So here at the breath house, what do you want to share with me? And with each other. Yeah. We had a participant in our group who was skeptical about this method of breathing, to have the attention on the breath. There was one participant in our group who was skeptical about paying attention to breath, about this method in general. And we, the others, try to express why this is so important to us and share our experiences with that.

[01:17]

I'd like to say something on the koan. I read it again this morning, and then it occurred to me that in the sentence, that I would be angry and sad, So I've read this again this morning and I realized that I'm becoming very sad and also angry with the sentence. Wrathful, actually. Wrathful? It may sound mad, but I had the feeling that I would have to help with my attention so that Manjushri does not leak.

[02:24]

Good idea. Also at the beginning when he's ascending the seat. And when he doesn't talk. This is a kind of humiliation to Manjushri, and it's our task to do something about that. Yeah. Yeah. Most of the world doesn't think that breathing makes much difference or could be important. And this comment about Manjushri is on one hand a kind of humor.

[03:45]

Here's the Buddha and Manjushri, the wisdom personified And then we say he's leaking. So there's a kind of irony and humor. But I agree, there's a kind of sadness too there. And it's the situation of all of us. We're all leaking. But it's also the way we live and help each other too. We sacrifice. It's a kind of sacrifice.

[04:46]

Yeah. You know, I agree with this person who's skeptical about breathing. You know, I hate to say it, but I'm a rather intellectual person. Yeah, because I don't like intellectuals much. Because they believe in their thinking. But I guess I sort of was intellectual when I was young. But Buddhism philosophically made a lot of sense to me. All this cross-legged sitting, I thought, well, you know, Sukhiroshi does it, so I'll try it out.

[05:58]

Yeah, and he was the first person I'd ever met who was what he was talking about. Yeah, and I went to lectures of famous theologians and philosophers and so forth, and it was clear they weren't what they were saying. And now I was in college. And here was a guy who was what he was saying. Oh. So I liked him a lot, so I decided I'd hang out with him. Nothing better to do. I mean, I thought the world was so corrupt, I did not want a career in it, so it was a choice between collecting pop bottles and turning them in.

[07:02]

And, uh... And hanging out with this little guy. So he kind of tricked me. Because the only way to hang out with him was to sit with him. You know, as soon as he started having serious students, he wouldn't go to the movies with people or do anything other than sit with them. So I had to sit with him and then pretty soon the sitting and the detention I did give to the breath because you have to do something sitting there. I was never one to believe you should follow the rules, but then you've got to do something while you're sitting there.

[08:24]

And pretty soon, the sitting and the breathing changed the ingredients of my life. And I began to be a participant in my own life. Instead of the victim of my life. Okay, someone else? Yes? One person was struck with your lecture today because you asked a question that they asked themselves last night about can it be this simple.

[09:24]

And they expressed a feeling that it's the only thing that they can really do. They can have some control over their activity, but they can't control the outcomes. And there was a general feeling in the group that it's a very simple and very obvious practice available to everybody. Something that we can always feel close to. That's always with us, that we're not separate from. Somebody said their body and their cushion and their breath is like coming home.

[10:37]

And in daily life staying with breathing is to be in contact with a wider self which includes but is not limited to our thinking. And to be connected to the breath in everyday life is also to be connected to another feeling of self that our thinking includes but is not limited to it. And different images like an anchor or a gate or gravity or a column in our life were used. And different images like, for example, gravitation or an anchor or a pillar or... I forgot one image. Anchor, what was the second one? Anchor, gravity, column. Those three I get. Gate. Gate. Black hole. And it's also not a way just for us to be with ourselves, but also a way that we can be with others.

[11:45]

And we got into some various discussions about how breath can be a calming factor or help us with our health or vitality. And then we came to very different kinds of discussions about how the breath can help us with our vitality, our health or our energy. So a way to work with anxiety or pain. But I think the main sense was that it was a way that we can feel ourselves or one another outside of just what we think about. Apart from the strategies or experiments or benefits of it. Someone else.

[13:05]

Is there someone else? Yeah. Yeah, I found it interesting in our group to listen to all these different ideas about breathing like someone said my one instruction he was given When you breathe in, you can be in a holiday and breathe out. That's what you should focus on. 25% on just focus on the breath and you rest just in open awareness. And all these ideas out of books, and to me it seems all these things are working. So there are many ways to... work and practice with the press, otherwise no one would teach them. There's also old tradition ways, yeah. And again, it seems to me that we have somehow the easiest way to practice with the press.

