I enjoy seeing so many familiar faces, but I haven't seen for a year. And this is the first time I've seen so many faces from the northern part of Austria called Germany. What we have to do here is, the title is right, the establishment of the two truths and Buddhahood, isn't that right? So what we have to do is establish that they're well, get familiar with this theory first of all. And if we can establish for ourselves and for the world that it makes sense.

[01:24]

And further it would be good if we could establish these two truths in ourselves. And the second part of it, Buddhahood, would be very good if we could establish it in ourselves too. But, you know, and that is possible. But it's possible if you're not so pessimistic about it, for one thing. Yeah. And it's possible too if you really do establish the two truths in yourself.

[02:26]

Since the beginning of the Christian era, the idea of Buddhahood and the two truths are nearly the same. Or Buddhahood depends on the realisational process that starts through establishing the two truths. Now these two truths can... Let the two truths remain a mystery for now. It's very good they call them the two truths and not the one delusion and the one truth.

[03:33]

It's rather sweet of them to give us this concession. These high-minded Buddhist philosophers who came up with this idea. Now there are many teachings In fact, all Mahayana teachings depend on and refer to the two truths. Or not only draw from the two truths, but often are explicitly ways of establishing or making use of the two truths. So this is a lifetime exploration or process of evolution, a kind of evolution in understanding these two truths.

[04:46]

Now within this group there are some more or less beginning people and some intermediate and some people who are a bit advanced. And as I'm now been teaching in Europe and especially Germany and Austria quite regularly, Those of you who have been with me for quite a while are familiar with various teachings which actually pertain to these two truths. But I know from things you say to me that among the various teachings I've been developing with your help here, some parts you've gotten and some parts are still kind of mysterious and so forth.

[06:41]

And I've been here, as of this evening, a week now. We started out with a seminar for therapists And then we had a seminar for human beings who are not therapists. On the poetry of the body. And we tried to work with a little different tone in how we practice together during the middle of the week.

[07:47]

And so now we have this seminar. And I've been asked by a few people if I could continue, if we could continue some of the themes from the middle of the week and earlier so we can understand them better together. But I have a peculiarity. Which I have a kind of physical resistance to speaking about something I've spoken about before. I don't know why, but I really do. And I can only do it when either two things or three things are present.

[08:48]

No one's heard it before at all and I can try it out anew and see whether it makes sense. Or second, it's essential that I bring it up and I can bring it up in a way that's fresh to me. Or third, you guide me toward it by asking me about it or asking questions. So I would hope that those of you, either beginners or people who have various kinds of experience, will help me by suggesting if there's some themes from the two seminars we've done or in the past that relate to the two truths, you could bring it up and help me see that it would be good to go over it again, or go over part of it. Now, also I would like to this week have several other people translate in addition to Ulrike.

[10:40]

Ulrike has been doing it pretty consistently for what, four years or more now? Since 87. Okay, yeah. So she's of course become pretty fluent with my way of thinking and familiar with the language and so forth. And my And so, of course, that in some ways makes it easier for you because there's not much interruption between my speaking and her speaking. But there's several reasons, a couple reasons or more, that I'd like to have some of you translate for me. One is, she wants a break.

[11:51]

That's almost sufficient reason for... Yeah. Oh, hi. And... Another is that I think it's helpful for individuals to translate just as a useful experience and practice in understanding what we're talking about. And third, I think there's a certain advantage to hearing somebody struggle with or having to make an effort how to translate things. You can hear it because, you know, Rika might have five possibilities of a way to translate things.

[13:04]

You could probably think of two more and say she should have thought of that. But when you're sitting here, you can't even think of those two. So, I remember I was in a meeting once and this woman said, she was called on and she stood up and said, I had all these ideas I wanted to talk about but when I stood up all my thoughts sat down. So anyway, I will ask some people to translate for me if you're willing. Okay. Now, I think all of us have some intuition that this isn't, when you're present in the world, you have a feeling this isn't all there is to life.

