You could turn the heat down. I'd like to start again with asking you if there's something you'd like to bring up or speak about. Yes. I noticed that it feels different for me, because I have the feeling that she comes from there.

[01:39]

And I would just like to say that this is also included in the whole thing. When you mentioned before to bring attention to the body, to this body, I recognized that somehow it feels different for me that the attention comes from the body. And I just wanted to know how to put this into this what we are talking about. You mean? You can give attention to Angela, but giving attention to yourself is giving attention from the body to the body. Is that the problem? I didn't get you. You mean the problem is the difference between giving attention to Angela

[02:48]

and giving attention from the body to the body? No. More like you said this, and I had just this feeling that the attention before it directs towards something, where it comes from, is somehow from the body, not from the mind. I get something, I always get mixed up because I never had an idea what mind is. I feel like I have an idea what body is, or maybe fully mind streamed, but I have no idea what mind is, so somehow I get mixed up. Okay, well let's, let me come back to that, okay? Anyone else? I never understand why you don't have 100 questions.

[04:10]

Because I have 100 questions or 1,000 all the time about everything I'm saying. Hello. Yes, when I talk to someone, how can I concentrate on the breath at the same time? When I talk to somebody then I concentrate on the conversation and how can I also direct my attention at the same time to my breath. Then I would have to double attention. When you are Talking to someone.

[05:11]

You also are giving a kind of attention to your posture. You know you're standing or sitting. And you know you're standing up straight or slouching. And that has some relationship to your conversation, but it doesn't interfere exactly. We can be aware of our breath in the same way we're aware of our posture. Does that make sense? Yeah. You talked about the stream of thoughts, and I wonder whether any thought stream is a stream of thoughts?

[06:15]

I talked about a thought stream or a mind stream? Mind, body. That's different. Yeah, okay. Let me come back to that, if I can. So it's an easy time to ask a question, because I can say, let me come back to that. Yes? You talked yesterday from these different minds, and this first mind overlaps the three others.

[07:16]

And you use this picture of different liquids. I think if I take yellow and blue, I get green. If there are two minds, are they parallel? Is this a level? What I experience is this sleeping and being awake. I have the feeling that the breathing is changing like sleeping. Yes, German, please. I have the question from yesterday. It was about the quarter of the mind that the three others sleep and dream about. And my question is, is that the problem with color fluids, where you get yellow and blue and nothing, and green, or are they parallel?

[08:23]

So would I be correct in saying that you're asking where do these different minds, how are they located in relationship to each other and how do they affect each other? That's also interesting. Oh. Yeah. My question is more noticing, how to noticing there is a second mind. Yeah, that's an easier question for me to answer. Because the other one, then I would have to define what a mind is and what kind of... Okay.

[09:25]

Did you say that in Deutsch? The second part? Well, you know, you can notice very clearly when you're sleepy. Again, if you're driving, you can notice sleepy mind starts coming into you. But that's real obvious. To notice more subtle distinctions actually is part of practicing mindfulness. Or noticing certain kinds of qualities. Now, when those qualities are quite clear, it's like a big difference in clarity or something like that.

[10:38]

It's fairly easy, though, to notice that as well. But then more important, I mean, yeah, more useful is when you can notice the beginning of a change in the state of mind. Again, a useful one is to notice when you're beginning to have a headache. There are certain kinds of signs I notice in myself that I might get a headache. And I've learned to notice them half an hour or more before a headache would occur, and then I can stop the headache.

[11:46]

Yeah, but that kind of skill is really just a mindfulness skill. To be in the actual present. Yeah, the present when... the triggers of things happen. Not when you start feeling the effect. So I think mostly right now I just would say that mostly you have to find these things out for yourself. But for now that's enough to say. I would like to know how I can deal with pain that appears during meditation.

[12:50]

if there is a possibility, analogous to this picture earlier, not only to look at the tree, but also to care for it and to plant it, if there is a possibility to treat the pain in the meditation and to relax me further, because I have the feeling that sometimes I can't dive deeper because some struggles remain and I can't get there. I would like to know how to deal with the pain which arises in meditation because I feel that it inhibits my going deeper into meditation when the pain arises. And so I would like to know whether there are some useful tips like maybe images in the tree, in the mountain, so that I can somehow deal with that.

