I've become an inkling what meditation can be. But you said also a few days ago that when you meditate you also sort of you relive your life or you retell your life to yourself. And during meditation also often pictures or images appear which touch me emotionally very strongly. Please, could you say something about how to deal and what to do about these uprising images during meditation?

[01:18]

Can everyone hear what she said? Very slight. Maybe you have to repeat it, or maybe... Can you repeat it shortly, what she said? I wanted to ask you to tell us how to deal with it and what to do with it. Sitting is a way of being alive. As is sleeping and being awake. And if you decide to sit, your whole life will pass through your sitting. And there's some form to that sitting.

[02:19]

And there's some form to that sitting. And we try to emphasize a form that's different from our usual habits of walking and lying down and sleeping. And it's a form where you can come to some mental and physical stillness. And first, there's some physical... things you can do, whether you sit in a chair or however, that you can sit comfortably without much physical effort. And in some way you can keep your back straight. It helps to keep your back straight.

[03:36]

Or allow your back to find its straightness. Now your posture is a kind of dialogue between an ideal posture and your posture as it is. And this dialogue is what's important, not so much whether you sit perfectly or not. I didn't say absolutely, but perfectly, yeah. So you sit... as well as you can taking into consideration say a Buddha posture. And then you accept your posture as it is. And you don't straighten it a lot.

[04:50]

Maybe you might straighten it once or twice in a period, but basically you allow yourself to sit the way you do. Now, I have a real resistance, as most of you know, to repeating myself. So I've been talking so much every day to twice a day or more in the Peace University. And then, of course, many people have come to my seminar. So I'm trying to find, how can I talk about this in a way that's a little different? But I'm doing the best I can, I'm sorry. It's not just that I get bored with hearing myself, but that too. But I... I find it interesting to see if I can find a little different way to speak about something.

[05:59]

When you decide to count your breath, your exhales, we usually do, You're making a very crucial and ancient decision to make the most accessible body function your breath and join it to a simple intention to count your breath. And counting is a very basic, probably one of the very most basic ways we teach children to externalize space. I read recently they waited six weeks to operate on the cataracts of a newborn baby.

[07:13]

And they thought it would be no problem because the baby, because adults when they have cataracts, whether you operate now or later is not so important because it's a fairly simple operation, I guess. And they took the cataracts off these babies' eyes, and the baby still could not see. And they think it's because, and from other evidence, that the baby during the first few weeks, brain is wired for seeing through physical interactions and depth perception and so forth. We had assumed that in the first few weeks of life, the wiring of the brain So when you're interacting with a baby and coming up close and touching them and etc., they're actually developing spatial perception and relationships.

[08:40]

And their brain is getting wired for seeing. And one of the ways, again, is that we teach babies to separate this from this. This is over here and this is here. Is we start teaching them to count. One, two, three. This is one way you develop an ability to separate one thing from another. And that's also when we teach the baby to just take something apart or keep it apart and separate it, that we give the baby the opportunity and possibility to count. Here is one, there is another or there are two. Okay, and so in fear of saying this too often, though quite a few of you are new, so I should say it, when you can't count in zazen mind, when you try to count your breath and you can't,

[09:52]

It's not just that you're distracted, it's that interior consciousness doesn't know how to count. Interior consciousness is not yet trained to make subtle distinctions. So you're taking something very basic, a cultural, that's true in all cultures, making some training for mind, for the possibility of remembering things and distinguishing things, in this case counting. And you're bringing intention to count, which is a vital force and energy. Together with this counting in a very pure way, and you're counting the physical act of breathing.

[11:09]

And you're then making conscious a physical act which is usually unconscious. And then you have the experience of interfering with your breathing because your counting and attentiveness changes your breathing. And then you're moving into the realm where breathing is conscious but now breathes itself without any interference. And then that step of breathing, breathing itself, moves into a consciousness of your breathing and a mind related to your breathing

[12:29]

throughout the day and even throughout the night. Your breathing becomes connected to your mind or part of your mind through the day and through the night. And when you begin to establish a continuity that's not a thinking mind, past, present, future continuity, but you begin to... develop a continuity of breath-mind, then you begin to have blissful breathing. An ordinary breath feels like something soft and beautiful and ecstatic coming in and out.