[14:37]

Strangely enough, some of the teaching of Buddhism is, yes, this is all there is, this is all there is, and you have to keep putting yourself in that situation. But this, when you say this is all there is, it's still, it actually activates a process of creating two truths. Because when you have to remind yourself that this is all there is, already you have the feeling that there's a lot that you want it to be, which it isn't. Or, you know, I mean in many ways our just intuitive way of thinking carried out implies a sense of two truths.

[15:52]

Or Or you can remember times when something powerful happened for you or you felt very strongly or very clear about the world. And you might wonder why you can't feel that way all the time. so this kind of difference which again is even more emphasized if you start practicing meditation because if meditation really works at all in the sense that you go into meditation the way we go into sleep but of course meditation you stay awake

[16:55]

When you go over that little edge into meditation, even if it's full of still distracting thoughts, it's something a little different. Technically we could say that you've gone at least from the fifth skandha to the fourth skandha. You've gone from a mind that's consciously organized, the fifth skandha, To the fourth skanda, the sixth, we'll work on that later, to the fourth skanda which is just full of associative thoughts. And I'm bringing in more of these technical terms in this way just to make it more use, trying to play the keyboard of these things, make it more useful for you to hear these differences and how they work.

[18:29]

But I think one of the things that happens if you do zazen, and as I say, actually go into zazen, Sometimes after zazen you feel, as a popular song says, all brand new. You feel freshened up in some way, physically and mentally. or you've been able to see things from more perspectives or a more integrated perspective. And beginning practices, beginning years of practice is characterized by this sensing this difference between how you feel in zazen and how you feel when you

[19:45]

not in zazen and how you feel if you don't do zazen in contrast to how you feel when you do do zazen. Okay, so what the two truths tries to do is explore this In a way, this kind of difference or sense, explore this in a way that allows you to... Well, what the... Explore this in a way so that you can establish both and are not just the passive recipient of these differences.

[21:08]

Of course, there are not really two worlds or two truths. There's perhaps two ways of looking at things. But these two ways of looking at things can give us life or can destroy us. Okay, so... The basic idea that's behind the two truths, functional idea, is the idea of dependent co-arising. Now, when you study something in Buddhism or you hear about something in Buddhism,

[22:12]

The first step is to ask yourself to try to make sense of it, let's say, is the first step. And the next step is to realize it applies to you. And it applies to you and it's something that is not far-fetched. It's actually possible for you to realize it. And then the next step is to look for an operative understanding, how you make it work. Okay, so what we're going to be looking for in establishing the two truths during this weekend is an operative understanding. Okay. Now, I think that it would be useful for me to go through the six attentions again.

[24:04]

Perhaps in a little bit of a brief way. Because they're versions or they're, yeah, they're, they're plays on or versions of this dependent co-arising. Mm-hmm. Now, let's see, I'm trying to feel, you see what I've got to do is with you, is with you feel out how we can touch this idea that's so basic to Mahayana Buddhism in a way that we can touch and make useful for us.

[25:11]

And the two truths are something like absolute and relative. Or conventional truth and the truth, or something like that. And conventional truth means, the word they use for conventional in Buddhism, means something covering. Or something that we've given our consent to.

[26:19]

So when you see that these two truths depend on your giving your consent to them, it actually makes them more operative. Now, the basic idea in Buddhism, and as a couple of you know, I spent this couple of days talking with two physicists, Hans-Peter Dürer and David Finkelstein, who are here and both in particularly David is working on this now and in Buddhism is an idea of non-beingness Now, you're all sitting here and you're all lovely beings. And how am I going to convince you you are lovely non-beings?

[27:46]

I mean, since you're so convincingly being, I think I better go home and leave you here alone. I think I've set myself an impossible task. Because your being is really quite convincing to me right now. Oh dear. Okay. Help. Okay. Okay, so let's take a little diversion here and talk about what I call the six attentions. And I decided to talk about this partly because several people said they didn't really get what these six attentions are. And there are actually, you won't find these in any Buddhist text called Six Attentions.

