Of Avalokiteshvara, compassion being the outward movement. And Manjushri or Mahastrama Patra being wisdom. And wisdom is that zazen is pulling the world in. And compassion is unfolding yourself into the world. So the enfolding is the samadhi of the Eightfold Path. And it's this idea, again, of host mind and guest mind. And that, as a teaching device, is set up in this koan for the rest of the... Show your rope.

[01:05]

This teaching device of host and guest. The mind of wisdom and the mind of... Compassion. And strangely also the inhale is life and the exhale is death. So we have the inhale and we have the three groups, so what they call the three groups, of the skandhas, the vijnanas, and the exhale, they all disappear. Anyone else want to say something? Yes. Is it advisable to give attention to the breath when the mind has already become one with the breath, or is it just a method that has done such a work?

[02:53]

Is it useful to still pay attention when the breath has already become, is woven and become one, or is it just a technique? To follow the breath when the mind has become one with the breath, sometimes in sitting, Well, I have the feeling there is some certain kind of openness, and I don't want to watch the breath any longer. That's fine, yeah. Then it's okay. Sure, there's all these different, there's counting, there's following, there's stopping, there's almost not breathing at all, yeah. There's returning the breath to the body, and so forth. You use a technique like this for a little bit and then you let happen what happens. Okay. Yeah. I have a very strange question.

[04:17]

The new Romani and theater pieces, they are built up like a covalent. and how did it come that so much time and dream always came together and now all of this is being dissolved? Does this mean that everyday life outside in society is similar to the way of thinking, that in Buddhism we are blessed? Okay. How come that in the contemporary plays and novels there is a similar structure in terms of time frame like in koans?

[05:19]

And does this mean that we are moving more toward Buddhist thinking? What novels? The new novels? What novels? Which novels? Which novels, yes. Yes, so plays, Pina Bausch in Dancing, for example. Then the similar new novels. Or Ulysses, for example, also from... Ulysses. Ulysses, yeah. Yeah, no? Yeah. Okay. I just happen to now be re-reading Ulysses. She already started 17 times. Well, I can understand Finnegan's Wick starting 17 times, but Ulysses is readable.

[06:28]

Yeah, I think Ulysses is readable. Well, it's something strangely, a little bit uncanny about the fact that... Tang Dynasty poetry, for instance, reads like contemporary poetry. I mean, the sensibility is contemporary. And these koans, even if they are problematical for you, You actually don't have to know much about Chinese culture to have them have power in our lives. It may help to know some things, like I mentioned this morning, having to do with how an embodied oral tradition

[07:31]

creates a literary tradition which is partially oral. And it's what the face-to-face teaching means at Dogen that transmission in Zen is still primarily an oral process, not a process of textual exchange. But given an understanding of what an oral... based written tradition is like. You don't have to know much about Chinese culture if you know that. If you know that much. So it is strangely contemporary.

[08:43]

And I don't know, you could probably look at demography. The population density today is probably somewhat similar to China at that time. And many of the ideas are similar to contemporary ideas. And as I've often pointed out, most of us are here because a lineage in the West led us here, not a lineage in the Asia led us here. And as my friend Michael Murphy always points out, he sees all these broken lineages. I think he would say whitehead and... Emerson and Heidegger and Wittgenstein and so forth.

[10:23]

And I see it in the novels of... Yeah, that was convenient. That's all right. I see it in the novels of... Man Without Qualities, what? Mozeel. Mozeel and Joyce, is that they come to a point which if they knew samadhi, if they knew prajna, if they knew meditation, they'd take their philosophy to another step. I see it in particularly a lot of the writers and others in Vienna. And it's Vienna, of course, which then produced Freud and Christa and... So, I'm sorry, what time are we supposed to stop?

[11:33]

Six o'clock? Okay. Five, two, I think. Okay. So... You breathe at night. Du atmest nachts. You breathe during the day. Und auch tagsüber. What mind follows the breath through night and day? Welches Geist folgt dem Atem tags und nachts? The sun and moon hung up under a shadowless tree. Jung speaks about a solar and lunar, two different consciousnesses, a solar and lunar consciousness.

[12:44]

And Freud speaks about nighttime dreaming as a different topography, a different psychic location. So Cohen, like this, is trying to go into this territory in its really brief, incisive way of two or three pages. And it's not trying to write a long book and say, yeah, here's all the aspects of solar consciousness and lunar consciousness and so forth. It says, if you want to know these things, tread the path of the breath.

