So let's continue. Anybody else want to say something? Yes, please. And I would like to say something because I'm quite new and up until three months before I didn't even know what Zen was. I'd like to express what I feel here, but I have to tell something of myself. Please. Two years ago, my life completely changed, and everything that had made up my life up until then had disappeared. I even had the feeling that I wasn't myself anymore. And I was looking for myself. And then I completely changed my life. And then three months ago I made an acquaintance.

[01:01]

And the first time you hear about Zen. And then I changed my life completely and about three months ago I made a new acquaintance and heard something about Zen. And then I realized that the attentive life which is being taught was what I had been doing up until then. And then I actually started to be interested in it and came here, actually only out of curiosity, to learn the MasterCAD, from which my acquaintance has learned so much. And then I was getting curious and lastly out of curiosity came here to get to know that Master of whom my acquaintance had learned so much.

[02:05]

Oh, okay. When I was standing at the door I knew when I would For me everything was completely new. And being absolutely new, everything was said here could relate to myself and to my own experiences. And there were things I didn't understand and things that were new, but also words I could relate because it was a slightly different language than from my own.

[03:22]

But my feeling is definitely that there is a sphere that I can enter and get access to. A sphere? A sphere. A sphere, yeah. And where I can get that which I need or what is necessary for me at the moment. But yesterday what I heard was not possible to put into words or to tell to my acquaintance. It goes into myself, into me, but it takes time to get sort of into the head. But I know I've found the opportunity, the occasion to do something about it for me, for myself. Okay. Hey, I feel good.

[04:35]

If it worked that well, that's good. Thanks. Yes? The story about the blindsided woman which we talked about on the prologue day was working with me. and that she was so unhappy about it. And in this seminar I sort of feel like being pregnant with this practice. And it is so satisfying to get this put into words. So that for this woman, it wasn't enough that the seeing worked, but she had to know it, she had to learn to know it.

[06:12]

The experience is that the practice grows, that I get to know it also through language. Yeah, this blindsided example makes certain things very clear. what version of non-self one chooses from the tradition. In other words, there's various ways we can experience the absence or lessening of self-referential thinking, for example. But how inflected or subtly we understand that makes a big difference. So this blindsided woman needing consciousness in order to experience to make use of seeing is quite interesting, is very interesting.

[07:30]

Okay, Gerald. I would like to say something about the appearance of a Buddha. And one of the big themes here is connectedness and relation. The practice moment is where I look and see what's surrounding me and to myself. and how I changed this relationship and you spoke about the example of Issa Glowsey who spoke in a lecture about how he goes into a relationship

[08:44]

And you told the example of Dissandosi yesterday, Rashid, how he goes into or gets into relation. And he said, every time he meets a person, whether he knows her or not, it's like a door that he sees where... And he says, if he meets a person, whether he knows the person or not, it is for him like a door, or was for him like a door, where a Buddha could stand, or stands behind the door. He took this as an occasion, as a chance with everybody or every meeting to see the world from a different perspective, a different angle.

[09:50]

For me it is how the Buddha appears, that I become clear to myself that relationship is life and in which direction I want to change it. For me it is how the Buddha appears, Life is relationship. Relationship is life. Life is relationship and how I want to experience it. And how do I want to change it. And how do I want to change it. Okay. Is San Dorsi said this? Yes. He said in one of his talks in Santa Fe. Oh, really? I didn't know it. I wasn't referring to it yesterday, but... Yes. He was my disciple and friend. I'm glad you said the same thing. I'm glad you guys are more familiar with the literature than I am. Craig? I also wanted to say something about this question of how the Buddha appears.

[10:55]

It's a question that I have now brought a little bit into my zaza. And it's interesting. It's interesting. I think my experience is that when I ask the question, the Buddha seems to appear differently each time. And depending on what practice I bring into my zazen or my daily activity, The Buddha appears differently.