[29:03]

It's not, what I'm saying, the Six Attentions are not, not Buddhism. But putting them together in this way is my own feeling for looking at how we put the world together. And the idea in the word attention is that we bring, is that the basic Buddhist practice is mindfulness. And mindfulness is to bring your attention to what you're doing.

[30:20]

And there's many levels of this. And the second sense of this word attention as I'm using it is that we create the world through this attention. Or we participate in creating the world through this attention. I mean, today I went shopping with my daughter. To find a birthday present for her because we celebrated her birthday here yesterday.

[31:24]

And so Krems is the nearest place there were shops. So we went there and found some other friends. And of course my daughter was born through my meeting a woman and getting married and having a baby. And we could say this is a very tangible example of dependent co-arising. Or as it's said briefly, it takes two to tango. Man braucht zwei für Wiener Walzer.

[32:28]

Okay. Now, but this sense of it takes two to tango is the... is... The center of Mahayana Buddhism, if you... So, okay. Now, let me say this teaching, which we're trying to work with this weekend, dates from the beginning of the Christian era. Now, this teaching exists from 2500, even more years ago, from Buddhist time.

[33:38]

But as an operative, central understanding in Buddhism, it dates from Nagarjuna and his foundation of the Majamaka school. The Madhyamaka school that he developed from the Prajnaparamita Sutras. And Nagarjuna lived about somewhere between 150 and 250 in the Christian era. And he's such an important figure in Buddhism, he's often referred to as the second Buddha. At least to the degree to which he influenced the whole later development of Buddhism. So what Nagarjuna did was really emphasize that the tango was reality, the two that tangoed were not.

[34:44]

Now, you just have to keep working on this sense in any way you want that A and B are impermanent, but AB is a karmic act. Karmic act, yeah. And BA is a different karmic act. So we have BA and AB. And discussing this again with the two physicists, they were pointing out in the contemporary mathematics, 4 plus 2 equals 6.

[36:11]

4 plus 2 is not the same as 2 plus 4. But don't tell your teacher that in school if you're not in quite advanced courses. And one way in which my daughter and I continue this dependent co-arising is that I treat her like a daughter and she treats me like a father. And so this is going on all the time, not just between mother and child or father and child, but it's going on all the time between us.

[37:18]

Now, this is all obvious, pretty obvious, right? We all know how babies are made. But we don't really see that we're making babies every time, all the time, when we see anything, look at anything, etc. It's really hard to see the relevance of this. And it may be because of natural selection. Okay. And I'll come back to that point in a moment. Now I don't want to get too deeply into this, but I'd like to lay a little groundwork so that we can go slower tomorrow.

[38:27]

So the first of the six attentions. Well, first Arya was saying that one of the reasons I mentioned attention is because of its emphasis on mindfulness. Second, that our attention participates in creating the world or is a karmic act. And third, that there's an interrelationship between attention and intention. And this sense of consent. Okay.

[39:48]

So, the first is what I call passive attention. Because we're not really giving attention to the world. And that's how most of us live, actually. And we are usually involved with our past and our future and we're not giving too much attention to the world. And we treat it like a container in which we live. But as Shakespeare would say, all the world's a stage. It's a container, but we're making what happens on that container, in that container.

[40:52]

But it's hard to see it in general, and it's hard to see it at the moment of perception. Okay, so again, I'm bringing up something like passive attention just because we all do it and you can notice, oh, this is how I'm in the world sometimes. Now, there's not much point in making a distinction like this unless it it in itself, by passive attention, creates a certain kind of world. So, you'll live in one kind of a world if you pay attention, you'll live in another kind of world if you don't.