[14:15]

Just watch it and try not to disturb it and let the body do the preaching. And it sounds, again, so easy, and that's the easiest way to doing it, but actually it's not so easy, Yana, because it's really not so easy to just watch the press without disturbing the press, Yana. There's always the question, when do I breathe in, and when is the breathing out comes to an end, and then do I breathe in, or is my body breathing in? So this is not so easy to figure that out. Mm-hmm. German, please. Yes, I found it very interesting to listen to the other with so many ideas and read by other teachers. You can get closer to the breath and practice with the breath. And that this is certainly a practice that also works, otherwise it will not be taught.

[15:16]

And partly also just as old as as well as other things. That is, it has healed itself as a practice, as a practice with which one can practice. And again we have, perhaps especially in our school, the simplest instruction not to disturb the breath. And even though it is so easy to observe and not to hear and even though it is so easy, it is really not so easy because it is always the question when do I breathe in and do I still breathe in, do I still do something or does my body breathe in and I can really only observe. Next. Next, please. I'd like to add something.

[16:17]

I've heard a kind of instruction from Dita today. an instruction on breath that helped immediately. I'd like to share that. Because my practice is, a lot of the times it will be that I concentrate on breath, but by doing that I actually disturb it. I want to take a deep breath, I just take a breath and come through. And Dieter had said from someone else, what Ottmar already said, when you take a breath, you can imagine, you have vacation, you don't have to do anything, and when you exhale,

[17:26]

First of all, I would want to breathe deep or do something with it, and that's disturbing. And then, as Adno already mentioned, there was this instruction by Dieter too with breathing in, you can be on a kind of holiday, and with breathing out... In the cemetery. Yes. And with breathing out, you let the breath flow into the room. Also, ich glaube, noch nicht gemacht. And it does sound so bad simple, but I've never done it like that. Und als er sprach, habe ich das versucht. Und ich habe die kurze Erfahrung gemacht, dass ich, so paradox das klingt beim Ausatmen, kann man ja sagen, ich lasse los, aber dass ich auch den Ausatmen irgendwie festhalte.

[18:41]

and I've tried it out while he was speaking and I made this paradoxical experience that when I exhaled one would think I'd let go but I was actually, I had a sense of holding the exhalation and control the exhalation as well. And when he spoke, it was very short, I had this idea, this picture and I had the feeling that without using any kind of technique But while he was speaking, I tried it out now and I had a very different sense of exhaling. I could let go of it and now I'm still doing that. Not in the sense of having a technique for breathing, but it was completely a new kind of breathing for me.

[19:49]

All good. That's good that you noticed that. Yes, it's only about perceiving it. Because it's not true how I usually conceived of that, that breathing in is holding and breathing out is letting go. So that was not true for me. I haven't noticed that before. Good, thanks. There must be one more group hiding somewhere. No? Okay. We found you out, huh? I'd like to have a question, if I may.

[21:04]

Referring to the third koan and referring to what to understand or how to understand the continuous Continuous contact with breath. My feeling is that after a couple of years of practicing there can be a very subtle sense of contact. Contact with the breath? With the breath, yes. Like a clock that's ticking in the background.

[22:16]

that from time to time may shift into the foreground, come into the foreground. Yes, I guess so, because I am not always in this complete contact with the breath. I assume that this is the case because, of course, I am not always in this full contact with breath. And yet I have the feeling that a kind of serenity that I did not know before takes much longer today. Yet I have a sense that a kind of serenity or calmness... Equanimity. Equanimity, yeah, all these three actually, is present that wasn't there so much in former times.

[23:38]

Yeah, thank you. Yes? You would answer the question? No, I'm not answering. It wasn't a question, was it? I didn't get the question. What's the question? So the question is what is the subtle contact almost on the verge of the unconscious if that's actually there or if that's a kind of illusion or delusion. No, illusion actually, not delusion. Trust your own experience. That's what your experience is. It's probably so. And verge, I don't know, would you say the surface of?

[24:47]

Maybe that's the wrong translation. He said the edge. The edge, the surface of the unconscious. In fact, practice allows the unconscious to be more and more present in our activity and not hidden underneath some kind of... So the ingredients of whatever the ingredients, let's call it ingredients of what we are, are more and more present. And the more one's self-narrative the more the fuller ingredients of ourselves can be present. Yeah. And, you know, in a way, you know, if we don't talk about breath but talk about mind, we can say that The more subtle breath is a way of speaking about access to the greater subtlety of mind.

[26:05]

We can think of breath as giving us access to tactile experience of mind. Does that sort of approach your question? Christoph? I think my question is connected with the question of Peter. So, as far as I know, human beings are breathing every minute of their life. Yeah, most of the time. Yeah, most of the time, yeah, if they are lucky. So, I think there are three conditions in general. The first is you just breathe and you are not aware of breathing. Second one is you are mindful and are aware of your breathing.