[12:11]

If I work with the Eightfold Path, the Buddha appears differently in views. It appears differently in intentions. Each part of the teaching of the Buddha appears differently. And when I work with the eightfold path, then the Buddha appears in the intentions differently than in the views. And in every part of the learning the Buddha appears differently. You say the Buddha appears, and the Buddha appears differently. What are some examples of the form the Buddha takes when it appears?

[13:11]

Well, if I work the full path, And I sit in views. There's a feeling of some views that are truer than other views. And I could call that Buddha. Why not just call it wisdom? Or a truer view. It has a wide feeling. And that would also be a different experience if you named it wisdom. Okay, so let me use your example.

[14:31]

When would we call it Buddha and not just wisdom? Or perhaps a third possibility, just, oh, this is a truer view, this feels better or something. In the language of Zen practice you'd call it a Buddha when it generates a mind stream or generates a body which replaces your body which then you could act from, then you could say that the Buddha appears through your bringing this into your practice of the first of the Eightfold Paths.

[15:38]

And what do I mean by replacing your body? Okay. Now, let me say these distinctions are not moot. Not mute, but moot. Moot means a small point that seems unimportant. It's a moot point. Or we could say it's not non-trivial. Okay. I haven't read the literature and he already is saying it. Okay. Because to notice, and this comes back to your point, really what is the relationship between conscious and auricus, conscious conceptual knowledge and direct experience of awareness or perhaps a written mind?

[17:02]

The direct experience of there is no mind? The direct experience of awareness or original mind. You have an experience. And you can notice that experience. And noticing that experience can hinder the experience. Or it can develop the experience. And I think what happens when people practice meditation over a period of time, particularly by themselves, you know, on their own, so to speak.

[18:06]

Yeah, it's maybe even like in psychotherapy. You tell your therapist something that you've... You tell your therapist something Say you tell your therapist ten things. You've noticed all of these ten things. And your therapist pays attention to one of them or two of them. Because you, from your self-point of view, value them all equally. Oh, I thought of those, I'm pretty smart. From the third person point of view of the therapist, he or she sees you differently and sees that one of them really has got a lot of energy around it and the others have less. So what happens when you practice with others, with teachers, you begin to notice which of the things you notice are most fruitful to develop.

[19:19]

Okay, okay. So, I said it replaces your body. Okay, so when you do zazen, for example, And you have the experience of the Sambhogakaya body. Yeah, go ahead. Now I started speaking about Sukhiroshi presenting the Sambhogakaya, the Krikaya to me. And I thought I would come back to it. Yeah, but I will add that portion to the tape. If you want it, you have to buy the tape to get it.

[20:37]

This is his idea. Or for Andreas' idea, we have to come together next year in Hannover. Anyway, it looks like I won't get to the Trikaya today. Okay. But the Sambhogakaya body is one of the three bodies. And let's just say it's the experience in meditation when you're bodily experience, bodily awareness. In other words, when you're walking around,

[21:38]

It's not just this physical body walking around. There's a presence. You have a feeling of aliveness or something. And that feeling that makes the physical, the stuff of the body alive is what Buddhism means by the word body. Okay. Now, this feeling of the body being alive, is kind of glued together a certain way. And one way it's glued together is by your personal history. And your personal history is in all your habits.

[22:52]

How you walk, etc. I can watch people in the Black Forest walking. I can tell whether they're English or German. They walk differently. So, not that there's that many Englishmen in the Black Forest, but... He's an American. He has heard of her. Okay. So various things glue you together. And if something happens on the other side of the door, there's a feeling of recognizing it in terms of how your bodies glue together. You open the door and something happens. People look at you or something, and you feel they're looking at a body that's glued together a certain way.

[23:55]

I mean, you don't notice that you're doing that, but that's what you're doing. But if you practice meditation, let's say, and you slip out of consciousness, out of discursive thinking, you slip past that place where if you're going to sleep, you could go to sleep and usual consciousness would Disperse. And in this case though, since you're sitting and you're upright, you slip over this line, this bump, which otherwise you'd go to sleep, but now you wake up in a different way. And you wake up into a new kind of body.