[41:56]

And this isn't just from the point of view of Buddhism and modern physics, this isn't just an aesthetic distinction, it really is a different world. So remember, the world is A, B, and B, A, and not A or B. So how does the illusion of A and B happen? Okay, the second attention is, what did I call it, cultural attention? Communal. Communal attention. We could call this communal or cultural. And that's just the agreed upon way that we all look at the world.

[43:09]

And that agreed upon way produces Germany and Austria and Japan and so forth. This idea is always familiar to us, but what I'm talking about is just good to notice that sometimes you're just giving a cultural attention, you're giving habitual attention to the world. Okay. And the third is what I call consensual attention. Okay. Now, And the reason I'm, of course, cultural attention or communal attention is also consensual.

[44:18]

But I'm trying to make a distinction between consensual attention now, where perhaps Giulio and I decide to think about something together. Ulrich and I, translating together, create a kind of consensual mind that is presenting this teaching. Let me say something that I mentioned this weekend, this last week a couple of times, that I just really noticed last weekend. Is it the reason it's helpful for me to have translation even when your English is pretty good? Is that really discovered this weekend that I cannot hear you hearing English?

[45:27]

But I can hear you hearing German. Do you understand? I can feel what you're understanding when you hear it in German. But when you hear it in English, I can't feel it. Although I can't speak German, I can hear you when you understand it in German. And the what I say here is very interrelated or dependent or co-arising with my hearing you hear what I'm saying. And what happens, I noticed it last weekend, when I can't hear you, when I'm speaking only English and I can't hear you understanding it, I start hearing myself instead of you.

[46:56]

And since I understand myself moderately well, I start speaking very fast. And I start going along in fourth gear and I realize that nobody is hearing anything. Okay. Okay. So now, Eric Eno, I don't think I can ask you to go through that whole thing again, Eric, but gave a very good example of consensual attention. And again, I'd like to mention what you told me, though. Because it helps to make clear that attention creates a world and that consensual attention can create a world that's different from communal or cultural attention.

[48:29]

Did I really say all that? Wow! I guess Eric participates in a kind of group therapy which deals with family questions. Is that right? And I think this is fascinating. It's as fascinating to me as if somebody said they saw a UFO out there. It's funny, you know, we always say UFO. Yeah, UFO. So it's taken me a while to get used to the idea that you guys pronounce these letters so it becomes UFO.

[49:33]

And I thought you must be talking about circus clowns, Bufo and Ufo. That's us, Bufo and Bufo. Well, I don't know. Depends on the day. Can I be UFO? You are sometimes UFO. Unidentified woman object. That's woo-woo. So what they do is you take one member of the group you act, you all take roles and pretend you're the person's mother or father or brother or sister, is that right?

[50:54]

And then acting that out, maybe you could say what happens in German. ... And then it appears that the members of the family, i.e. the representatives, describe what they felt about the other family members in this position. And the surprising thing is that although, with the exception of the therapist, the others have never heard anything from the patient, that the family situation of the patient comes out pretty precisely. That's the first thing. And then there are two therapists who try to put these members in such a way that everyone in the family is happy. And then various other things appear, including people who were perhaps needed and who were tabooed.

[51:58]

And in the end, when it's too early, you take a patient and put them in the position of their representative. And now the patient is practically in this new family and takes another and can try to feel himself in this situation and changes the inner image with it. that he has to these family members. And the surprising thing is that sometimes amazing changes take place, also from the side of the other family members. That they, for example, did not know anything about the therapy and did not have any contact, suddenly called, although they had never called before. Okay. Did you say anything more that I don't know about? You stopped, okay. This is quite interesting to me.

[53:24]

Because what they did is they created a consensual attention. And that consensual attention to each other and to the person who is the center, right? created a field of consciousness which manifested in the other people's bodies, the people's bodies who weren't the family members. And then manifested both their psychological problems and their physical illness problems and where they were located in the bodies. So in other words, they created a kind of consensual identity which is actually quite different from the cultural or communal identity. And also it even knew things or perceived things that the communal identity doesn't accept as possible.