[13:52]

Now, this would be not direct practice, but adept practice. But you're all breathing. This is all something that's your own possibilities and treasure. Okay. Now, you had a question, but I'm still answering hers, but go ahead. No. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Yes, I would like to ask what I experienced first. I tried to count my breath and I had the feeling that it was getting narrower, that it was getting narrower in me. I can only speak in such a strange way, that it was getting narrower.

[14:54]

When I started to count, when I just felt my breath, I had the feeling that it was somehow going on. I just had an experience I had yesterday. When I started counting my breath, I found it became a feeling of narrowing and when I just watched it, it was wider. My question is, would it still have been important to stay in the counting process? Did you avoid that? Or is it just as useful to only experience the coolness of breathing without counting? Now my question is, was I doing right when I counted? What would have been right, so to say? Just experiencing the freshness or the coolness of my breath? Or should I have gone on and counted?

[15:56]

What would have been the right thing to do? Well, the most basic attitude is that what you did was right. And not worry too much. Is it right or not right? And what's wrong with having narrow breath? Have narrow breath for a while. Yeah, but what's wrong with being uncomfortable for a while? You're just studying yourself. So sometimes it feels narrow. And this becomes very familiar with the narrow. In general, what you're doing in practice is you're making an effort, you're relaxing the effort, and then you make an effort again. So there's a pulse of effort and relaxation. Okay. And then So you stay with that pulse and don't change your...

[17:19]

practice sort of, oh, I don't like this, it doesn't feel so good, I'm going to do something else, you know. You just stay with what you're doing and see what happens. Because counting your breath can also feel very wide. No. If you want to go back the next time you make an effort to just following your breath or being present in your breath, fine. This is up to you. And maybe at some point then suddenly counting will feel more wide and following your breath will feel too lax. Don't let your mind control your zazen. Just let what happens happen and mostly be an observer.

[18:34]

At least for the period of 30 or 40 minutes that you sit. You have to spend the rest of the day controlling yourself. Okay, so I'm trying to finish this zazen breath instruction here. Okay, so your mind, you're bringing this vital energy of attention and counting and your physical act of breathing together. And the coming together of it is pretty pretty incomplete at first. But it is a kind of alchemy.

[19:40]

Whenever you bring things together, you're creating something. You need a kind of patience and faith to let that alchemy begin to happen. And you understand you're dividing a cloud. You're taking one sort of part of yourself called intention and another part of yourself called counting and another part of yourself called breathing and you're putting them together. You could make some other division. If you make some other division, your practice actually will have a different effect and result. So I'm trying to show you within the Buddhist tradition the simplest way Buddhism has decided to make these divisions and put them together with patience and

[20:50]

And allow this alchemy to occur. Now, one reason, again, you can't count to ten easily is because you haven't learned to, your interior consciousness hasn't learned to count. And it's also because you have a lot of karmic, unfinished business. You have to understand, I think, at least as I understand it, the self, I mean, Freud did not discover the unconscious. Freud discovered the emerging unconscious in an industrialized civilization.

[21:52]

Even that. And if that wasn't clear, either in German or English, some people feel, oh, the unconscious was always there. It's a human condition. It goes back into the ancient past in all cultures. I don't think so. Of course, to some extent it's true. But I think that we have tried to develop a very productive organized self that's very efficient and really aimed toward productivity. And it's a self in the chains of progress. I think enchained by ideas of economic and material progress and development and things like that.

[23:12]

So our self has also a lot of anxiety all the time if there isn't economic security, if there isn't material progress, if your comparisons, and your self is sitting there thinking, this is a horrible place to be. And it's, you know, it gets a very, it's a very tight little boat, right? That sail in the sea of life. And you try to pour all of your existence into this little boat. And the boat's just too small for all of your existence. And it would sink the boat immediately. And the boat gets stuck in the mud of the unconscious.