[13:57]

Yeah. Is this like sitting one period of zazen or sitting a seshin, or what kind of sitting does it occur? Is that when it's just a sitting or a whole seshin, a shorter period of sitting or a long sitting? Actually, I have it with every sitting. Actually, it's any sitting, short or long. Five minutes? Ten minutes, I mean. It's almost like an indicator that I'm also going deeply into meditation. What kind of pain do you feel? What kind of pain do you feel? Headache, then I have a tennis arm for a few months, then I can feel the whole arm, then I really notice how what I usually carry to the doctor as a diagnosis, how that is put together in my body, I feel that as a whole.

[15:09]

So it's a headache, it's a tennis elbow, it's the arm, so I can feel like all the parts which I carry to the doctor and he diagnoses as a connected hole. This is terrible. Well, is there any damage occurring? Passiert irgendwelcher Schaden? Then I just sit through it. Because it looks like something wants to stop you from sitting. And our ego does kind of bully us. And it can threaten us with first lots of itches. There are strange bugs on us. And it will find your weak point, you know, the thing that really might bother you.

[16:19]

Yeah, it can threaten you with craziness and all kinds of things. So at some point you have to sort of say, okay, come on. I'm going to not let you bully me. So you do have to get through a kind of psychological stage of resistance in various forms. It's not always pain, it can be other things. And then you have to get through the resistance of consciousness itself. And the simplest example again of that is if you put your arm just on the table for four hours and you didn't move it after a while you'd really kind of want to move it.

[17:23]

But you can go to sleep and it can stay there. So what's the difference? The difference is the kind of mind that's in your arm. So you have to find a kind of mind that's not ordinary consciousness. Where you could sit down and be somewhere without sleeping and without losing consciousness and not be in a state of discomfort. Usually we have to tune out into a kind of unconsciousness called sleep. Why do we have to tune out?

[18:25]

Those are interesting questions. And a kind of tuning out can be useful. And refreshing. But still... can also hide ourselves from ourselves. So these are just basic kind of... I can't even say this is Buddhism. This is just exploring the transitions of waking and sleeping and consciousness and so forth. And this posture somehow is conducive to that experimentation.

[19:27]

That exploration. Okay. So I would like to... Yeah, go ahead. Please. In the pathana meditation there are different stages of deepening in the meditation, where the attention is counted away, pleasant body feeling, feeling of pleasure. How is that with zazen? Where is the attention always with breathing? In vipassana, there are different graduations where the attention switches. How is it in Zen? Is it always staying with the breathing? For example, give me an example in vipassana. The stages are... You start with pleasant body feeling.

[20:28]

Pleasant body feeling. Pretty? Joy. Joy, oh yeah. Pretty is nice too, you know. Boy, do I have a pretty posture. Yeah, okay, so... Yeah, we'll come back to that. Yeah. So I think I tried to make clear before our delicious lunch, for those of us who ate here at the Kurdish restaurant, That attention is a very, that mindfulness is not attentiveness.

[21:46]

Mindfulness is connected with a kind of giving each thing its own space and completeness. And intentionally practicing that actually also then changes the mind. And that attention can be very penetrating. It's a kind of tool even. It's like plowing the mind and plowing the body. Okay. Yeah. So let me come back to what I've talked about a number of times at other times, but watching Sophia put together her consciousness.

[23:11]

This has been very instructive to me and I keep going over it. Okay, when she was born, she had a kind of general kind of, awareness maybe. And she seemed to have experience like the Janssen's Airedale. I mean, she had experience of our voices and presence, smell, and so forth. Sie hatte Erfahrung in Bezug auf unsere Stimmen und auf Gerüche. She had some experience of her body, but it was pretty unformed.

[24:13]

Sie hatte auch etwas Erfahrung in Bezug auf ihren Körper, aber das war noch nicht sehr formiert. And she kind of moved her arms around and occasionally she'd bump you. And she liked it when she bumped you. Seemed to. I pretended she did. But she couldn't keep her arm there at all. It would just go somewhere else. So I watched her struggling with that. And it seemed like that first she had to get a kind of sense of her body. I would say she developed a kind of body hub. A hub is like a hubcap in a car. It's where the spokes of a wheel meet.

[25:17]

It's a good Japanese dish, nabe. So she developed a kind of body hub. And about the same time she began to integrate her senses. It took a while. You could see she could hear something, but she couldn't turn toward it. So it took her a while to get her body movements together with her sense fields. And after a while she was able to hear something and turn toward it.