[54:38]

We have no cultural or scientific explanation on how these strangers could know what was happening in the family. So in some way this consensual attention or consciousness doused this person and picked up what was happening in this person's family. Okay, so the point I'm making here is that consensual attention is significantly different than communal attention. And when we get together with a friend and think about the world, or just do things together, I bet if you looked at it carefully, your best friends

[55:56]

are the persons with whom you create a consensual identity that's a little separate from the cultural identity. Now, isn't that expressed in the Austrian or German expression saying, he's the kind of guy I'd like to steal horses with or something like that? Now, if you steal horses with somebody, that's definitely outside the cultural definition. Do you want to say it in German? Certain. It would probably be difficult to notice.

[57:22]

But if you really paid attention to what happened when you decided to steal horses with your friend, You'd see that there's something a little different going on in your body or you've changed the way you sense or locate yourself. Okay, so what are we trying to do this weekend? We are trying to create a consensual attention to the two truths. And the more it gets established in any one of you, it will more rapidly get established in others of you. Okay, so that's enough on that for now.

[58:32]

Let me just say one more thing and we'll end for this evening. I'd like to come back to the sense of natural selection. Now, the way our senses work or function, is that they established subject and object. And when I look at Yasmin, I remembered her name, that's the first thing. Yasmin, oh, I'm sorry. Already I established a kind of dependent co-ariser. But when I see Yasmin, the way my senses work is I establish an object out there.

[59:35]

And an object. And that also establishes a subject, me who perceives it. Now, the way our senses have developed, we could say, is the result of natural selection. We've gone from the big bang to eyeballs. That's quite a leap. And And let's assume, let's just use natural reflection as an idea here, that in this process, our ability to perceive has developed as a way to practically survive. And so it's the way our senses function is to establish a subject and an object.

[60:53]

But what's actually happening from the point of view of non-worldly convention is that there are many mutual, dependent co-arisings. And those co-arisings create a presence. So that for a moment, there's a presence of you being there. And all those together create our sense of being and a unity of experience.

[61:56]

And a unity of experience. And we can logically establish that's true Through Buddhist logic. And we can also establish it through science. And you can also establish it perceptually if we re-educate our perceptions. Doesn't mean actually anything is any less real in any practical way. Und das bedeutet jetzt ganz praktisch gesprochen, dass nichts irgendwie weniger real ist. What it practically means is we have far more choice. Was es jetzt aber praktisch bedeutet, dass wir eine viel größere Auswahl haben. So we could define being then as the being of dependent co-arising.

[62:58]

Now, we don't see the being of dependent co-arising because of the way our senses work. But if you re-educate your senses a bit to see being as dependent co-arising, You live in a much more fluid, interactive world. A world in which several people can get together like Eric and the people he works with did. and produce a consensual attention which actually knows something about us which doesn't seem possible to us when you only have a simple subject-object difference. Now, how can I say this so it doesn't sound so weird and slippery?

[64:09]

Mm, slippery, that's really slippery. That sounds like it's ice and snow and water and... So, is that our sense perceptions establish boundaries. And the way the world functions is through boundaries. But the sense perceptions that our boundaries establish are not as fixed as we think. There's also actually a fluidity of boundaries in the world itself which we are trained and which our sense perceptions through natural selection don't see.

[65:22]

Now, the next four attentions are ways in which we begin to see that the boundaries are interactive. On this surface of worldly convention which our senses established and our culture established are still there but much more permeable, and we can move with more freedom within them.