[24:25]

So, as a result, we Westerners, a great deal of our story isn't told to us because it doesn't fit in the boat. Now, we could define Zazen practice, meditation practice, as the practice of knowing yourself through yourself, And knowing yourself through the freedom from self. So when you're trying to abandon your posture, the form of your posture, abandon your thoughts, wholesome and unwholesome, You're trying to move into a freedom from the force of self.

[25:30]

So one of the first things that happens is when you try to count and you can't count. Doesn't mean zazen's failed, because if you could always count to ten, your zazen is not good. But actually you've just forced external consciousness into zazen. So because you can't count, it means you've entered Zazen mind. It's an untrained Zazen mind, but it's Zazen mind.

[26:30]

And it opens you up to all your unfinished karmic business. The many parts of your story you've not really told yourself. The aspects you've de-emphasized or left out or forgotten. Or the aspects you've never knew because they happened outside the realm of self-consciousness, which is the realm of memory or forgetfulness. So there's many aspects of yourself that you've never forgotten because you never remembered. So we have the We could say you have the non-forgotten parts of self, of existence.

[27:56]

I mean, there's a difference between an apple, having an apple and no apple. That's obvious. An apple and no apple, that's obvious. But a non-apple is not no apple. So there's parts of yourself that aren't in the realm of remembering or forgetting. They're in non-forgetting and non-remembering. It's an area we haven't noted or even forgotten. Well, as a translator, you passed the first big test. You can't say. I think, I don't know. No. So what happens is many things just start coming up and flowing through you.

[29:14]

And the more open you are the more this flows. And if you want to encourage the flow you exaggerate it a little bit. Because still the ego doesn't want this to happen. So the ego throws a wide moat of boredom around zazen practice. And you have to either swim the moat, which is very boring, or find ways to let a drawbridge down, you know. But you're literally learning how to be alive. Simple aliveness is the greatest of all pleasures. You know that just before you die.

[30:25]

That's when you usually discover it. Another moment of simple aliveness, please. You could have learned that late earlier. So if you're bored, it means you're simply not alive. So when you get more alive, you can sit in zazen quite easily because it's just a pleasure just to be alive. You can't tell people too often, oh, isn't it great to be alive? You have to find some more clever way of telling them. Well, that's what I'm doing here. I'm trying to find some clever way of telling you.

[31:25]

Forget your unwholesome thoughts, etc. My experience is, for most Westerners who meditate daily or five or so times a week at least, it takes about two years to retell your story and let your story tell itself to you. So we could call counting to one, or not being able to count much past one usually, an inner posture of zazen. We could call letting yourself, letting your story tell itself to you an inner posture of Zazen.

[32:28]

Now, another inner posture of zazen is within this story happening and being open to your story happening, sometimes you just feel the inclination to abandon yourself, abandon the story, abandon everything, abandon yourself to your posture. Another inner attitude in the sasana is this tendency that sometimes overcomes us to just let go of everything, to let go of the inner story, to let go of the thoughts, to let go of everything. And as your story begins to open up and there's more spaces in your story, there's less welling up of the story, you'll find more often there's room there to just abandon yourself to self-joyous samadhi. And where the space expands, where you allow it, where there is less of this rolling up of your story, the space also expands, there is more space and there is more of this self-satisfied samadhi.

[33:54]

Okay, I would like us, if it's all right with you, for us to sit for just a few minutes, three, four, five, and then we'll take a break. I don't know why, but it makes me very happy to sit here and listen to you all speaking German.

[35:07]

I wish I could do a seminar in which I would arrive on Friday evening and then I'd sit till Sunday evening listening to you all speak German. Um... Anybody want to say something as a result of your conversations? Oh, yes. One problem of understanding which in our group occurred was that with consciousness and un- or subconsciousness, as you mentioned, Freud, what he discovered, and there was something which wasn't clear to us. And, of course, that considers the whole area of what is conscious, what is unconscious, when has it ever been, at what times has been what unconscious, and this we just couldn't solve.