[26:25]

So I would say she wasn't born with consciousness exactly, she created her consciousness. Through the interactions in the world, manufactured a consciousness. And it took her a heck of a lot longer than the little calf born across the street from us. The calf was up in almost no time and finding a way to eat and do things. I don't know why we're such slow learners.

[27:36]

But I presume it's because our consciousness has obviously a lot more potential and complexity than a calf's. So we're bringing together something far more complex than the calf or sheep or even their airdale. And we have a lot of problems that go with that, of course, too. And the therapists are in the job, their job is to try to keep working with these problems. Okay, but eventually she developed what I would call a sensorial hub and a body hub. And she could bring those together.

[28:39]

And bringing those together allowed her to develop an articulated consciousness. Then she could touch you with her hand and keep her hand on you if she wanted to. Right now she's working on how to maintain her balance standing up and how to put thumb and forefinger together. They seem to be closely related. You try to feed her. She wants to feed herself. She grabs a spoon, but she doesn't grab it this way. She just grabs it. Okay, so she began to develop what I would call a consciousness hub, too. And that consciousness hub then had to find a... establish some kind of continuity.

[30:16]

The consciousness hub had to establish a continuity from moment to moment. And the other day I said it was a little bit like a needle on a record player. If any of you remember what a record player is... You have a piece of plastic with lines in it and a needle you put down on it and it turns. They didn't exist when I was a little boy. They had radio. So it's a bit like our consciousness is the record. And our experiences, our karmic imprints are the grooves.

[31:32]

And the needle is the point of continuity. Und die Nadel ist der Punkt der Kontinuität. And if you move the needle to another groove, it's a little scratchy and there's no, the song, you lose the continuity, the song. Und wenn sich die Nadel wegen einem Kratzer woanders hin bewegt, dann verliert er die Kontinuität des Liedes. So we have to keep the continuity, keep the needle in the groove to keep the continuity. Also es ist wichtig, dass die Nadel innerhalb der Rillen bleibt, um die Kontinuität zu behalten. But of course, the record is already continuity whether the needle's on it or not. Aber natürlich ist auch die Platte schon Kontinuität, ob nun jetzt die Nadel drauf ist oder nicht. And the record itself shouldn't be confused with the turntable.

[32:33]

And most of us, I think, confuse consciousness itself with the world. It's the turntable. So where Sophia is right now is trying to develop this continuity, this needle. Okay. Now what I see, I feel like is going to happen. It's only partially happening with her. She can clearly sign far earlier than she can speak. Sign, you know, like deaf people. And they've discovered that children of deaf parents learn to sign earlier than children of hearing parents learn to speak.

[33:47]

Und es wurde herausgefunden, dass Kinder von tauben Eltern, die durch Zeichensprache sich verständigen, früher sich mit Zeichensprache artikulieren, als Kinder, die mit hörenden Eltern dann anfangen zu sprechen. Okay, so she's already signing, but she's not exactly speaking. Also sie macht schon Zeichensprache, aber sie redet noch nicht. Now, I would say that conceptual consciousness and comparative consciousness and language is going to glue all this together. Okay, so why I said all that is I want to establish what the ingredients are. I think we have the same ingredients. Yeah, we and what we're doing in practice is we're going back to those ingredients.

[34:56]

and gluing them together differently. Now, I think there's no alternative to her gluing them together in terms of comparative conceptual consciousness and language. No alternative in our culture, at least. I'm not so sure it's the same in every culture. Certainly a culture which didn't have language, language wouldn't be part of the glue. But, you know, I was very impressed once I saw some sort of documentary television thing. I think something I mention every now and then. They showed, I think, in Australia. A little white Australian girl.

[36:34]

A little black Aboriginal girl. And I can see them pretty clearly in my mind, and they were five years old, something like that. And they had a stump of a tree piled with stuff, branches and feathers and all kinds of stuff. More complicated than this flower arrangement. So they brought both kids to it and they let them look at it for about that length of time and they knocked it all over. And they asked the white girl to put it back together. She got two or three things back up on the stump. Can you imagine trying to put that flower arrangement back just the way it is?