[13:45]

Follow your breath into sleeping. And much of contemporary thinking, psychology, writing like Joyce, Freud and Jung and Foucault and others, all are concerned of these two worlds that don't quite meet of our nighttime world and our daytime world. A phrase outside the scriptures, outside of consciousness. The mortar itself with which you grind rice flour or barley or spices. The mortar itself blooms.

[15:07]

The body is the mortar. In a sense, the breath is the pestle. And the breath and body are always turning and, in a sense, grinding up your life, refining your life. All the phenomenal world, the material of your senses, comes into the body and breath, mortar and pestle. And the body itself blooms, the pestle itself blooms, and the mortar itself blooms.

[16:12]

So here we are in this koan, brought into these realms, these two realms of solar and lunar consciousness. Let's say solar mind and lunar mind. Do you have the same word in German of lunacy? of being crazy. The nighttime mind is often the crazy mind.

[17:15]

And here we are travelers in those two minds through meditation. And what does our course, our path in these two minds? Breath. So I've often suggested, follow your breath into sleeping. It's fun to do it. I do it every night. Es macht Spaß. Ich mache es jede Nacht. You're breathing. And as I say, you can usually tell if you go into a room and your child or your spouse is pretending to sleep, you know right away they're pretending to sleep. Also, wenn du in den Raum gehst und dein Kind oder dein Partner gibt vor zu schlafen, weißt du sofort... You're not asleep, are you?

[18:22]

No. Du schläfst nicht, nein. It's very hard if you want to help your partner to sleep, so you pretend to sleep. It doesn't work usually. Sleeping, breathing is a different topography, different psychic sight. I like the two words in English, sight, S-I-T-E, and S-I-G-H-T, sight. So sight, G-H-T, has the sense of the image that you see. But sight, S-I-T, has a sense of location that's a location, but an image, but not a visual image.

[19:31]

As they say, how do you see shadows in the dark? What kind of mind can see shadows in the dark? Yeah, so you follow your breath and it goes along. Oh, this is my conscious breath, I can tell. And sometimes there's a little stumble. It's almost like the breath stumbles over a threshold. Over a shelf or a windowsill. You can feel your breath stumble. And if you can kind of keep this awareness, this knowing stuck to the breath and not either in lunar or solar knowing, you can feel your breath stumble.

[20:51]

And sometimes you give a little death chortle. And suddenly you're asleep and your breathing is doing itself and you're in another space. This is also our practice. Now, can anybody practice this? Of course. Can anybody do it? I think if you've done sessions and quite a lot of sitting, yes, you can do it. It's hard to keep knowing with the breath unless you have samadhi experience.

[21:55]

Yes, and I think if you have done sesshins or meditated intensively, then you can do it, because it takes such a samadhi experience to realize it. Okay. Thanks a lot. Next seminar, what is night like? Stumble across the threshold with the Dharmasanga. vāreṁ āryaṁ māṁsīṁ sūgataṁ tārīṁ nirvāṁ tvājāṁ āryaṁ sūgatiṁ [...]

[23:25]

I, Mother God, hope that you will continue to protect me from the coming of karma, and that I will be able to protect you from the coming of a thousand million devils, and that I will be able to take you into my arms and protect you, and that I will be able to discover the truth of the Tatra Kata. So we see with this koan, despite some of your feelings about koans.

[25:19]

And by the way, this afternoon I hope I hear more from the I hate koans group. Yeah, I want to learn something from, you know, I kind of understand, but I'd like to understand better. Maybe I'll join up with you, I don't know. Okay. But we can see in a koan like this, despite its problematics, how really simple the teaching is. It doesn't mean we're simple, but the teaching is simple.

[26:23]

And this third koan and this collection of teachings that's central to our lineage... Yes? I'd like to be ignorant. This third koan establishes the breath as the basis of the teachings, especially the basis of the teachings that open up the body and perception and consciousness.

[27:27]

So what I hope you find out in this week, the extent to which Zen Buddhism expects you to become a breath body, As a shortcut, as a shortcut. So I'm trying to give you a feeling for that and also some of the practices, teachings involved. Okay. Now, last night or yesterday afternoon, I spoke about following your breath into sleep. Now, I realize that what I said might be misunderstood or confusing.

