Please tell me something about your discussion. Yes. We began with an observation that practice is science-like because it's experientially not belief-based. Wir haben mit der Beobachtung begonnen, dass die Praxis etwas von einer Wissenschaft hat, weil sie in der Erfahrung wurzelt und nicht auf Glaubenssätzen aufbaut. Und dass wir nicht mit einem Satz von Instruktionen oder Anweisungen arbeiten, die davon handeln, wie etwas auszusehen hat. One person felt closer to a sense of exploring than a scientific sense.

[01:04]

More objective than their experience. A little cold. Felt more objective. Can you repeat that, please? How? Paul, you have to talk into the right ear. Excuse me. They felt exploring was more subjective or warmer. And that this kind of exploring or developing a craft over 2500 years is the legacy that we have now. Someone observed that using your practice instructions is using this sense of craft in this tradition of our practice.

[02:20]

We also had a discussion about the benefit of not knowing what an outcome will be. That we're willing to not know or to allow an accident to happen. This was contrasted with consciousness, which wants to continue to create a predictable experience in predictable ways. And out of this, one person expressed a feeling of closeness and intimacy with their experience. And they didn't know if this was being more precise, but they felt more in contact with their experience.

[03:28]

And finally we had a discussion about orioke practice. It's both very precise, but it's also unpredictable and dangerous. I always feel that with beet soup. Someone felt there was a real grace and beauty to not just each of us but all of us together doing Uriyoki. And there was a grace and beauty in the people who don't know Uriyoki but make an effort to do it.

[04:32]

And it resulted, I think, in most of us in the group feeling it was described as vivid or animated experience together of what we were discussing. And that vividness felt like a very alive, warm precision. Precision? Precision. Precision. precision, accuracy. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay, Samuel Ernst.

[05:43]

Yes. We also talked about scientific aspects. Couldn't we agree on what would be scientific and what measuring tape we should use? How scientifically brutal? We've also talked about science and we could not quite agree on what science actually is and how to define it. But then we found out that if, then it is an experiential science. And then the thought arose, or the question about the instruments to use, what kind of instruments or ways of measuring do we have. So first of all there are our five senses. And then there is intuition. And mindfulness as the newest aspect.

[06:56]

And also to observe and study things through breath. And also kind of field consciousness. Don't forget the body. I see a lot of them here, actually. Hard to forget. Yeah. Gesamtkörperwahrnehmung. Yes, also to study things with a very precise consciousness of the body and a whole body consciousness. Someone said very precisely, for all of us, the practice has already produced results.

[08:04]

when someone said practice does or did lead to results. And they are always noticeable. Okay, thank you. I was also in this group, and the last question was about reality or the real. Yes, and then there was the question, what is reality? I was in the same group and the last question Dieter posed was how can we get closer to things as they actually exist. Do you have the feeling?

[09:32]

And then the question was also raised, what is actually reality? And can we not only speak of human reality? I mean, is it not possible that spiders or animals have a different kind of reality? I hope. It's a spider doing push-ups in a mirror. I remember that from high school. Also, was ist das? Das ist eine Spinne, die Liegestützen auf einem Spiegel macht. Okay, ich hab mein Herz. In unserer Gruppe haben wir auch erst darüber gesprochen, über den Bildgeschatz bequemt, wie weit der sich übertragen ist.

[10:43]

Übersetzt du dich selbst, oder? Ja, ich bin übertragen. Okay. So first of all, we talked about how the term science is to be transferred. Translated? No, transferred to practice, I think that's what you mean, huh? Yeah. The main difference that we noticed is that the practice as my scientific experience does not work with objectifying constantly, that is, to stand against and objectify things. And one of the first differences we noticed was that practice as a science does not work with trying to objectify things and to always be opposed to things and put them somewhere out there, like we do in science. Mm-hmm.

[11:43]

but that this is a way how the body-mind continuum explores and experiences itself. And referring to the second question, that is, do you have the sense of coming through practice closer to things as they actually exist? There was the general opinion in our group that no one really dared to say that or to know how to make this kind of judgment.