[36:25]

I said it in German. One of the problems with our group was that we were stifled by what had to do with the unconscious. Roche mentioned this earlier, and also the example with the boat. What was conscious and unconscious at a certain point, and what does consciousness and unconscious have in common? We just didn't get any further in one way or another. I think there's 532,000 contemporary psychologists working on this problem. But I think tomorrow, since last night and today we've more or less concentrated on the body in various ways, at least that's been my feeling. Tomorrow I think I should speak about the mind. And so I'll do my best tomorrow. Yeah. Okay. We had one question about the difference between adept and direct practice.

[37:42]

Do you know what adept is? Yeah. Well, like adept practice is to... You don't have to say that in German, right? It's clear enough. The difference is between the direct practice and the adept practice. The adept practice. Adept practice is like understanding the four abandonments, how the five powers are also five faculties. Understanding how the skandhas interrelate with the... Eightfold Path and with the ten Bhumis and so forth. And I'll have to talk about a little of this at least tomorrow. And this is very useful. And it makes direct practice easier. But direct practice is in Zen usually just to take a phrase which covers the territory without explanation of adept practice.

[39:06]

For example, you might work with this very mind is Buddha. Without any explanation of what all this means, you just repeat a phrase like that. This very mind is Buddha. Or everything is mind. And you see where that leads you or what it opens up. For instance, let's take a dream. Analytical approach to a dream is to try to look at what it means, how it fits into your current life situation, what it might mean in mythological or archetypal terms and so forth.

[40:08]

But direct practice with a dream would be to stay with the feeling of the dream without trying to analyze it. And learn how to stay with that feeling and then carry that feeling into the day and let the aspects of the day speak to you. Do these distinctions Help in the difference between direct and adept. One is like knowing being a car mechanic and the other is driving the car. But if you're But if you're driving the car and you hear something strange, it's nice to also be a mechanic.

[41:16]

No, these are the same person. They can be. But Zen emphasizes direct practice. Tibetan Buddhism emphasizes adept practice. And my emphasis is on direct practice as realization practice. And adept practice to come to a better understanding of yourself and functioning of yourself. I have a feeling that we should talk about how jizo is not moral, the first four abandonments, and about the relationship of uncorrected mind. And just when we talk in a group, it can start becoming like you have to weed out all the bad thoughts.

[42:39]

You know, it's like totally... Deutsch. Please. Pretty please. It would be great if he could talk about it again. How far... I mean, morality with the four... This is the first time I've explicitly taught the four abandonments. So I haven't discovered exactly what language to use to make it clear. That's why this is a workshop and we're working on it together. But maybe by, I don't want to say any more about it now, but maybe tomorrow I will say something more, at least by the end of the day, certainly.

[43:56]

But I think the key is to recognize this frees you from rules and puts you in charge of your own life. And it's rooted in you and what's good for you. not in what's good for society. So it's not do unto others as you would do unto yourself. It's do unto yourself what might be good for others. Or something like that. We have to massage the English a little here. Okay, something else? Yeah. In our group there was for me an interesting discussion how unwholesome thoughts can be avoided and for us it was kind of a preliminary result.

[45:21]

It can be avoided at a very early stage if you increase your awareness towards the inner realm. But how this works, how the structure of this works, was not quite clear. In German, for us it was very interesting to discuss, for me it was very interesting to discuss, how it comes that one cannot let unheilful, harmful thoughts arise at all. And we thought, You've got the idea. And your question is the answer. So it is about coming to a state of mind which in itself we say that the

[46:23]

Ocean rejects dead bodies. They float to the surface. So a healthy state of mind or an integrated or joyous state of mind rejects unwholesome thoughts. So you're not only working on the wholesome or unwholesome thoughts or noticing them, you're working on the mind which sustains or does not such thoughts. And a Empty state of mind, you know, it's interesting, like zero in mathematics.