[66:24]

And that's the point of this teaching of the two truths, that by making a distinction, We can rejoin the world in a much fuller whole way. Like we're on this side of the distinction and we don't see this side. So we make the distinction. Move over to the other side and then join the two. We can't do that until we make the distinction. And see how the distinction works in us. Now, the level of faith and ordinary practice of Buddhism as mindfulness and a way of seeing the world

[67:35]

This idea can almost be ignored. But from the point of view of what Buddhism is really about and the kind of understanding that leads to enlightenment and without using such a big, dumb, glamorous word But just to live with more accuracy and freedom, it's very useful to know what this means. Okay, we need to do a few minutes of logistics. But first let me apologize for not being too clear in this, but I'm doing my best. I hope my best gets better tomorrow.

[68:38]

We need to do a few minutes of logistics. But first let me apologize for not being too clear in this, but I'm doing my best. I hope my best gets better tomorrow. Because I really want this to be practical. I don't want it to sound too philosophical or slippery. But it's funny. Slippery has a very kind of sexual meaning. It does? Essentially because it has a dishonest meaning in English. A slippery person is somebody you can't really trust. Okay, well, they're probably both true.

[69:45]

All right. This is one of the hardest things of all to study in Buddhism, but it's actually the center of Mahayana Buddhism. And partly because it so goes against common sense and the way our language is put together. And it seems impractical. But it used to be, it's been in the past, shall we say, a way of seeing for, a way of seeing that benefited the real survival of only a few. It was a way of seeing that benefited, as I said in Darwinian, it was a way of seeing that benefited, this way of seeing the two truths was a way of seeing that only benefited a few.

[70:55]

This enlightened way of seeing was a kind of, you could say, not just survival, but a kind of higher survival. But I think now it's actually a question of planetary survival. If we don't begin to see in a real fundamental way how this world is dependently co-arising, then we are already in deep trouble. And if we don't really understand fundamentally and see how we really become dependent, we are all really in a big problem. I just wanted to briefly mention why I translated the two truths with double truth.

[72:01]

Just because I found it translated like that, also mit doppelter Wahrheit. Sometimes you can call it the double truth. Ich habe also den Ausdruck jetzt auf Deutsch doppelte Wahrheit gewählt, weil mir das also in der buddhistischen Literatur so begegnet ist. Und ich dachte, das hilft euch vielleicht, dass irgendwo, wenn ihr das mal nachschlagen wollt, And sometimes these things are just a matter of finding the language that clicks for us so you get a feel for it, and then it's not so hard to understand. But sometimes the language can be very simple, like we could use it's an ecological idea. But if we use something so obvious as that, we actually don't see how it really applies to our lives and the world. So the language can't be too convenient, but it also can't be too difficult.

[73:05]

So I'd love your help in finding what makes us feel this way. So this morning I'm wondering why, what I'm struggling with this morning. is why it's so difficult to talk about this. Or what is the nature of an explanation?

[74:07]

But having grown up in a Christian, more or less Christian, Judaic world, you all know that it's quite difficult to explain God. In fact, it's usually said it's better not to explain God and just have faith. His, her existence. So maybe I should just tell you, have faith in this. That's good enough. Because I have a kind of faith in it. And I also have no doubt about it.

[75:15]

And I know that at least in the most definitive way, it's the way I experience things. And when I don't experience things this way, most of the time I think I know that I don't. Um... But it's, you know, it is a... Okay, so why bother, why should I bother to kind of work with you on this? And I... I suppose the reason is, you know, why do you climb a mountain?

[76:26]

Because it's there. And so this is such an important topic, somehow it ended up on the list of subjects for seminars this year, so here we are climbing this mountain. But I also know that if you have some feeling for the possible explanation, even if you don't get it in its entirety, and I am probably unable to present it in its entirety, still it gives you confidence and an intuitive basis for a direct experience in the future.

[77:33]

If you want me to repeat anything, just say so. Okay. Now, it's helpful to me, as you know, if you have given me some comments on what you've understood so far, what's made sense to you, or where you didn't understand, or where you think... the discussion can be pushed a little bit like, well, why don't you say that? Like Christina's comment question last night, which gave me a sense of what I hadn't made clear enough. So, does somebody have something you'd like to... yes? Mostly sensual? Essential. Yeah.