[28:45]

It's not like you go from the room of waking to the room of sleeping. And now the room of sleeping is all brightly lit or something. No, you still leave ordinary consciousness. Sometimes you come into an awareness that's something different than sleeping or dreaming or waking or dreaming.

[29:46]

But it's more like you... It's more like your awareness continues with your body. Now, one of the first things Sophia... You know who that is? I think you... So, the first thing Sophia... Some of you might be quite new. Sophia... it's almost three now, learned, is to be aware of her body during the night.

[30:50]

And, yes, because I think she's fallen out of it. She has a rather high bed, actually, but I think she's fallen out of it once. So she's learned not to wet her bed, almost completely, and she's learned, that's nice, and sometimes she wets our bed, but she doesn't wet her bed. Maybe she's establishing her territory. Vielleicht etabliert sie ihr Territorium. Ja, also sie nässt ihr Bett nicht und sie fällt auch nicht aus ihrem Bett heraus. Also das heißt, sie weiß, wo ihr Körper nachts ist, also sie verfolgt, wo er ist. But she still wakes up from dreams and quite disturbed sometimes, and sometimes she wakes up and she doesn't know where she is, what's going on.

[32:05]

So if we try to understand this, She's not conscious of her body because she's not conscious and she goes from dreaming to consciousness with some disturbance. So let's say that She's aware of her body, but not conscious of her body. So there's a big distinction between her consciousness, waking consciousness, and her awareness of her body while she's sleeping.

[33:09]

Now what happens through practice is this awareness of the body during sleeping is enhanced. If she were a practitioner, there wouldn't be such a big distinction between being awake and asleep or conscious and dreaming and so forth. So if I'm trying to establish a non-koan vocabulary here, between awareness of the body during sleeping and consciousness, And you know it's intentional mind, not discursive mind, that works in awareness.

[34:32]

So that it's like, you know, you can... There's an intention not to wet her bed, there's an intention not to fall out of bed, and those two things work in awareness, and that's not consciousness. In a similar way, as I say, you can... decide to wake up at 6.02 in the morning without an alarm clock. So you can go to bed at night and decide, tonight I will not wet my bed and I'll wake up at 6.02 a.m. These are both similar intentions

[35:34]

Yeah, that work while you're asleep. Now, breath practice is trying to... Because you're breathing at night and awake. I think you are, most of us are. And that breathing can weave so together this... awareness, consciousness, intentional mind and discursive mind. Mind and consciousness and... Intentional mind and so forth. It becomes a kind of golden thread, something like that, that you can follow.

[37:02]

So the teaching is simple, breath. We are complex and so what happens is complex. Now there's a koan Case 27 in the Blue Cliff Records. We're among us young men. What about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? Leaves fall. And Yan Min is one of the creators of the way we practice and study Zen.

[38:05]

And the young man, who is one of the beginners, is one of the creators of the way we study and practice Zen. And study Zen. That's it. Young men. Sorry, I always understood. Young men, yeah. That's what Sophia says. I like young men. Really, she's always wanted to go down to the main house at Creston. Why? The young men are there. Once on the way down, she said to Marie-Louise, I love you, Mother. I need you, Mother. And Marie-Louise said, well, why do you need me? Well, if we didn't have a flashlight, I'd need you to show me the way to the main house.

[39:37]

Anyway, young men... And Unman answered, Yanmen answered, the body exposed in the golden wind. Now maybe this phrase, you know, you can feel something on this phrase. It's another one of those images. If someone asks you, what is zazen like?

[40:37]

What is the feel of the body when you sit? Yeah, well, if you drop your thought coverings, your body, your sense of your usual body shape, physical body, One way to express that, Jungmann thought, was the body exposed in the golden wind. You're the golden wind and you're exposed in the golden wind. And it's a feeling when you go to sleep that that body... is exposed in the golden wind in your sleeping.

[41:54]

Well, it's not exactly that consciousness, in the usual sense, follows you into your sleeping, but rather the enhanced consciousness the awareness the body already has while sleeping, and it is enhanced and you feel, yeah, I don't know what words to use, understood, complete during sleeping. It's not a feeling like you go somewhere else while you sleep. It's a feeling like you go where you already are because you already are in your breathing and body. So I can try to say it another way.

[43:09]

You come into the intimacy of every act. You feel the intimacy of everything. everything, each thing you're engaged in. Yeah, like you can feel the breath on the inside of the lungs. You can feel the breath throughout the body. And you can feel the breath in the tissues of the nostrils. Yeah, so what you've done is you're taking sort of, you're suspending consciousness, perhaps, and kind of like enhancing awareness.