[47:36]

Zero does things. And there's lots of different zeros that do different things in mathematics. And there's different kind of emptiness. Emptiness is not homogenous or empty. If emptiness does things, then emptiness has some kind of actuality. And emptiness is empty, and all possibilities are there. But really, only wholesome possibilities are there. Because it takes a conflicted mind to produce unwholesome thoughts.

[48:38]

And a conflicted mind is not empty. Does that make sense, sort of? But this is one of the definitions of wholesome and unwholesome, which isn't about morality. So we could define wholesome and unwholesome not as morality, but as what emptiness sustains or does not. Do you realize how far we've come since Friday night? That I can make a statement to you that the difference between wholesome thoughts and unwholesome thoughts are what emptiness sustains or does not, and more or less we can understand that.

[49:43]

That's a very hard statement to make in any context on this planet, and somehow you guys have made it possible. Thank you very much. I'm very grateful. What? He only used the male form. Who did? Guys. But guy is a male. Guy in English, guy means women too. Oh, I see. It's an incomplete Russian. I'm sorry.

[50:43]

I'm sorry. He's a good translator, but he's not yet perfect. Far from that. And I am definitely not yet perfect, so... Okay, anything else? I want to ask, what is then the difference between brainwashing and Buddhism? Of Deutsch. Deutsch? Brainwashing is done by someone else, not by you. And brainwashing is a way of removing things that you want to think. And Buddhism is letting go of things you don't want to think.

[51:49]

And Buddhism begins where the mind boggles, not where it's washed. I don't know what I said, but Okay, you had a question I wanted to ask. This morning you said that if we abandon ourselves to our posture, We could abandon the wholesome and unwholesome thoughts, we could abandon everything and we don't have a feeling of our soul and we could let disappear everything. Now my question is, in my experience a state of mind is always a state of some object.

[52:54]

The consciousness is the consciousness of something, of a bodily feeling, or a visual image, or of a thought. It is difficult for me to understand how there can be a mind without an object. Is it possible to explain this? Yes, in German. Yes, because what she said, as many as it is a shadow, Ugi selbst loszulassen und unsere Haltung überrannt zu werden. then we could get to the point where we can let go of both the pious and the unaccompanied thoughts. Yes, we can then bring everything to life. We do not necessarily have to consider where our body is now, where our body is now. No thoughts, the teaching of the spirit. And that is therefore very difficult to understand, because Spirit or consciousness, according to my experience, is always connected to the consciousness of something.

[54:08]

A sight, a sound, a thought. If I imagine that everything is gone, no mind, no soul, etc., then for me the conclusion is that this is consciousnesslessness. No object, no mind. What is the mind without object? Okay. This is a very acute and essential question. And it's a question on which various schools and the development of Buddhism historically have turned. And it's both philosophical and experiential. And for the most part, it leads into what I want to talk about and at least touch on tomorrow. But at this point, let me try to respond fairly simply. Okay. So, what is your name? Volker.

[55:21]

So, Volker, or all of us, you can concentrate on this object and here is an object, right? And you can develop the ability to concentrate on that. Now, when you can really concentrate on that, it's called one-pointedness. And one-pointedness means you not only have a concentrated mind, you have a relaxed mind. It's not concentrated by effort, though it is initially. It's concentrated because you can just relax your mind on an object. So first you have to keep bringing your mind back. And after a while you don't have to bring it back or it comes back easily without effort.

[56:22]

And there's two aspects of that, which is the clarity of the object itself in its brightness and preciseness and the way the mind can easily rest on it. Then there's also the clarity of the mind itself, which is observing the object. And the field of a mind that's established between the perceiver and the perceived. Now that's all part of one-pointedness and an essential skill of meditation practice and Buddhist practice and mindfulness practice. Okay, now let's imagine you're all concentrated on this.

[57:27]

Okay? Now you see it, now you don't. Now, can you retain your feeling of concentration? And if you can retain your feeling of concentration, now what are you concentrated on? The object of concentration now is the concentration itself or mind itself. So you're right, there's always an object of concentration, but that object of concentration can be the mind itself. Okay, then you can bring this back up into that field and examine it from the field of concentration rather than this establishing the concentration.