[24:59]

And you know, as you know, I've been For ten months, ten weeks, living by myself in Freiburg. Having a good time writing. So I sit by myself in the morning. And it's great, I love it. I can roll out a bed under the cushion and sit. But it's different than sitting at Johanneshof.

[25:59]

It's simply stronger and more powerful when I sit at Johanneshof. But it's great both ways. I ain't complaining. More. When you're sitting... with others makes a difference by yourself makes a difference when you start feeling bliss and bliss in the early days of my sitting is something I brushed off it's one of the things I didn't have ready to hear the teaching that this was a path I should let develop So there were little trickles of bliss sometimes. I'd think, oh, that's not important. I should do something serious, not those little nice feelings.

[27:00]

But after a while, they get to be more than dripped. They get to be, you know, not a torrent, but more present. At some point I let my sense of how I was glued together shift over to this bliss. So I'm into a good feeling. I need to get warm with it because I'm stuck here. And then, when I tried to move the way I was using glued together over here, right this over, found I was glued together differently. And this new way I was glued together initially by bliss, but then bliss, which you can't teach what happens, you have to discover it opens up into a new way of being.

[28:08]

I can speak about the past to this, but I can't speak about what happens when you enter the path. Now, the way this aliveness of body is glued together. It is not glued together by my personal history. So it's not a personal history body, it's a new non-personal history body, which in this context we can call the Buddha body. In this context, we can call the Buddha mind.

[29:22]

We can call it Buddha mind or something like that. But if it has the feeling of how you're glued together and how you would function, then we can call it a body. And we can call this one of the ways the Buddha appears. Okay. The seminar is over. We can pack up and go home. Anyway, that's one of the ways the Buddha appears. Where's Richie gone? Oh, he takes care of himself. Oh, he's got an mp3 player? Really? I don't have one. Is that one? That's what an mp3 player is? I thought it looked like an old-fashioned iPod.

[30:35]

I'm a Mac kind of guy. This is a microtrack. How the hell did you get here? Okay. Speak. I wouldn't have And the winter branches are started to practice with the eightfold path. What I have a feeling is when I practice one of the aspects of it, like the right views or right attention,

[31:36]

that within that practice my personal history just drops away. I'm sort of conscious what history is, but it really drops away. And in the everyday life I experience something different. And within the group of my colleagues at work, I had a certain experience. I don't know if I could call this appearance of a Buddha. Well, a small Buddha, maybe. It must be possible. It was really different. A colleague of mine, she was really angry and shouted at me.

[32:51]

Shouted at the Buddha? And in the course of this process, which lasted until yesterday evening, That's why you were late coming to the seminar. That in this shouting at me, the Buddha voice was... In that shouting, I mean, the Buddha voice. In that form, that it... first of all drove me into a complete chaos with ego and non-ego. with at first sort of a plunge meter of chaos of ego and non-ego altogether. And now it got into more clarity. This shouting was like a red light, like a red traffic light.

[33:54]

But what is important is that my intentions were not without telling the whole story, but my intentions were completely clear. And so that makes sense. I would say that the Buddha appeared sort of as this red traffic light telling me, you're not in the Buddha sphere. At the moment you are in a strange… Plunged into ego chaos. Yes. A strange mix anyway. This is what I like. I'm going to use this. And that is a different appearance than in practice. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Fine. But also a Buddha… Yeah, the Buddha has a red light. That's what I'm saying.

[34:55]

Stop. Wouldn't you that sometimes say stop? I'm looking for someone who hasn't said anything yet. We should stop. You've said something to me three times. All right, go ahead. Yeah. I can't do that. I can't do that. I'm stopping it. I can't do that. It was quite a different feeling of suffering in a red light and no two things I hadn't noticed before. It was a beautiful feeling. Yeah, that's good.