[12:53]

But that there is experience to simply feel immediately concentrated, but there are experiences like feeling more immediate and more concentrated, more clear, being in a wider space, not to be so driven by externals, Feeling more natural, more balanced and more wholesome, is that a word? more vivid and more incorporated. Sounds good.

[13:54]

Can I give this practice to you? I don't care if it's science or not. And that through this kind of experience people feel themselves to be more in touch with themselves compared to this edgy thinking kind of space. Yeah, good. Who's next? Yeah.

[14:57]

In our group it was the case that the longer we felt this question of science, In our group we realized that the longer we explored this question, we more and more came up with a very similar result. Among each other? Yes, among each other. And the result was that the practice as... And the result was that we found practice to be a very good example of how science is or should be done. The main characteristic of science is that it has to be open to the results and the results cannot be set before.

[16:30]

And the main difference between practice and classic science is that in classic science subject and object are separated, whereas in practice subject and object are the same thing. The prejudice that often arises when one hears the word science and the negative connotation of it, according to our experience, is that science is generally run inattentively and that one of the main characteristics of our practice is that it is run attentively. science has a negative connotation to some extent, and that's because it's usually being done in a very unattentive or not mindful way, whereas in our practice the goal maybe is to be mindful or to do it mindfully.

[18:00]

Thanks. Yes? And to the term not mindful, is there a word, unmindful? Unmindful? Yeah, the no of mindfulness. To the term I would like to add that there is no scientific investigation on altruism or compassion. But here, here, in the practice or in my practice, I can experience this. I understand the Bodhidharma as my own inner science, to explore it and to experience all this here. Here I can experience compassion, here I can experience altruism. And the scientific examinations are focused solely on aggression.

[19:08]

But here within my practice I can experience this altruism. And in my Bodhidharma practice, which is the practice of my inner experiences, I experience altruism. And that's in contrast to scientific investigations, which usually only deal with aggression. Not all scientists would agree with you, but... Okay. Anyone else? Someone else? Yeah? For me it was very important that I heard from someone who has been practicing for a long time that the therapeutic level and the zazen level do fit together.

[20:12]

And I think it is impossible to only know yourself through sitting, but you also need someone sitting across from you. Like in a therapeutic relationship. So that there are different levels, but it doesn't work to just sit. I don't know if that's true, but it's a very good, important question for sure. We can come back to it. Maybe it's also a question or a matter of the school you're trained in. Like in my school, a psychotherapeutic school, we'd say it doesn't work to just sit.

[21:33]

Yeah, you might be right. But it's something that we can discuss too. Thanks for speaking. I mean, I like it when someone who hasn't talked much speaks. Anybody else who hasn't talked yet? You know who you are. Let's just hear your voice at least. Breaking the sound barrier. Can I say something? Oh, we've heard a lot of you. Yeah, I know. Go ahead, yeah. Something I would like to add is that what I find very, very important is this attitude or this intention of just facing the facts that's there in science and that's also there in practice, because in practice there's really no way of not facing the facts.

[22:48]

Mm-hmm. So something that is still very important for me is simply to keep the attitude or the intention to look at the facts. And that is just a possibility in science and that is also in practice. There is actually no way out than to really look at the facts. Sunday we'll end partly because some people have to leave early but also because we usually do end early on Sunday. We'll have a brunch. Yeah, and maybe, I think Saturday afternoon. So tomorrow we'll do rather what we're doing now. And Saturday afternoon we'll maybe just have a circle and each one of us will speak.

[24:12]

Yeah, I mean, I think it's important that we have an idea of what we're doing, what this practice is. And it is a kind of subjective science. And the studies that are going on now, there are a lot of them, on meditators. And one of the, it seems like a nonsensical breakthrough, but one of the breakthroughs was initiated, I think, primarily by Francisco Varela, Is that they accept first-person reports? The meditator says, this was my experience.