[58:36]

Mm-hmm. So again this is a basic skill or basic treasure or power that you have yourself and you can develop your concentration and consciousness in this way. Okay, now, in front of Volker, what is your name? Martin. Martin? Martin. Hi. You had a question too. Yeah, I was thinking of the first five powers you wrote on the board, about confidence, and I'm not at this thought at the moment, I try to get it.

[59:47]

I'm often afraid if I try to meditate or think of meditation, of what will come after maybe several years of meditation, when I always deal with myself, with my inner force, my inner unconscious. I'm a little afraid of cutting myself off of communication with other people, with the world around. I'm searching this confidence of, it will be good what will come through meditation, through just dealing, thinking of my development. I'll try to say it in German. The question is about this trust that Reiko Roshi has written down there. I always struggle with the idea that it is good to meditate and to be self-assured, but there are also moments when I feel that I don't have this trust, that it ultimately brings something to me, but also at the same time a fear. And why do you have a certain anxiety again about it?

[60:52]

I'm afraid of it because one aim is to be able to communicate with people. That's one problem I have. It needs an effort to communicate without effort. I'm afraid of just losing the capability of communication. not to need any effort, but at the same time not to be able to communicate anymore. So I have an aim and I'm afraid not to reach it then. Well, I think I should speak about this a little bit. Because this kind of concern occurs I think almost for anyone who practices meditation seriously. And there are many forms of it. Like when I first started practicing back in the

[62:23]

late 50s, early 60s. One of the most common things people would say to me is, why are you staring at your navel? Why are you wasting your time? You should be out helping people. Well, I was only meditating 40 minutes. It seemed to me like the world could do without me for 40 minutes. And if I went and had a beer for 40 minutes, no one said, why aren't you out saving the world? But as soon as I meditated, hey, hey, this is dangerous and you're not helping people and so forth. This also relates to, I talked about this a little bit at the Peace University, this also relates to when we have thoughts that we don't, which we don't feel other people have, we get scared.

[63:58]

or we think we might be going crazy and I can't promise you you might be going crazy But the point is not that we're going, most of the time we're not, but we still have the fear of thoughts that are different from other people's thoughts or that we think we can't share. What does that tell us? It tells us in our society where we emphasize individuality and democracy and equality related to individuality, and where there's a simple equation of individuality and equality, that we have a fear of a threshold below which we enter territory that we don't share with others.

[65:08]

So you not only have to go through the boredom barrier, the moat that the ego puts up, You have to. pass through the fear, you're going to enter into the depths of gnomes, goblins, devils, etc. German has a special way of saying these words, like... Hey. And as most of you know, Jung had a terrible time with this. I mean, Jung... struggled with, is this the voice of the devil or is this, you know, the archetypes?

[66:19]

So our culture does not give us permission to enter a kind of confidence or enter a way in which we determine what's wholesome. ourselves, not society. But to practice you have to be willing to have thoughts and feelings that you've never had before and maybe no one else has ever had. Because we're very interdependent, but we're not only interdependent, we're inter-independent. We are simultaneously the whole of existence and a part of existence.

[67:30]

And we're capable of creativity. And in any case even if what you discover is what others have discovered you need the courage of discovery. So you have to give yourself permission to trust yourself at a very deep level. To trust the stuff of you and the stuff of the world. And if you don't have that trust, you're always controlled. And our society is set up to exercise that kind of control.

[68:37]

That's why we can give ourselves so much individuality. Because our society allows us individuality in the realm of which there's mind control. I think that's one of the reasons there's so much criticism of the Freedom University. And why there was terror in the United States during the 60s about psychedelics. You know, I was 25 years old and I sort of never taken LSD, but I thought, hey, there's a lot of stuff going on about this. I better, you know, maybe we should do a conference about it. At the great liberal university of Berkeley, California, I organized a conference called the LSD Conference.