[44:23]

So awareness is in the very kind of tissues of the body. Through the breath. And you feel that in the objects. It's almost like the object that you pick up or hold is... Yeah, in your breath or not separate from your body, I don't know how to say it. Dogen says, okay, that's good enough. Whatever you said was just perfect. Dogen said something like, to see something is like to feel the eyes. So this is more than now. What does it say later in the koan?

[45:31]

The whole earth is the practitioner's The whole world is the practitioner's eye. With this eye you should read the scripture. without interruption. This kind of eye or this sense of the whole world as scripture is realized through this becoming a breath body. Becoming a breath body. Yeah, so they say, you know, between the exhale, inhale and exhale, you have the 18 dhatus, that means the 18 realms of

[46:42]

by the organ of each sense and the sense field and the object of the sense. As you understand, 18 dhatus is six senses. The field that's established. I look at you, my eye looks at you, you're the object of my looking, and I feel the... So, if you want to practice these, you breathe your way into your seeing, hearing, smelling, etc. Now, yesterday I spoke about the eightfold path as a path of the breath. And today, maybe I think I should speak about the four foundations of mindfulness. Well, it's also translated into four awakenings, foundations of awakening.

[48:14]

It says, awaken the body. How are you awakening the body? You've already got this body. What does it need to be awake for? It's been happy being asleep for a long time. That's the way you feel. You can leave. No, I mean, no, please stay. I like you. Yeah, this is an extraordinary thing, this body. There's nothing like it, except lots of other people, on the planet, in the cosmos. The elixir of the body is the breath. So you bring attention and breath together with your body.

[49:27]

And you're enhancing awareness. The body is sort of in the territory of awareness and our sense of the continuity of the world and so forth is in our consciousness. So you're sort of taking your sense of continuity out of consciousness and putting it in the body and you're enhancing the awareness of the body. So, you're first of all, if we go quickly through the four foundations of mindfulness, you're bringing attention first of all starts with the breath. And what does it say in this koan too?

[50:54]

Guishan, I think it says, if you don't know these basic principles, if you don't have the foundations of the teachings, you can hardly realize, understand the mystic path. So this goal, again, is establishing it right in the beginning of this book. Realize, awaken through the breath. Now, if attention is the secret, attention, what is the best target of attention? The best target of attention is breath. And then breath and attention joined can continue the targets.

[52:17]

the sights, the tones, when the attention is joined with breath, then you bring breath attention to the other aspects of the teaching. I mean, at least this is adept practice, not kind of philosophical practice. So first you bring attention to the breath. Then you bring breath attention to the activities of the body. Walking, so forth, etc., Going to sleep, waking up. Yeah. And then you bring breath attention to the... to the...

[53:32]

parts of the body. And you start with your exterior body and you begin to bring breath attention to your interior body. And this is something you have to develop the skill of, the craft of the breath attention. So we could call this as well as the path of the breath, we could call it the craft of the breath. So you start out with what you can do easily. Bring breath attention to some part of your body. An easy thing to do is to bring it to your thumbs when you're sitting and so forth.

[54:48]

Try to move your breath attention around through your body, maybe up your arm I think is useful. You can feel your attention in your elbow. That's not too difficult. So you go through the fingers and you bring your attention to the wrist and elbow, etc., I told you it's simple. So then you can move up your arm, upper arm, shoulder. And I think the shoulder is the easiest place to enter inside the body. You can feel your breathing there, you can feel your lungs there.

[55:56]

And so you bring this breath attention into the body. With your breathing you can begin to feel the shape of your lungs. And you can, like moving a little flashlight around in the body, you can go down the sides of your lungs and up the back of your lungs and so forth. Yeah. After you've gotten a feeling for The lungs, that's the easiest interior organ, I think, to get a feeling for. Then you can start trying to see if you can locate your stomach or kidneys and things like that.

[56:57]

Until you can find after a while that your body is permeated by attention, by awareness. A kind of consciousness awareness. you don't feel an inside-outside distinction in the same way anymore. So this is, again, just at the very beginning of the Buddhist teachings. It's assumed by Guishan and this koan. That you do this. This is your homework. Homework. Home cooking. And after a while, again, you can get pretty good at feeling throughout your body. Muscles, legs, etc.