[37:53]

After a quick look at it? The little black girl just went, and it was like a photograph. It was back like she had a photograph in her mind. So my guess is that that culture has them glue this whole, these ingredients together differently than we do. So why am I saying that? Because Zen practice is definitely a process of taking apart and re-gluing together in a new way consciousness. Okay, then I can imagine us asking,

[38:53]

Why should we do that? What's wrong with the way we are already? This was natural and instinctual. And God helped. Yeah, but, you know, From what I'm trying to say today, it's not natural and instinctual. The ingredients are there. But the environment puts the ingredients together. At least in our environment it's cultural. And unser Umfeld ist kulturell. No, I'm not saying there's not an element of instinct and so forth, but I really think we overlook how much it's actually creation.

[40:14]

Also, ich sage nicht, dass da gar kein Instinkt wäre, aber da ist ganz viel Kreation. So, the process Sophia is going through is an active process of creation. And with different parents in a different culture, she would put it together somewhat differently. Okay, so what does Zen practice say? What does Buddhism as a whole say? Buddhism developed in a yoga culture which doesn't have an idea of a creator God. And it doesn't have versions of an idea of a Creator God, like natural or instinctual. Okay, so if you accept that what happens to us is very large part an act of creation or generation, then I think it's easier for us to actually participate creatively in our own re-creation.

[41:43]

So what are the basic practices? And what are the things I've been trying to talk about the last 10, 15 years in Europe? And what does the Heart Sutra say? It starts out, you know, Avalokiteshvara, so and so. What did he do? He saw the skandhas and he saw the vijnanas. So what are the basic things we go back to, the basics of Zen Buddhism? To look at the basics of ourselves, the basic ingredients. So we go back and we look at the sense fields.

[42:55]

We kind of separate them from the way they have been glued together with consciousness. And we try to experience our sense fields more purely independent of consciousness. Just smelling, just hearing. Okay. And we try to separate each sense field from the total sense field. And we have an eye-dominated, a visual-dominated overall sense field. And you can see that blind people who can't do that end up to have a different sense of how people are in the room with them and so forth.

[44:13]

You know, they can... How much should we go into detail here? Maybe we should take a break in a few minutes, huh? Okay. You know, they discovered that mice can smell the DNA of other mice, right? Or they smell something like that. Because a nice little cute female mouse won't mate with a male that has DNA like her father. weil eine nette kleine weibliche Maus nicht mit einer männlichen Maus sich kopulieren mag, die wie ihr Vater riecht. And they do that by smell.

[45:24]

Und das tun sie durch Geruch. And so then they thought, well, we humans are not sensitive enough to do that. Then they noticed the lab assistants were able to say which mouse would like which mouse. And they realized the female lab assistants were able to smell which mouse would like which mouse. So I think we do like other people sort of by their smell. But this is a sense field, smelling, that most of us don't have very developed because seeing overrides it. Okay, so part of practice is you go back and develop, we've gone over this at various times in seminars.

[46:35]

Go back and develop each sense field independently of the others. And then gets you can bring, say, smelling the path in the forest and hearing it. So we're doing exactly what Sophia is doing. We're going back and trying to coordinate, separate our sense fields and re-relate them more evenly. Then we work with the four elements.

[47:37]

And then we work with the skandhas. How from initial perception through feeling and perception and adding associations we generate consciousness. And I can see her doing something like that. She doesn't have so many associations, but she's getting them passed. Yeah. So we're doing something very similar. We're just now putting the ingredients together differently. And how we develop that process of looking at the ingredients and putting them together is also the practice of mindfulness.

[48:48]

Okay, so why don't we have a break? And what time are we supposed to stop? Wann wollen wir denn enden? 6 o'clock. 6 o'clock, okay. Um 6? Castle Geyser. Die Castle Geyser. Okay. Ready to go until 6. So let's take a break for half an hour. Lasst uns eine halbe Stunde Pause machen. So I'd like you to have some discussion, but I haven't given you among yourselves. But I don't think I've given you anything to discuss yet.

[49:50]

I've just been trying to give you a picture of the topography or texture of mindfulness. But you know, for some of you this may seem familiar to you. You've been to earlier seminars or whatever this year. But for me, I'm slightly, what I'm talking about is new to me. In the sense that I, you know, I'm always trying to, I'm speaking with you about something that I experience in practice.