[36:05]

I suggest a practice of looking for styles. Yeah, if you're a chance to take a seat below. Or as I say, stand in the longest line at the grocery store. And appreciate the people in front and behind. Yeah. And I was remembered yesterday talking with people about something practicing at which I've been doing that since about four years or several years. And I notice that I'm meeting people that I find repulsive. But within that noticing that I found them repulsive, I start up and say, how are they really?

[37:14]

And I try to feel how this person might feel from inside. And I tell this because yesterday I had to go to the station and I was in a repulsive situation. And in the moment when it falls, I try to perceive the people from the inside. And at that moment there is this change, where I try to notice people from their inside. Not only do these people feel very familiar, but the whole space, the whole area, Not only the persons feel familiar, but the whole space around it feels familiar.

[38:31]

Sometimes it happens that this gets sort of radiant, light radiance. This is something where I more and more often feel that this is really a Buddhist practice which I can do in everyday life. I mean, first let me say, what you're doing is what you're doing. And it doesn't fit into any, it's beyond any designation. But for the sake of teaching we were to give it a designation. we would say that you were very directly practicing the paramitas.

[39:44]

And in practicing the paramitas, interactively, intersubjectively, which is what's supposed to happen when you practice the paramitas or ideally generate a bodhisattva body which is again not simply the body of your personal history but it is a mutual body generated at that time and then becomes a gift also within the situation and to the other person or whatever is in the situation. Okay. You were going to say something. Yeah. Your question was, is it difficult or easy to do the practice?

[40:49]

I took the winter branches and that was the Abhidhamma. It was necessary to get used to the language of these old scriptures, but with the help of the Sangha and the place of Jesus Christ, it was just as scary to go into a state of consciousness that would be destroyed. It was, at first I had to accommodate myself to the ancient language, but with the help of the Sangha and place, it was sort of astonishing or even frighteningly easy sort of to get into the states which were described, mind states which are described there. And when I feel your voice and your presence it is very easy for me to feel what's probably meant by Buddha mind, Buddha nature.

[41:54]

It's a very familiar feeling being at home, being within myself. The teacher that I project in myself as a decision maker, now I go there, now I am there. What I have achieved is to install the teacher, so to say, within myself as a decisive agent to establish that. She has or she's asking?

[42:56]

Not yet. Oh, not yet. On my own. Yeah, okay. Yes. Yes. I understood that this is my decision, which perspective I take. As I would pass through the door with, oh, I know what's going to happen, or not knowing anything, getting lost, being at a loss. That's again the old question, how do I bring it into my everyday life? Well, I think you're doing it. It seems to me you're doing it pretty well.

[43:57]

Valentin? I don't know what to say. I'm sorry. Oh, dear. Here's a raised hand. I would add to that and I feel this quite similar what you said before that my everyday life I often know that I don't live as I actually would like to live and that in my environment there are people Yes, but I'm surrounded sometimes by people who sort of judge this, you know, and judge my...

[45:03]

So sometimes when I'm surrounded by people who reproach me, I get so furious and I get into arguments and in the end I see that I have to separate from certain people because really I have so much to do with myself. Yeah, I understand. And we have to do that, but eventually it's possible when everybody, everyone is initially in your initial mind like a tree. Yeah, you can practice in the way Christoph suggested. And that also, what I just said, is one of the ways to another approach developing the feeling of Buddha.

[46:19]

In each situation, you say to yourself, I had to avoid that person or I had to do whatever, but I did the best I could. At this point in my life. And you take a certain pride. in doing the best you could at this moment. But then you also feel, well, I could have done a little better. The Buddha would have done it a little bit better. So next time you kind of do a little bit better like the Buddha might. And you're creating a kind of trajectory or path or movement, direction toward the Buddha.

[47:41]

But you never say, I didn't do it well. You say, I did it the best I could, but I couldn't do it. That's one of the positive dynamics in working with your moment-by-moment experience. Now we have to decide what to do.

[48:10]

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