[27:10]

Third one is it breathes. So my question is maybe you say trust your experience or trust your feeling. How can I know or how can I feel the difference between unawareness, you know, unawareness of breathing and its breathing. Yes, in German please. So, one breathes in every minute, and in my experience there are three different states. One is one breathes without being aware, without saying anything. There is the state one is aware and careful with one's breath, and there is the state Yeah, exactly right. At first we, you know, we just breathe. As long as you're alive, you're breathing.

[28:32]

And then we have this practice to bring attention to your breath. And, yeah, particularly if you do it in zazen, you can notice that bringing attention to your breath interferes with your breath. And when you bring attention, you're bringing your self-narrative and self-referential thinking and so forth. You're bringing ideas of whether you're doing it well or poorly and all kinds of things. And that's a very gross, coarse form of mind. I think that's true, yeah. I love it.

[29:43]

I sit here and talk away, and you poor thing, you have to change it all into German. Yeah. You know, since we talked about this as a science, I always think of myself as a test tube. And I'm sitting here kind of in a little flame underneath me, and I'm... And then she has to... She's sitting in her test tube, and she has to... It's really hard when you're getting sunny, though. Oh, I'm sorry. That's okay. Okay. It was a joke. Please, can you translate? Yeah. So if you stay with your bringing attention to your breath and not forcing it Too many of us have the idea that you have to do it and you have to do it right and you have to follow instructions.

[30:58]

It really doesn't work. We're not practicing for performance. So simultaneously you're just accepting that you're not paying attention to your breathing. And often you find that when you completely lost it, suddenly you're more concentrated through losing it than through making an effort. And I don't know why it is exactly, but Europeans have much more tendency to turn it into structure than they have in Japan. Americans too. The Japanese culture tends to structure the body, but they leave the mind tremendously free.

[31:59]

So they apply these rules differently. We tend to as Westerners. You know, I went to Japan in 68. And, you know, I went to Japan because I was walking along the street one day, you know the story, and I, on the other side of Bush Street from the Zen temple, And somebody was coming up the street toward me and they said, I hear you're going to Japan. I said, really? I went across the street into his office.

[33:07]

I said, I hear him going to Japan. He said, yes. So, you know, when I was living in San Francisco, it was the flower power time. It was the Avalon Ballroom. Fillmore Auditorium. You don't know the center. I mean, it was the whole, not the whole city, but large parts of the city were wandering around on psychedelics. I mean, the sky was full of diamonds and Lucy's and all kinds of things. So curious, you know, we'd come into the Zendo sometimes and there'd be several people sitting on the steps, you know. Suzuki Roshi would go by and look at them and look in their eyes.

[34:11]

And there was all this psychedelic art, you know. You don't have to translate that. No, I want to do a gesture to it. You'd be good at it. And so like this release of stuff, right? I went to so-called disciplined Japan. And just the ordinary advertisements were more far out than most of what was going on in the 60s in San Francisco. I think at the time the Japanese made a pavilion for the World's Fair of some sort.

[35:22]

It was this big building with all kinds of structures, supports going up and a kind of dome. And then they put models of big black crows in various positions all over the dome. And they had models of people hammering and things up there with the black crows. And you'd ask, what's this about? I don't know. You can't figure it out. I was on a building like that. But you should see the comics. I mean, they're so imaginative. I was on such a building. You should see all the figures. It's so imaginative. Yeah, so anyway, so I... The Japanese approach to these rules is very different than ours.

[36:37]

They're very much... They have... They structure... They bring the rules to the physical world and not to the mind. So when we sit, you free the mind. That's why the posture is so precise. And you want to depend on the precision of the posture so that you can free the mind. And to trust the mind. And to not feel just because weird thoughts come in, you might be going crazy. So you've got to keep weird thoughts contained. And you find that no matter if you really get so you can sit still and not scratch, you break the connection between thoughts and action.

[37:39]

And you really discover you can sit through anything. And this gives one a tremendous power in this world. Okay, so you're bringing attention to the breath. And in doing it, you're actually refining the mind, refining the process of attention. And you're kind of tiring out the self-referential thinking. I mean, the ego is used to bullying us. Bullying? Bullying? Bullying, no, I don't know. Like when a little boy takes another little boy's hat and won't give it back to him. And the ego... They were always taking my hat.

[39:02]

Anyway, you should have been my buddy. He's a former boxer. My father thought I should take boxing, too, and I did, but then there was this guy about 20 pounds bigger than me named Force. Really? Named Force? Not enough, but he kept pounding me. So the ego tries to bully you. And, you know, it'll really, if your practice gets serious, it'll start threatening you, hey, this is wrong. This is boring. No one here really understands it. I understand it better than anybody else and it's wrong. And if you just persist through that, finally it says, this is going to make you crazy.