[51:09]

And I try to speak about it so you can have some feeling about what I'm talking about. And you can relate it to your own practice and experience. And I try to say it in a way not just that you can recognize it, but you can make use of it in your own practice. And I think it's important that it holds together in a coherent way. Because even if you don't quite get the whole picture right now, if I have a picture, but a coherent picture, not a rigid picture, but a coherent picture, as I'm speaking, there will be a kind of

[52:17]

There will be an implicit organization in what I'm saying. In a way, I'm trying to answer questions you'll have later when you practice. So that as you're practicing, it'll come up with what? What's this like? And then you might remember something I said. Yeah, what I'm saying does actually fit together. It can't fit together perfectly. Because we're speaking about something both obvious and the fundamental mystery of our life. Well, science still doesn't know how to approach what is consciousness, what is awareness.

[53:27]

So we're trying to approach it and participate in not only our own knowing and consciousness, but we're trying to Develop, mature it, develop it, transform it. Okay. Yeah. So I think that Sophia will attempt to develop a consciousness which can make distinctions and hold distinctions. Distinctions like here and there, before and after.

[54:38]

Yeah. what's a door, what's a wall. And, you know, we have to do some version of that, for sure. Okay, and that gets really locked into the world and its description of the same thing. The world and its description or distinctions are the same thing. And we forget that it's all, in the end, mind. And many Western philosophers have come to this point.

[55:54]

Like Wittgenstein says that when I look here and I see all of you, there's nothing in the scene that tells me it's seen by an eye. There's nothing in the scene that tells me it's seen by a mind. The most obvious fact about it, but there's no information there that tells you that immediately. So practice is to remind yourself of this obvious fact. And you really have to kind of train yourself to do it. So when I look at you, I know I'm seeing not only you, but also my own mind seeing you. And I'm as aware of that as I'm aware of my breath or my posture.

[57:03]

For many people, the first taste of this is when in meditation, in Zazen, you hear yourself hearing. And it's carried like when you hear birds or something, and there's almost a kind of ecstasy or bliss associated with hearing the sounds. And a kind of bliss arises when you hear your own hearing and not just the external bird. And strangely, you know

[58:06]

You know, if you want to think about it a minute, you're not hearing the bird the way another bird would hear the bird. You're only hearing it the way your ear can hear it. Birds hear it in a seemingly much more complex way than we do. At least there's more complexity in the sound a bird makes if you slow it down than our ears are able to hear. So we're not really hearing the whole sound that the bird is making. But if there is such a thing as the whole sound, but even though we're only hearing a part of it, when we add to that part the part of our own mind hearing, there's a funny kind of intimacy in that.

[59:33]

A kind of bliss and feeling of everything's okay. And really, when you really do start seeing as a wisdom habit, without any psychological analysis, you just start seeing everything around you as simultaneously also your own mind. A large number of our psychological problems are diminished. And not all. We want to keep the psychotherapists or have a place, you know.

[60:37]

probably, if they work with meditation practice in their clients, it's probably even more effective. Okay. So what We don't know what this mystery of knowing is, but we are it and we can participate in it. How does the eye see the eye? How does the mind see the mind? For one of the things you do when you start to practice, if Sophia is making a hub in a distinction holding consciousness,

[62:03]

We're moving that hub out of distinction-making consciousness into our body and our breath and a kind of locus of presence. What's the difference between presence and present? The present is a comparative idea. It's the present in contrast to past and future.

[63:15]

Presence doesn't have that comparison in it. And when you drop the comparison, kind of the present turns into presence. And presence is one of those words like ease. Which is inseparable from and covers all, inseparable from mature Buddhism. and covers the whole of Buddhism. But it's very hard to say much about it. It's rather because we can't use our usual distinction-making consciousness to talk about it. It's only something we can feel, really.

[64:17]

and developing a feeling for. And like Erhard said, a way of noticing, a more sensitive way of noticing these fields of knowing that don't have the usual distinctions. aren't defined which aren't defined with distinctions. And move in and out of distinctions almost without interfering with them.

[65:26]

Okay, so we change the the hub from distinction-making consciousness to a kind of non-conceptual locus. And you develop a kind of field of awareness. Now I'm a little different than what I've ever said before. And I just do the best I can to say something about it. Because I'm now speaking about awareness as not only a mind in contrast to consciousness.