[58:33]

And you feel like you reach into your foot from inside your foot. My foot's here. I can feel it from inside, not just like it's there from the outside. So you start feeling all of one piece. And this changes, of course, the way you feel tightness, the way memories are stored in your body, and so forth. No, it takes time. I would say, if you decided right now, and you hadn't done it before, To practice this first of the four foundations of awakening. To do it fairly thoroughly is going to take you a year or two. Also, um das einigermaßen gründlich zu tun, wirst du etwa ein Jahr oder zwei dafür brauchen.

[59:49]

You do it a little bit now and then in Zazen. Yeah, it's the easiest place. Also, du machst es ab und zu im Zazen, da ist es am einfachsten. And you go as far as you can, then you forget about it. You know, maybe two or three zazens later, you again, oh, okay, I'll see if I can bring attention to the body parts. Each time you do it, sometimes you don't have a feel for it, no point in trying. Sometimes you have a feel for it and after a few minutes you can really feel your body differently and then next time you may go a little further. And you're not pushing yourself.

[60:58]

You don't have a program. I'm going to do this in six weeks and I'm stage one, stage... No, you just go by your feeling. You kind of more let it happen. A conscious program doesn't work so well, because we're talking about awareness here, not consciousness. The usefulness of consciousness is to form an intention, not a program. Some people, I think, can't imagine doing something without forming a program. You use consciousness to form an intention. You let the intention start to function in awareness.

[62:00]

And then you let awareness tell you when you're going to practice. So awareness will remind you. If it forgets it for a year, that's okay. Yeah, what kind of... You're in a timeless realm. The sun and moon are hung up there. There's no shadows. Ja, du bist in einem zeitlosen Bereich. Die Sonne und der Mond, die hängen dort über dem schattenlosen Baum. Ja, time of, you know, turtles are steaming. Die Schildkröte, die dampft schon. In this realm you have all the time in the world.

[63:13]

This koan says you want to practice in a place before the beginning of time. That's not a conscious program. That's not a lot of thoughts about enlightenment. It's a place before the beginning of time. Everything has already arrived. Yeah, and there's a feeling of, as I said, to join those things of the world that are always at rest. This beautiful old floor we found under the rug Ja, dieser wunderbare alte Boden, den wir unter dem Teppich haben. Was having a nice nap under the rug.

[64:16]

Ja, lass uns ein kleines Nickerchen unter dem Teppich haben. And it's still mostly asleep. Ja, es ist meist schlafen. It's just at rest. Es ruht. And the stones in the garden go forth. Things are... Most of the objects of the world are at rest. And we start to feel this at rest in ourselves. Okay, so then you usually, if you want to do it traditional way, you also look at the four elements of the body, liquidity, solidity, and so forth. And usually, traditionally, then you go meditate in a cemetery. Just to cheer yourself up. But that means you are aware of the impermanence of the body.

[65:37]

Cemeteries in those days weren't so antiseptic as ours. Okay. That's only the first foundation. That's probably enough, huh? And as I said, a year or two, I come back. Thank you very much. The world plans to deliver us from the evil spirit. me [...] and my own experience is that it is like a mosaic of a lot of different fragments and very complex and that at first it doesn't make sense

[67:46]

But reading it over and over again, and I have done that seven to eight times by now, certain aspects come forward and I gain understanding. And the same is true for the other ones. I believe it's like putting yeast in a dough. And with time some bubbles appear and become evident. As a baker, I understand. As a baker, I understand that. I personally like it very much and I also have a lot of fun.

[69:14]

And I personally very much like that and I enjoy it. I just think it would be important that, especially when people are confronted with a core in this form for the first time, But I believe if people are confronted with the koan for the first time in their lives, that they might get some help by how they could approach it and instructions how they should approach it. And the second part, and this is also true for me, is what is lacking is self-confidence to deal with such a text. You lack self-confidence?

[70:17]

I hope not. Yeah, well, I understand I lack self-confidence, too. But it's always the self that's the problem. Not the confidence. Maybe to finalize in our group, which was against the koan yesterday. Today, it was much more relaxed and more joyous, the atmosphere. Good. Tomorrow, you'll be writing a poem.

