist robe and the O-Kesa is the way you say it. Yeah, so O-Emily is with O-Papa-A. Okay.

[01:05]

Yeah, as I said, much of what I'm, yeah, two-thirds or three-fourths or so of what I said this morning, I said in a somewhat similar way in Munchen. So if you're willing, if any of the three of you, I guess it's Valentin and Elizabeth and Andreas who were there. Is there anything that comes up hearing it again which... So you three, Valentin, Elisabeth and Andreas, who are in Munich, Or if anything come up since last weekend, etc.

[02:07]

I'm dealing with this, what you said about the consciousness, the tool of consciousness. When I sit and I create this, what you call, second space by observing what's happening, so in this way, is it not also that in this moment – I mean, maybe it doesn't make the world predictable – that I use in this moment also the tool of consciousness? And but then after a while it changes and then – I'll use my words – then it's more that this all disappears and it's just, you have just stillness there.

[03:23]

when I regard it this way, so it wouldn't be so bad to use this tool of consciousness. But on the other hand, maybe it's some kind of a detour because I also could go directly into sternness. Okay, Deutsch, bitte. I'm still thinking about this tool, this consciousness as a tool. If I sit down and create this second space that Roger mentioned, when you step back and look at what is happening right now, if this is not the way I use this tool at the moment. And if you look at it that way, it wouldn't be too bad to use it, even though it's a detour on the other side, because it's often the case that it changes and falls at some point, and then it's not there anymore, but it's actually just

[04:28]

Well, first, OK, so I'm speaking about the effect of bringing this posture not this posture, which is not sleeping or waking posture, into our life. Sorry, I said we're bringing this posture that's neither sitting nor sleeping in our daily life. Into our life.

[05:34]

Okay. So you're not sleeping and you're not active. Okay. It's maybe like a little bit like you sit down in the stream of your life. And the stream's trying to go somewhere, but you're just sitting there, so the stream kind of circles back on itself or something. So you can start sitting in the midst of your mental and physical activity. So first you... And this is... First I hope what happens, because, you know, one's alert and noticing things.

[06:43]

You notice your own activity, mental and physical activity, in more detail. And that's clearly from your description what you're doing. Now, does what you're noticing coincide with what I'm saying? Or does what you're noticing coincide with Buddhist teaching? Yeah, so we're noticing and we're also noticing in a context of some teaching, in this case mine.

[07:45]

and you don't want to make your experience fit what I'm saying and you don't I mean you want to trust first of all your own experience And then you want to see if there's any benefit in seeing how it relates to what I'm saying. And what I'm saying has been developed just by my doing just that in myself. And when I notice a problem, does that make sense?

[09:02]

Yeah, it clarifies or deepens what I'm trying to talk about. And again, I'm not, of course, naming entities. It's all activity shifting around. Es ist alles Aktivität, die sich hin und her verlagert. Okay. Ich verstehe das Wort entity nicht. I don't understand the word entity. This bell is, we think of this bell as a bell, as an entity.

[10:08]

In Buddhism, we don't think of it as a bell. It's an activity. It's only a bell if you hit it. As I say, if I drink tea out of it, I've tried it, it tastes terrible. It's a teacup. It's only a bell if we use it. And the man who made it, made it aiming the metal toward its use. Its activity. It's nice to sit by a bunch of sunflowers. And if I'm sitting next to Marie-Louise, I should think they'd all be turned this way.

[11:19]

I haven't forgotten as much as I can what you said. To make an outline of what I'm speaking about. I'm trying to speak about What happens, yeah, maybe say for two years or three years of mainly just bringing this posture into your life? During or after? During the two or three years. That should be the main occupation of your practice, if it's serious practice. Das sollte die Hauptbeschäftigung von deiner Praxis sein, wenn das irgendwie seriöse Praxis sein soll. Okay, then we add institutional practice.

[12:42]

Und dann fügen wir noch institutionalisierte oder institutionelle Praxis hinzu. And that would be like a Sashin. Und das wäre jetzt sowas wie ein Sashin. And more specifically monastic practice. So behind my question, or important to me, is the additional question is, what happens when you add sashins? What happens when you add monastic practices? And what happens when you add teaching? Now, the problem with entity thinking is not so going to be obvious by just bringing the posture into your sitting. Or even a really deep understanding of impermanence is not going to be brought into your life by just sitting.