[66:29]

Weil jetzt spreche ich über Gewahrsein als ein Mind in contrast zum Bewusstsein. So now I'm speaking about awareness as the kind of what consciousness is made from. Okay, so Sophia again has taken, I would say, something like awareness, fairly unformed awareness, And through the process of sense fields in her body, etc., she's shaping it into a consciousness. which will allow her to open doors and put things back on shelves and keep the spoon on the table and things like that.

[67:56]

She learns spoons are mostly supposed to be on tables, not on floors. And that in itself implies language because it has to fit into a structure of knowing. Now, practice somehow decontextualizes knowing. decontextualizes. So I can just, I mean, it's not so different from kind of daydreaming. You have this scene here, I have that scene there. I can just see it. Yeah, there's the red of the bricks and the tiles.

[69:00]

And there's the blue-gray-pink of the sky. But I can see it really as just a presence. I don't turn it into distinctions. But I can very easily go back and forth between turning into distinctions and seeing it's a roof, or taking out of distinctions, and I don't know what it is. There's just kind of a red line there at the bottom of the window. A little like a painting, that you have to get at a certain distance, and then you suddenly see, oh, that's a roof, and up close it's just sort of stuff. Now, one thing practice does is it gets you so that you can most of the time rest your mind, your energy and mind,

[70:07]

In a knowing which has an overall field quality but isn't formed into distinctions. So you don't feel trapped in a world of things. You feel more like you're just luxuriating in your own mind. The Florida of your own mind. The Florida of your own mind. They just went to Florida, so I know. Yeah. Okay. Okay, that's enough to say about that.

[71:24]

Yeah, well, you say that's enough to say about that. How to make a distinction whether something is real or not real. Why is that a problem? Could be sometimes. What are you taking? He asked... Well, I don't know, the glasses, if I want to. I mentioned the other day... During Sesshin. The little sutra card for the meal chant in German is passed out to me.

[72:27]

And it was sitting on the floor beside me. But there's also a patch of sunlight on the floor. I had a generalized field of knowing. I sort of reached out and tried to pick up the sunlight. I knew it was there somewhere. Some part of me knew it was there somewhere. So when I couldn't pick up the sunlight, I looked at it and there it was. I could see it sitting there and I couldn't pick it up. So I had to kind of shift into actually making distinctions. I had to create a foreground, background, and see the floor, and then I said, oh, it's over here, and then I picked it up.

[73:35]

But I had no problem with which was real. Because I made use of the one that was real. I don't think that answers your question. Yeah, not really. So why don't we come back to it? Okay, because I want to, before we end, I want to get into the first foundation of mindfulness here. Okay. So all of this is to say that we can bring attention to ourselves. So in a way, Sophia developing a consciousness will develop a consciousness that kind of traps her But that consciousness is also the skills to develop awareness and a freedom from consciousness.

[74:58]

And we're talking about those skills. Okay, like bringing attention to your breath. So then the question is, what should be the targets of your attention? Okay, now how do you make a choice? You choose the targets which would tend to accumulate the effects of mindfulness. Also, du wählst die Ziele, die die Achtsamkeit anhäufen. And you choose a target in which you could penetrate a target that you can penetrate.

[76:01]

And you choose a target which allows transformation. These are fairly simple, but there could be a lot of targets, and they've basically picked four or five targets. One target is your activity. Bring attention to your activity. Walking, breathing, whatever you're doing. Picking something up. And, as I've many times pointed out, in a mindfulness culture, they want you to pick up things with two hands. Because it's almost like you're orchestrating a field of awareness and both hands are much more powerful than one hand.

[77:14]

If you really understand the implications of that, you'll understand much better the background of the koan, the sound of one hand. So a mindfulness culture will make its clothes and design its houses and design its cups and glasses differently non-mindfulness culture. Because as your activity is a focus of attention, of mindfulness, it changes the objects. They make the objects more accessible to mindfulness. So Zen or Yogi bowls are a perfect example of a way of eating that is a focus of mindfulness.

[78:41]

Now, another target, which you've always spoken about, is your breath. Another target is the four postures. So now we've made a shift from your activity to your breath. To your postures. Reclining, standing, sitting. Walking. And you begin to penetrate those four postures with mindfulness.

[79:53]

In a variety of ways. Like I suggested this way of bringing a line up through your body. So you can find many ways to bring mindfulness to the four postures in which we live our lives. Now it's been discovered that the wisdom posture, not a posture we're born with, is the posture which can be penetrated the most by mindfulness. So Zazen, after you get rid of most of the obstructions, becomes filled with mind.