[25:41]

I felt this. And they never used to tell you. You go to the doctors and you say, I feel well. But our machines say... So this has to be, you can't do the research without first person reports. I myself, you know, lent myself and lent some of us, including I lent Suzuki Roshi, to some experiments years ago in the 60s at the San Francisco State University now, I believe, anyway. But there are a number of reasons. I did not think it was, particularly at that stage, fruitful. So I haven't done it since, and I have not encouraged anyone to do it.

[26:43]

But the Dalai Lama, His Holiness, is encouraging Tibetan monks at least to allow themselves to be studied. And I think it's fine. I mean, it's fine. If he wants to do it, then they want to do it. Okay. And I think Zen more... I mean, I'm not saying this to make Zen sound more important, because I think, I don't know, it's just that I think among the schools of Buddhism, Zen is the most... similar to science in its approach.

[28:03]

In simple ways, though. For example, we don't do in Zen guided meditation. Almost all Buddhist schools teach you how to meditate and they show you the stages and so forth. But the view in Zen is that we don't know where we're going to go and we don't want to give guided meditation. And Sukhirashi would make statements like, each of you will have your own enlightenment. So Zen does not assume there's a clear path of stages that we know exactly where we should arrive. To some extent, that's a disadvantage, but it's also closer to the concept of Western science, the approach of Western science.

[29:22]

In some ways, it may be a disadvantage, but it's still... I'm just sharing some thoughts with you now. And another way Buddhism is like science is there's a qualified peer review. In other words, part of the Sangha, and somebody mentioned that they were glad that there was an experienced person in the group they were in, Implicit and explicit in the development of the Sangha and the passing of the teaching

[30:31]

is there should be in each sangha experienced people who know what people go through and what the practice is like. That's certainly one of the main qualifications for being a teacher. That you can know whether a person is in safe territory or dangerous territory, for example, in their practice. Now, I don't think you can study altruism and compassion very well. But, you know, it is interesting that we do have... We do have... A kind of knowledge of... The kind of... Yeah, the... I don't know how to put it.

[32:14]

The... The role and... I don't know quite how to say it. We do know, we do have very... Well, let me put it this way. Joy, for instance, and bliss are very specific terms, technical terms within Buddhism, within Zen. And we know when they're likely to arise and when they arise, what they mean. And we do have practices which in a sense are a study of compassion, practices which develop compassion.

[33:27]

But I think probably more important from the point of view of comparing science and Buddhist science is the framework of altruism and compassion. The extended interpretation for example of the precepts includes that you don't sell alcohol and you don't sell firearms. So, you know, the words mindfulness and right livelihood came into the culture, in America at least, without any real idea of what they were as Buddhist practices. I was amused.

[34:39]

I read some kind of announcement of a conference or a book or something and said something like, this conference will concentrate on Buddhist meditation and Western teaching, Western similar practices like mindfulness. Well, this completely comes from Buddhism. It's not Western at all. But it so permeated the culture that now it's part of our culture. We take it for granted. Most therapists take it for granted and so forth. During the Vietnam War, many scientists begged out of the war and research and doing science to develop weapons because using right livelihood is the reason.

[35:40]

And during the Vietnam War it was also the case that many scientists wanted to withdraw from the army and wanted to stop developing weapons. And the reason for this is the right way of life. At that time it was impossible in America to practice the right way of life and at the same time to be patriotic. And all of this talk, Iran is going to get a nuclear weapon, etc., do nuclear research. And I guess there's quite a few, a lot of countries which have nuclear power programs, but very few actually enrich uranium. But Israel has the atomic nuclear weapons.

[36:59]

Probably Saudi Arabia does. And Pakistan has. And Saudi Arabia funded Pakistan's nuclear program, which supported Iraq's nuclear program. If I was an Iranian, I'd say, why the hell shouldn't I have a nuclear weapon? But to me, it goes back to the scientists. When they were making nuclear weapons first, I said, I gave my high school graduation speech on it. I said, if one country has nuclear weapons, they all will have, probably within my lifetime.