[13:53]

We could almost say, entity-less is a word for emptiness. One can also say that entitylessness is something like emptiness. Or Monika, there are these wooden blocks, and then he can play there. He's really getting big, isn't he? He was Emily-sized about three days ago. Watch out. See, that's what happens to Emily. Oh... Okay, so let me come back.

[15:19]

Do you have anything you would like to add, Valentin? Yeah. It's funny. Anytime I want to speak, I forget what I want to say. That reminds me. I was at a meeting once in a tenement with a lot of black people, and this great, powerful black woman got up, and she was great. And she said, I won't use the expletive here, She said, I just stood up and my thoughts sat down. Yes, go ahead. It's a little like what you said about the bell.

[16:33]

Last week it became clearer than it's ever been for me, but sitting or the activity of sitting, what it could mean in daily life. For me, since last week, it means not to run away. Usually when it feels like it's time to run away or to change something, a problem or something. Sitting means just staying there. Stay in the midst of it. Yeah. That became very clear. I was very grateful for that. Oh, you're welcome. It's a small thing, but it can be a big thing. It might be like with the bell. The activity of sitting is just staying there. Yeah. Pretending you're a bell. Yes. Yeah, now do you want to say that in Deutsch or do you want her to do it? You can do it. It's your thought. I wouldn't...

[17:36]

Ja, es wurde klar nächste Woche und ich bin auch sehr dankbar dafür, dass es ein bisschen wie, was der Roshi gerade gesagt hat, mit der Aktivität des Sitzens für mich bedeutet, da zu bleiben, wenn ich wegrenne. It's a little like the refusal to pick or choose. I have no preferences. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, thank you. Anything? Yes, I remember when you asked me that I once had a kind of fetal precision of sitting.

[18:41]

It helped me to work that way. I have this image of more subtle precision of sitting which got me more into it. What? The LEHR. So that outside from the teaching there is some kind of field spread when I make my posture more precise. And then I had this feeling that when you said introducing the teaching that this is like putting a seed into it or into that which then can develop in a much different way.

[19:58]

And something first thought is very strange, but it didn't feel that strange that this deals three minds, and the fourth one which we create, which overlaps these three, makes them almost more available. Makes the first three, the birth lines, all more available. Yeah, that's true. It didn't make them so separate. Mm-hmm. That was what brought me into that, what was going on in Munich. Okay, anybody else want to say something? Okay, so I have to see how to come back to your question and explore it more.

[21:15]

So I will. We'll see what happens for a little while. Okay. Again, what happens when you, if I stay for a little bit longer with just introducing this posture to your life? Well, you begin to notice that somehow you might make decisions, probably would make a decision a little differently through sitting with the problem than with thinking through the problem. And although you don't have to know what's going on, I would say what's going on is you're basically weaving mind, body and breath together.

[22:39]

So you're bringing your body more into your body. thinking and feeling and consciousness. So this kind of balancing or something or other like that, integrating of the, bringing into a better proportion and relationship the three birth minds, Yeah, and you begin to feel the presence of mind in what you're doing. And you feel more breath and mind are in a dialogue or participating with each other.

[23:50]

And you begin to be acquainted with the fourth skanda, which is the mind of associative consciousness, which is like the mind of free association in psychotherapy. So this is a kind of vipassana, a kind of clear seeing of your ingredients is going on. Or there's an analysis.

[24:58]

In the old sense of the word analysis, it means just to loosen things up, to hold things up and loosen them up. So you begin to see into the weave of the basket of mind and body. And you begin to see through the spaces of the weave. You begin to feel the space between thoughts and so forth. You can notice when a thought or mood arises. And then if you're an inquisitive person without much teaching, you can begin to follow a thought or mood to its source.

[26:02]

And then if you're an inquisitive person, you find... You can begin to wonder where that thought came from. So you're going along your day and you decide it's time to go to Zazen. You've washed your face in the morning, say. We have an expression, you cross your heart and hope to die. You cross your heart. A kid says, I'm telling you, I cross my heart and hope to die. Is that if you didn't lie? Yeah. It's what kids say. So I always sometimes in the morning I think I'm going to cross my legs and hope to die. So you're in the middle of whatever your day is and you sit down.