[81:02]

And what's the process of doing that? The process, the mindfulness itself is a process of lessening the obstructions. Now, I think that what we don't really get as Westerners practicing, how this isn't just something you do now and then and it's nice to be more attentive. Also, dass das nicht etwas ist, was man ab und zu mal tut, und es schön ist, etwas achtsamer zu sein. This is a really active process. Okay, so you bring your attention, in addition to the four postures, you bring your attention to the four elements.

[82:10]

Also, zusätzlich... Now that's more subtle and hard to explain. Because now we're getting into categories that aren't clear distinctions. Even the four postures aren't that clear how different they are. Standing and walking or lying down flat. But there is a difference. In a different mind you begin to feel a different mind in each. Now the four elements is you work with your solidity.

[83:14]

You bring attention to your solidity. And I would give yourself a little regime. Like for one week, just notice your solidity. Boy, am I a solid kind of guy. You feel your solidity pull your stuff. Sophia is a real tough little girl. Her ribcage is like iron. It's nice. She's really got some solidity there. Okay, and then when you step down, you step down, you feel... Every time you step, you feel the solidity.

[84:21]

And it's also good to have no conception. Is there a floor out there? And you step as if there might not be a floor out there. And you come down and you feel the solidity of your own body meeting the floor. Hide this that you're doing with the people you work with. And then you feel... The water element is harder to explain.

[85:32]

But it means things like, and this is the best example I can give it, when you lift your foot, it doesn't have to be solid anymore. It's completely relaxed. You know how water seeks its source? So as you lift your foot, you just feel it hang like as if your foot was made of water. It feels a little like a swimmer does if you swim. You don't hold your hand. It just is relaxed outside the water. At a certain point in the water, you feel the solidity of it. So this would be the water element, and in the water would be the solidity element. So you begin working with a kind of softness simultaneously with solidity.

[86:53]

And fire is concentration, energy, fusion. And fire is concentration, energy, fusion. Heat, literally. And when you can feel heat rising, like in a conversation, you get concentrated or enthusiastic or angry or something. You begin to know that not as an emotion, The fire may take the shape of an emotion or anger or something. It may just be a kind of things being brought together with a blissful feeling.

[87:54]

That's a little bit like the fire element is something that emotions make use of. And you can begin to feel how the fire element and the liquid element and solidity go back and forth among each other. And the air or space element This means both motility, movement, and the space in which you move. And the space is created when you move. Because my arm can reach here and here and here.

[88:57]

But even if I don't reach here, this space of my arm still exists. So you begin to feel the space your movement and lungs and everything make. This is one of the basic early Buddhist focuses of mindfulness. It may sound funny to you, but I'm just telling you the way it is. And if you're interested in adept practice, You simply take this on as a little exercise for weeks at a time.

[90:13]

Let it go for a while and then let it come back. And don't be critical of yourself for forgetting about it for a while. When it comes back, just do it. And then last of the important targets is the parts of the body. Now I've spoken about this a number of times this year in Europe. But it's so important and I haven't been in Kassel for so long. And I don't want you folks in Kassel to be left out of any of the goodies. So I think I should tell you something about this.

[91:22]

Now, it's usually traditionally said the 32 parts of the body. But it's just the parts of the body. What's a part of the body? Anything you want to call a part of the body. You identify something. You can start with parts of the body you see or parts of the body you have names for. I do a yoga class with Marie-Louise sometimes. And the yoga teacher is German and she knows some English. But she'll say, do such and such with a certain part of the body. And they ask me, what's the word in English?

[92:26]

Sometimes I don't know. Is there a name for that? And sometimes I look it up, there's no name for certain parts of the body that there are names for in German. I can't remember which. So anyway, but you did. So it's not important. Just whatever you happen to decide to call a part of the body. And I've always found it very useful to start with the hands. And so I bring attention, and this is this practice I did, used to do like every zazen for a while, every zazen once a day or something. I mean, one zazen a day. Or I do it somewhat once a week. Or I do it thoroughly once a month or so.

[93:34]

Now, I suppose, 35 years later, I do it thoroughly every two or three months. But it's pretty much my habit now, so it's kind of present as an activity all the time. Okay, so let's take your fingers. You put attention into, let's say, the tip of the forefinger. And then into the tip of each of your fingers.

[94:16]

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