[69:40]

And it through really the state and the university into a great turmoil. The regents of the university of the entire state system met and decided I was a communist. I had to be a communist because I was undermining society. And the psychology department met and decided that I didn't have their authority and didn't have the proper degrees and I couldn't do this conference. And Reagan was running for governor at the time, before he became president, and he decided that the university had gotten out of hand because of my conference.

[70:55]

You can't believe how far it got out. I mean, they decided that there's a... There's 25,000 students at Berkeley. So there was headlines in the newspaper coming from Reagan. 2,500 homosexuals at the University of California. Well, Kinsey had said 10% of... Men and women are homosexuals, so it was 2,500, 10% of 25,000. So, and Allen Ginsberg is a friend of mine and a poet. I finally made a deal with the university. If Allen Ginsberg doesn't come, we can have the conference, but we have to move it to San Francisco so the newspaper stories don't say LSD Conference Berkeley. And the university set out a formal announcement that the conference was moved to San Francisco because there was not enough parking in Berkeley.

[72:24]

And then the local Republican newspaper in Oakland wrote a story saying exactly the truth that is all about LSD, it wasn't about parking. And I went up to the offices and listened to all the leaders of the university talking, and they were really criticizing this newspaper for lying. And I thought, I'm in a madhouse. They all knew he was telling the truth, but they were convincing themselves that he was lying. And it all came down to the fear of psychedelics opening us to a state of mind that's not under our control.

[73:43]

And I've still never taken LSD, but I love to meditate. So somehow to end, we have to find some inner permission and confidence to allow ourselves into unusual states of mind. And unshareable states of mind. And one of the things I'm trying to do here is share with you unshareable states of mind. And since they're unshareable, I can't do it directly, but I can try to give you the feeling of it.

[74:52]

And so you get this confidence and permission from the teaching and from the Sangha. And since this is only a way of studying yourself and getting more intimate and familiar with yourself, In a wide sense, you can communicate quite freely and easily with others, don't worry. So we agreed to end by six, but I'd like to have one or two minutes of sitting, if it's okay. I hope you don't mind my telling you that little anecdote about the LSD conference, but it's nice to change the tone now and then.

[76:00]

I ask you to tell you something. Many... That's a huge arrangement of flowers over there. Many groups, Rigpa and the Dharmadhatu, have centers... permanent centers that they rent or own like this place. And the Dharma Sangha in the United States has our center in Crestone, Colorado in the mountains. And there's been an interest for some years in Dharma Sangha maybe and maybe not having a place in Europe. And my own feeling at least is not to have a number of centers here and there, but maybe to have one center where we can have a presence and where I can be a good part of the year.

[77:35]

It doesn't mean we wouldn't continue to do seminars like this, but anyway, this is a possibility. And Graf von Durkheim's group wants to sell us or is willing to sell us their center in in the Black Forest part of it. They're a meditation center with about 30 to 50 beds, rooms. And I don't really know if it's a good idea or not, but we're thinking about it, and I have to meet with some people this coming Tuesday to discuss it. So if any of you want to discuss it among yourselves or with me, because I really only want to do it if the Dharma Sangha wants to do it. So while I'm here this evening or tomorrow afternoon or evening or morning, anybody wants me to join a conversation about it, I'm happy to.

[78:49]

Okay, that's all. Thank you very much. Guten Morgen. Guten Morgen. I think when I straighten postures, I... Sometimes I interfere with your sitting and maybe sometimes I hope it helps your sitting. We'll find the right ... you have to develop a voice like Neil's.

[80:11]

But I like my own posture straightened sometimes. I find I get off slightly if I don't have some suggestion. From overnight, is there anything anyone would like to bring up? Okay. You're on the right. Oh, yes, all right. Hi. Ich habe nicht direkt eine Frage.

[81:24]

I don't have a question. Ich habe mit einer Beunruhigung zurückgeblieben. I'm a little worried. Es gab gestern, glaube ich, oder vorgestern, eine kurze Sequenz, dass jemand fragte, also wenn es noch Krieg gibt in der Welt, dann liegt es daran, dass ich noch nicht Yesterday it happened that someone thought if there is another war in the world that the cause is that I'm not developed enough. Someone here thought that? Well, something like it, very near to that. And the answer was yes. By me? Yes. I don't know what was said in German, but I don't remember that exactly.