[27:05]

Okay. You're in a reasonably good mood. And then up pops anxiety. And you might wonder, where the heck did that come from? No, that doesn't take teaching to notice that or being curious. So you might and you can and you ought to develop the skill of following thoughts, moods, feelings to their source. To the triggers. And you can get so that you find the triggers for... Physical states and mental states.

[28:21]

I mean, in a way, it's an endless weave. But usually when something is there, there's actually a specific feeling, thought, memory that causes, you know, something. You think of someone who died or whatever. And often, in our usual activity, the source is buried in the feet. We're just in the midst of feelings. We don't know why we feel the way we do. So this sitting and just in the midst of your mind and body, Without trying to get away from it or scratch or, you know, something.

[29:38]

And one of the things that came up and mentioned was, you know, sometimes you go through extreme fear or extreme anger or hatred or murderous thoughts. We've woven a personality from the reeds of our culture. And our family life. And at some point we may say, hey, this is just a basket I don't need to live in or use. And at that point, sometimes a tremendous fear can come up because you could lose everything or everything you've done so far doesn't make any sense or something like that.

[30:52]

You lose the world view. You lose your world view and it can be about as scary as anything possible. It can be a kind of nervous breakdown. The difference is you're sitting in the midst of it and not moving and just letting it happen. No, if it's really bad, you might see a therapist, you might take a tranquilizer, I don't know. But if possible, you just stay in the midst of it and let it get as bad as it wants and say, I'm just sitting here.

[31:53]

And this pain or anxiety or horrible thought can burn its way through you. And when it's through you, sometimes you feel like a burned up piece of wood, but you're still there. And actually, the pain of zazen in sashim often helps this dissipating deep feelings to occur, absorbing and dissipating. Can you say that again, please? The experience of, now I'm talking about institutional practice.

[33:05]

Where you're sitting all day long with a group of people who are kind of like watching you to see if you're going to move. Or... Or they're sitting and you're sitting. Somehow it helps you not move. And one usually has to go through some pretty intense periods before one's on the other side of the pain. One of the most beneficial things that can happen to you in your life. Because once you've gotten this ability just to sit there, no matter what happens, You can face almost anything in your life.

[34:26]

Yeah, and I suppose puberty rights and things like that were supposed to do this work for you in past ages. And you also, now you know you can sit through anything that's thrown at you, that comes up in you. And in effect, you break the connection between thought and action. So you don't fear anymore.

[35:39]

If I'm full of murderous thoughts, it doesn't mean I'm going to murder somebody. And several times I've actually worked with people who had real serious compulsive thoughts that they were in total fear that they were going to act on. that they have to do what they think about, right? And they learned over a period of time to sit through it and they broke the power of the compulsive thoughts. Okay. In any case, once you have that feeling, then you're open to an inner psychoanalytic process.

[36:52]

Excuse me, when you? Once you've broken this connection between thought and action. Okay. And once you can develop the mindfulness in daily life and in sitting, so you're in what I would call is the real present. So you notice things immediately when they happen to you, not later when they begin to have more developed effects.

[38:19]

And you cope with them immediately and not later when they're now a headache or illness or a bad mood. So you have a participatory engagement in your life. You have a feeling of participatory possession of your life. teilnehmendes oder mitwirkendes Besitz von eurem Leben habt.

[39:33]

You're not a victim of your moods. Ihr seid nicht Opfer eurer Stimmung. You're in the midst of the moods happening and you feel you have something to say about them. Ihr seid mittendrin in dem Geschehen eurer Stimmung und ihr habt da was mitzureden, wie es ist. Okay. Okay, some territory like that can happen just by bringing this posture of sitting into your life on a regular basis. And now you're more ready for the teachings. And now you're also more ready for whether and how you bring institutional practice into your life.

[40:36]

Like zazen, I mean like sashin or monastic practice. Okay. No, I think we have to take a break. But I'd like, if any of you have any thoughts about who practiced at, done monastic practice, how that changed your practice or did something that you wouldn't have done without monastic practice.

[41:44]

And here, of course, we're trying to create some mix of daily practice, And sesshin practice, monastic practice, sitting together, sangha practice, etc. So basically this is a place to bring a certain amount of institutional practice into lay practice. Here it is a place where you can bring a certain amount of monastic practice into daily life. So let's have a break.

[42:39]

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