[71:24]

Well, you know, Yuan Wu's disciple... Jan will put together the Cohen collection, the Blue Cliff Records. Yeah, one youth scholar, who put together the Smaragd and the Felswald, destroyed all the copies of the Blue Cliff Records. So he was part of your group, I mean, yesterday he was part of your group. No, he thought it made the teaching too explicit and people would depend on it too much. He destroyed all the copies, but some copies, I don't know, some portions were found and put back together. By contrast, Dogen supposedly copied the whole thing the night before he left for Japan, but let's presume that he only copied the main cases. I was going to want to start out, but then I thought it would be too depressing, with more comments from the I Hate Coens groups.

[72:52]

Yeah, you don't have to, I mean, really, you don't have to be persuaded by Gerhard, you know. Not that he was persuading you. Someone else? Yeah. Yeah. You were going to speak black yesterday, and I... Yeah, I'm sorry. She was also in this group? Yeah. And I was irritated and angry about the commentaries. Well, I had very difficult access to the commentaries until I understood that there are new pictures and images in those by your help.

[74:06]

And Sian helped me in the comparison with the dream interpretations, because I saw that I interpret my dreams not by asking many people what they interpret for me, but by diving back into this dream and experiencing what it means to me. And what also helped me was your remark about analyzing dreams. Not that I ask other people to analyze them for me, but I kind of plunge into them, dive into them myself and re-experience what they might mean. Yeah, that sounds good. And when I experience this breath, when I go into the experience and also into the distance, a question arises for me, how do I connect this with the one-pointedness? And when I go into the experience of breath and I experience more spaciousness, then the question pops up, how do I correlate this with one-pointedness?

[75:21]

How do you correlate the spacious feeling of dreams and breath and so forth with one-pointedness? Is that what you're asking? Well, let me say about dreams. Freud and Jung both seem to want to make the primary reality everyday consciousness. So they seem to, and it comes out of a rationalist background and so forth, but they seem to want to say that dreams exist for the purpose of everyday consciousness or your usual way of living.

[76:31]

Or when you interpret dreams, you try to pull them into the mind of consciousness. Buddhism just would say, this is just simply backwards. It might be interesting and useful sometimes to do that. And also there's this rational assumption that dreams really arise from things that happen during the day or things that happen in your consciousness. I'm going beyond what you asked here, but I'm just sort of riffing on dreams. So Buddhism would say the... let's call it lunar consciousness or the nighttime consciousness or nighttime awareness, mind, has its own life just like daily consciousness has its own life.

[77:57]

And so certainly dreams often do incorporate events from daily life. They're often quite separate. Okay. All right, so there's two aspects, I would say. One is the tendency for... The way... I don't want to spend the whole time talking about dreams here. Since I started, some things are important enough to mention, I think. First of all, a dream that does surface into your morning consciousness or daily consciousness...

[79:00]

I'm not saying you shouldn't interpret it, etc., but a more Buddhist approach was just feel the dream without trying to interpret it, just feel how it affects your life. And let your Trust your living consciousness and awareness itself to make use of it. I mean, you didn't go and produce this dream. Let it evolve on its own and don't try to mess with it. Now I'm speaking about one point of this in the context you brought it up. When you sit and you sit regularly.

[80:18]

Many kind of layers of imagery and so forth. appear. And sometimes something will catch our attention. And then you can bring one pointedness to that. So while you're sitting there's this stuff and there's something maybe a door or a light or an object somewhere. You can bring one-pointedness to it, attention to it, and just let your attention rest on it, which is an amazing secret, to be able to let your attention rest on something.

[81:27]

Then you can kind of, if you want or... But you have to be very gentle. There's a kind of craft to it. You can pull that light towards you or the door or the object towards you. Sort of like Alice in Wonderland. You can go through it or... Various things happen. White rabbits appear, you know, things like that. Not too often. Anyway... So thus, one-pointedness allows you to open up spaciousness, actually. If you're not distracted by it, then you can... Okay?

[82:37]

Now, one-pointedness also means to be able to rest your mind on spaciousness. Here's a simple example again. Can you loan me your pencil, Paul? There's nothing worth writing down. There was one guy who wasn't supposed to write during lectures and he had a paper kimono made. And he would, you know... What did he do when it was full of notes? Seven years of notes and something washed it. Okay, so say you concentrate on this. Sorry, do this again. Say you concentrate on this.

[83:37]

And you can bring your attention to it. And stay with it, right? If it goes away, it comes back. Okay, so now your mind is quite concentrated. Concentrated on this pen. Okay, so I take it away. But your mind stays concentrated. What's it concentrated on now? Mind itself. That's also one point. In the sense, it's the same technique. It's able to have your mind rest where it is. So your mind is already concentrated.