[38:03]

There's no way to stop it. It's like handguns. You can't control handguns. You're not going to be able to control nuclear weapons. They're going to be fairly easy to make. If you have enough money. So, I mean, excuse me for saying so, but I think it's inevitable that a nuclear weapon will blow up in an American city. Pretty close to inevitable. But, you know, in a way you can't blame them. I come from a family of scientists and engineers. So, in a way you can't blame them because they have a belief that somehow they trust knowledge. They trust they've got to go where their research leads them. But in many of this is a pretty compromised view because they say, I have to go where science leads me.

[39:33]

Who's funding your science? The U.S. government. Oh, that's interesting. But still, there's some kind of... Yeah, go ahead. Still, there's some kind of trust in knowledge. And the Buddhist view is some knowledge is okay, some knowledge you have to think about the consequences of. Strictly speaking, a Buddhist scientist does not do research on nuclear weapons. And also another way in which Zen is conceptually like science is the Buddha is not the end of our practice, but the beginning.

[40:48]

is that the Buddha is not the end point of our practice, but the beginning point. And you, from the Zen point of view, my point of experience, you will experience things the Buddha never experienced and already have. So, you know, Nico gave us, I'm still blaming you, Nico, when Nico gave us this topic, Which actually, for me anyway, has turned out quite well, so thank you. I never know quite what I'm going to do or go or say. We'll find out later if it's turned out all right for you guys. But... As I said, it took centuries for the vision of the Mahayana vision to be articulated in the practices and teachings of various schools.

[42:22]

And thinking about this and being confronted with this has also been much of my life. Because, I mean, in a way, I'm in effect trying to create a new school of Buddhism. It wasn't my intention. It's not that I think, oh, I should start. It's just I don't find an alternative. In trying to take this vision of the Mahayana and Zen's extension of it, into our life, our daily life, our practice, our culture. I find in effect I'm redefining a lot So it works in our particular culture.

[43:49]

Maybe it's not a new school, but it's certainly a lineage with a particular flavor. Maybe it's not a new school, but surely it's a classroom with a certain taste. It's not my intention, but it seems to be what's happening now. No, I think the phrase, which I use a lot, things as they are, is a kind of black box.

[45:00]

It's not clear what it means. But still, we do in our practice have an experience of at least trying something like that. And, you know, the Dalai Lama was, I think, remarkable in saying his book, a new book on the relationship of science and Buddhism. I have... I haven't read it. But I've heard that there's a couple points at which he, you know, takes stands which science would not.

[46:01]

But he said, and I think he says in the book, I'm not sure, but I know he said publicly, if there's anything that can be clearly shown in Buddhism is not, doesn't stand up to science, it has to be changed. He said, if there's any aspect of Buddhism which proves to be not true from the point of view of science, then we have to change it. Yeah, that's probably enough observations on this. I could speak about, and I did it some length once, speak about what kind of baseline in our experience we try to establish.

[47:09]

And maybe I'll speak about it tomorrow. We'll see. Let me go back. Why I... I didn't continue the experiments with having ourselves wired up, you know, for experiments back in the 60s. There were basically three reasons. One is that very soon the results got out on the street. Some people did remarkably better than others.

[48:16]

They're lab assistants. I mean, the people, they're young people, and they're interested, and they tell a friend who tells a friend, and pretty soon the streets of San Francisco knew how well Sukershi did, how well I did, how well Mike Worfie did, how well, you know. And then people draw conclusions about it. And I called up the head of the research and I said, look, two or three years later, I said, look, this is ridiculous. He says, well, they're marked private and they're in a file drawer. And I said, yeah, but who has access? Well, everybody on the research has access to the files of So that's the personal, you know, that's for the advancement of science that's not really a big problem, it's a small thing.