[79:08]

You want to say that in German? My question is about one aspect of mindfulness, which is to observe oneself and to create the world. So mindfulness, the first level of mindfulness, or ordinary mindfulness, is just to pay attention to things. And it's worth studying the four foundations of mindfulness. Of which the most subtle and loving presentation is probably in Thich Nhat Hanh's books.

[80:20]

That's right. We don't have to worry about grammar here too much. Yeah, and he goes through, you know, the mindfulness of the body, the mindfulness of the parts of the body, the spleen and so forth, in much the same, not as detailed, but by implication, the same way we went through this midweek seminar. Well, obviously we didn't go through the spleen this midweek somewhere. At the point is using spleen as an example is that you go into when you really practice this sense of awareness of the body

[81:44]

You really, over a period of time, go into quite a lot of detail in your inner physiology. But it starts with just being aware of what your feet are doing when you're walking. It starts with just being aware of what your feet are doing when you're walking. Yeah, so that's, in a way, the first level of awareness of mindfulness is to just be present in what you're doing. And then you're mindful in a deeper sense of the body itself as an interactive event. The body itself is an interactive event.

[83:01]

And then that leads to seeing, actually being in the midst of how the body creates itself, how it creates its health, its body states and so forth. And then that brings you to the mindfulness that Erich pointed out, which is mindfulness of how you are participating in creating the world. And that comes up in the next three attentions, the last three attentions. And that we could call, as some scholars have, the attentions of Buddha subjectivity in contrast to ordinary person subjectivity.

[84:47]

Yes. Could you talk a little bit more about that thing you said yesterday about A plus B is AB or BA? A and B are unreal, but AB and BA are real. Okay. Because I think that's very interesting. Yeah. I'm very confused. Yeah, I think that's very confusing. Like, for example, when you say A is the father, B is the mother, AB is the child. Mm-hmm. Does that mean, in the way you said it, that A without AB is not a father? A man without a child is not a father. Do you mean it? Okay, yeah. You want to say that in Deutsch? Since you all have these special skills of being able to speak two languages, I'd like to... A and B is gleich BA oder AB.

[85:52]

OK. Yeah. The truth somehow reminds me of my first theological thought when I was a kid. Like when God exists and there exists and they somehow contradict each other, how can it be true? I don't know if it's a good answer, but it strikes me when I was a teenager and the temptation I feel then really appealed to my body. She knows how to speak German. No one told you you were a fallen angel?

[87:34]

Well... What Ulrike said makes me aware that having this kind of discussion, which a big part of it is conditioned by perplexity. I realize that when I speak English, I use simple words, but I say things that nobody says in English.

[88:36]

It's a little hard. It's conditioned by perplexity. Perplexity is the difficulty in understanding something. It's perplexing. Rika made me aware that having a discussion in which much of the discussion is conditioned by perplexity. Maybe the perplexity may be as fruitful as resolving the question. Because it brings us in contact with the many times we are in that fruitful state of perplexity. Or we could say a fruitful state of complexity.

[89:42]

And complexity is very hard for us to grasp. And we are the most, as far as we know, the most complex objects in the universe, at least in the planet. As someone pointed out, one cell of Florian's body is almost infinitely more complex than his whole little computer there in front of him. And he has millions and billions of cells and stuff going on.

[90:46]

And we can't deal with it except by creating a generalization. Seeing the outside of this complexity. And then further simplifying it and calling it Florian. Well, no. And so one practice of mindfulness... And one of the practices of mindfulness is So, was ist das?

[91:46]

Is that what you say? Was ist das? Was ist das? So that's a great little mantra you can practice with in German. Was ist das? Was ist das? Was ist das? Das ist ein schönes kleines Mantra, mit dem man auch im Deutsch praktizieren kann. Was ist das? Was ist das? Was ist das? Ja.

[92:11]

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