[82:28]

Do you remember? He remembers houses. I must have said something very similar. And I thought the story begins here, but it doesn't end here. Well, I did say if it helps to have a million people more conscious and so forth, then it also helps to have just one, but nothing to do with this. But I don't think you can take that as responsibility for what happens in the world. In a causal sense, at least. Anyone else? Yes. Yesterday evening someone in the group asked himself, if I just sit like this now, without knowing anything about Buddhism, I just want to see what happens then.

[84:07]

And I also asked myself, what is the relationship between theory and practice in Buddhism? That is, in Bureit, you once said in a seminar about the skandhas, someone asked, then do I have to know all this stuff now, or can't I just experience it at some point? And then they said, yes, you have to know it beforehand in order to experience it. Last night in our group someone said, if I just sit without knowing anything about Buddhism and just see what happens and where it leads me, Jörg asks, what is the proportion between knowledge and theory and just sitting?

[85:09]

And he remembers you saying at some other time that it's good to have knowledge in order to know what to experience. in a seminar about the five stanzas yeah in a seminar ask about this so what is the proportion about acquiring knowledge and I mean Buddhist knowledge and just sitting it's a good question it's a good question and it's a question that has again like some of the others has been implicit in how Buddhism has developed Buddhism is not natural. And from a Buddhist point of view, nothing is natural. Everything is some kind of form and conditioned by other forms. So there's no way you could do natural zazen.

[86:16]

Because certain assumptions would influence you. You try to do something with it or you try to not do something with it. Having said that, Buddhism attempts to be as natural as possible. At least Zen practice. But again, it's not a return to some primordial infant-like mind. But we could say that it's an awakening of a primordial dimension of mind within our adult consciousness.

[87:28]

Now, I don't think that statement would stand up to a lot of scrutiny, but it's more or less true, I think. This is Katrin, by the way. Not Ulrike, not Neil. Ich bin Katrin, ich bin nicht Ulrike und auch nicht Neil. I'm, you know, she's part of the Berlin sitting group and so I thought, Neil and I have worked together a number of times, I thought it would be nice to have a, see Katrin who's lived in the United States and Japan, have a feeling of translating with her too. And am I going in, is it okay the way I'm saying things? Okay. Hmm. And it's also a question in its... You know, I've written this book called Original Mind, The Practice of Zen in the West.

[89:03]

And as most of you know, I have only a couple of months, a year, where I could actually work on something. And the publisher has... I've changed publishers, so now it probably won't be out till next year, end of next year. But about 50 pages of it are meditation instructions. Mostly as antidotes to attitudes we have, really trying to keep it simple. I have to write 50 pages. And I do that partly because there are so many people practicing Zen and meditation now, more or less on their own, and I think they need some instruction.

[90:27]

But I feel that given, if you accept the basic instructions, from then on your sitting can pretty much teach you. But even if I say your body itself can teach you, That's a recognition that comes through culture and teaching. And how to let your body teach you or listen is also a kind of teaching. How to let your body teach you and how to listen is also a kind of teaching.

[91:54]

But I'd like to come back to what you said in another way in a moment, since you mentioned partly in the context of the five skandhas you remembered. Okay. Someone else had their hand. No? Go back. Yes? Oh, okay. What do you think of bliss? Blissful. I don't think of bliss. Ich denke nicht an Fröhlichkeit. I want to know, perhaps in the afternoon, something about the core and the non-duality. I'm very much impressed. Perhaps it is for someone who is more narrow, like us, that.

[93:00]

Do you think I'm going to tell you everything this weekend? Yes? In this book that I found yesterday, there seemed to be some statements about what is meditation and what isn't. Is it possible to say something about that? Sure. Deutsch? Yes. Well, let me say before I respond to you that looking at how you were sitting,

[94:07]

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