[49:21]

But it was kind of dumb. And then another reason is they only measure what they can measure. So they begin to create a picture on the basis of what they can measure. And it doesn't take into consideration things like, you know, sometimes there's been people who I've practiced with who've been really very gifted at meditation. Gifted at the kind of meditation they can measure. The kind of meditation experience they can measure.

[50:48]

And yet the person doesn't have the psychological and personal structure and wider experience to handle that. And the experience in the context where they're not mature yet makes them a little crazy. So if a teacher sees that, they send the person down the wrong paths for a few years, you know, until they get mature enough to handle their meditation experience. But if you're someone like me, whose legs never work very well, your meditation experience takes years to get a little bit ahead of the pain. But if you are someone like me, whose legs have never really worked properly, then the meditation experience just takes years to grow out of the pain just a little bit.

[51:58]

So just learning to sit and to do it creates a certain stability. That's the second reason. And the third reason, they draw conclusions then that enlightenment is a certain kind of experience, not a certain kind of behavior. Then... Just from this guy's experience, he was one of the first. Somebody did it in Japan before him, but I think this project I was involved in in San Francisco was the first in the United States.

[53:01]

And it was certainly well-intentioned. But they concluded that there were shortcuts to these great experiences. They just had to manipulate the brain waves into it. So why I started to laugh is because I remembered a few years I knew these machines from this guy's experiments people started making these machines. So I think sometime in the 80s I was somewhere in In Germany, getting used to, Germany getting acquainted to the New Age with a whole bunch of New Age conferences.

[54:14]

It was sort of the 60s come to Germany and the 80s. And New Age, I usually pronounce New-age. So I was in one of these conferences, I don't know, and it was a kind of carnival of science and meditation and trance and dance and stuff like that. And there was this booth with this machine. I said, oh, I've seen that machine before. So they said, aren't you Baker Roshi? I said, well, I saw him sometimes. So they said, could we hook you up? We really want to know. So I was just like, come on. So I did it and I just fell asleep.

[55:27]

They said, your brain waves are great when you are asleep. And you told me they have enlightenment hats now. Tell us what you told me. In German? Yes, in German. I know enough about it already. So if any of you have done this and have had experience with the enlightenment hat, I'm fairly sure you won't pass my peer review. Just a comment about therapy.

[56:28]

The terms, the shravakas, the hearers, the one who hears the teachings, Shravakas. Isn't that how you pronounce it? Shravaka? Our scholar here I have to check up with. And Pratyekabuddhas. Pratyekabuddhas. Pratyekabuddhas are Buddhas who are enlightened by accident. Just from experience in life. And Mahayana, when they're in a politically abusive mood, say, oh, the Shravakas and the Pratyekas, they don't really understand.

[57:36]

Because the realization and the maturing of the practice did not occur in a face to face context with others. So there's no Zen which thinks just sitting is good. Just sitting in a sangha with a teacher is what makes practice work. And Dogen says it all has to be face to face. But I hear some people do Doksan over the phone now and videos. I don't know, I'm glad I'm just a small potato, you know, and we have this little group and we practice together. Small potato Zen, that's what I like. I'm glad I'm just a small potato and we practice together.

[58:51]

I'm glad I'm just a small potato and we practice together. [...] I'm glad A lot of potatoes here, right? Some of the best potatoes in the world are in the San Luis Valley, actually. That's where Christians... Okay, um... But still, there are many times I feel that a person practicing should do therapy. Because therapy is different from... There's no Buddhist psychology in my opinion.

[59:53]

Buddhism is much better described as a mindology. And there's some things that you can do with a therapist, psychotherapeutically, which you cannot do in Zen, for the most part, I'd say. And I have an interest in understanding and making clear ways which Zen practice in our culture can be used psychotherapeutically. Some people, that's a strong emphasis for some people I practice with, but for me, I'm doing mostly just what you see me doing. So, anyway, we've talked enough.

[61:02]

And you've talked enough. Luckily, there's somebody like you in my life, because otherwise I couldn't practice with you. But I've been lucky in finding people who can translate for me. Okay.

[61:31]

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