[84:47]

You can feel it in your body. You know the feeling in your body. You can hold that feeling. And then you bring the pen back into it. Oh, hi, pen. But now you're observing the pen from the point of view of the concentrated mind. So you can use the skill of holding the spaciousness of mind and concentrating on a particular thing. And it's a technique that's a merger of vipassana and shamatha. And as a technique, this is what Vipassana and Srimad-Dharmakirti do. May I ask you a question? I agree with your statement and your attention to the ballpoint pen and the staff. So your examples, taking the stick or taking this pen, and to concentrate or bring the attention to those, this I find still relatively simple.

[86:13]

Yes. But to bring the attention to my breathing, then this attention to my breathing always disappears. But to bring my attention to the attention of the breath, that's much more difficult for me because then the attention kind of goes away. I miss then the object which I see or have in hand. Where does it go to when it leaves the breath? In the same place where it goes when it shifts away from the tip. Into the same space where she, it would go when it goes away from the pen.

[87:26]

Yeah, where's that? I mean, what is it, thinking or? Is that thinking? It's more like non-thinking. Sounds pretty good, you know. Well, I would suggest sometime in your room you sit down and sit in meditation and put a stick of incense or a flower or something in front of you. and see if for 40 minutes you can stay attentive to the flower or the stick of incense. Sticks of incense are sometimes used in just this way. And then see.

[88:30]

Then compare that in another period to if you can stay at 40 minutes with your breath. Study what the difference is. Okay? Yeah. Yes. I sort of gained something out of the koan and the discussion on the teisho and that is my, so to speak, gist, my personal gist for the time being out of the koan is just trust your breath, follow your breath. You don't have to rule or reign your breath. and that relates to my everyday experience, my everyday breath path.

[89:33]

Actually, I didn't reflect on how I breathe, what experiences I have with breathing in my everyday life until the question was raised here in this practice here. And I found out that I oftentimes become aware of my breath in situations where I used to say, I would have said the breath isn't good, like too flat or too rapidly in situations of anxiety, for example, or anger. And I tended to rule my breath towards more deep Zen-like breath in order to calm down the anger. What I found out during these days, what my practice was, and I decided to practice in a new way, just follow it,

[90:45]

Just observe what my breath is like when I'm angry, for example, or when I'm in fear. Yeah, well, that's basically the third foundation of mindfulness. So that's my brand new practice. Deutsch, bitte. Das ist grundlegend die dritte Grundlage, Praxis von Achtsamkeit. Yes, Deutsch, I have been able to tie something up in the discussion and in these choirs and the lectures, namely a new, so to speak, practice for my everyday life. My, so to speak, my personal The essence of this core, as I want to understand it for myself now, is simply to follow the breath, to trust it and not to direct it or to manage it or to change it.

[92:02]

What has become clear to me is that in everyday life I often try for example, when I am excited or angry, or when I am entangled in such feelings, then to somehow let go of the breath or to get into a calm rhythm. And I decided not to do it anymore, but simply to observe it and to let it be as it is, so that I could practice it, to follow the breath, even in situations where I may continue on in an unfavourable or fearful way. Thank you. Danke. Someone else? Yeah. I was in the English speaking group and started more or less with the question to practice who is breathing or what is breathing. And we shared different experiences and came towards the end to an experience this morning in Oryoki practice.

[93:06]

where three of us were in this small group, sitting together, and I noticed that maybe there was something like a shift from who to what. There was one of us first in a motion, crying, and then... During breakfast or...? During breakfast. And then... stop very slowly, there was a, not so, not abrupt, but there was a shift from emotion more to feeling, to a feeling quality. And I could feel the softness of emotion, but not, I felt the emotion of this person very short and then there was this shift to a very soft feeling among us. And before I was practicing with more what is breathing which brought me to what is moving here in this breakfast situation and during the discussion I recognized maybe there's

[94:27]

Something going on in this way, what's going on in this way, this shift from more being emotional to more just feeling. And maybe the who is breathing is more emotional. Experience this is more emotional than what is breathing. Okay, since the rest of you were not in the English-speaking group, maybe you could judge a bit. We discussed how it is to practice with Veya Atmet or Vass Atmet and then came to the end to an experience where three of us were also present this morning at breakfast.

[95:09]

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