[40:11]

And you think, I can sit through even craziness. At some point the bully gives up. But also just because the ego says or the self-referential thinking says, You're going to concentrate on your breathing again? Yeah, I mean, I'm getting tired of this. Can't you do something else? Well, it seems harmless enough, so I'll go take a rest. In effect, self-referential thinking lessons. And at some point, breathing just starts to breathe itself.

[41:14]

And simultaneously, you're developing a mind, a non-interfering observing consciousness. You're developing the yogic skill of a mind which can observe itself without interfering. So eventually mind breathing just breathes itself. And you know it like you know water is wet. You know it just because it's happening. Sometimes it's kind of a big experience. You're sitting and suddenly your life starts doing itself. You feel it in the breathing. Breathing just starts breathing itself. It takes hold.

[42:15]

Something like that. Yeah, now this is a big shift actually, an important shift in practice. And it's not something you can think your way to. You'll just have to do the practice and eventually it may or may not happen. The more you try to control your practice, the less, the longer it'll take. Yeah. Now, I'm emphasizing breath. I'm emphasizing it partly because it's lay practice. It's monk practice, too, of course. But much of sangha practice, monastic practice, you can't bring into your daily life.

[43:18]

Much of Sangha practice is getting used to being in a yogic space all the time. Having an openness to others that's not social space You're going to get more and more free of social space because the senior people and the teacher will not relate to you in terms of social space. If you don't get the point, they'll actually start treating you rather rudely. Or ignoring you until you get it that there's another space than social space.

[44:34]

And then much of the practice is getting along with others outside of social space. So the Sangha often, when it's functioning, everybody gets along. It's like Sukershi said, like milk and water. There's a fluidity and fun in just being together. What was the very last sentence? Milk and water, so that... Fun, just get fun. Don't talk too fast now. Yeah, I'm trying to catch up with you. Sorry, I'll try to go slower. Um... Yeah, um... And one always values the people you're with over any result.

[45:48]

Yeah, if the nail is nailed in the wrong place but everyone's happy, that's better. As long as the building doesn't fall down. And the example I've given of that is this Japanese man, carpenter, And actually a national treasure wood joinery carpenter. National fresh leptos. The Japanese government names certain artists and carpenters and cooks as national treasures.

[46:57]

A treasure of Deutschland. A Schatzkister. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. And he was, on working on the building and all, he would put whatever stone in or whatever people handed him he would work with, you had to make the choice because he would just accept your choice, even if it was the wrong choice. And soon everyone just enjoyed working with this guy because all of our choices were part of the solution. And pretty soon everyone enjoyed working with him, because all our decisions were part of the solution.

[48:09]

So there are many aspects of monastic practice that we can't bring into our daily life. To some extent you can bring that in, though, too. So there are many aspects of monastic practice that you can't bring into your daily life, although you can bring this here, for example, into your daily life as well. It must be 20 to 6, right? My clock says 20 to 5. Don't we have another hour? What happened to you? OK. So we have... We can think of our life as having certain ingredients. Yeah, our health is an ingredient. Our thoughts.

[49:09]

Our emotions. Our fears. Our attachments. Yeah. And our karma, various forms. Okay, that's the ingredients of most of our lives. And the more complex a person you are, the more complicated this can all get. And you try to sort it into some kind of self-container. It doesn't fit very well. And then the parts that don't fit become unconscious or you don't like them or you try to, you know, etc.

[50:18]

So we can simplify a description of our life by saying there's all these ingredients and they don't fit very well into the can of self. And the self which is observing these Ingredients is one of the ingredients and one of the problems in the ingredients. And there's almost nothing you can do about it. Because you are the ingredients, but you're only one of the ingredients, and the ingredients, you know, it's a mess. I mean, at least it was in my life. So, you know, sitting helps you not get pushed around by your thoughts.

[51:23]

And breath, you know, mind is one of the ingredients and body is one of the ingredients. And of course we don't have a mind without a body and so forth. But we can experience them separately. And we can mostly experience the condense of mind and barely experience our body except when we jog or something. Okay, so, you know, when I was a kid, I used to have to wash dishes all the time. I've told you this before, but somehow it stays with me. Yeah, and I get, whatever I do, I get very involved in it, and I get to it real slowly. We'd have finished eating by 7.30 or something, right?

[52:36]

Nine o'clock, Dickie, are you still in the kitchen? And there I am, and somehow I'm in the dishpan with two glasses, staring at the silverware under the suds. They worried about me. They sent me to a psychiatrist actually when I was fairly young. What's he doing? 35 minutes looking at the silverware. I was fascinated. The silverware all laid underneath there. I could see right through the suds. The suds, yeah, the bubbles. So then when I started to practice, I found that with the breath you could sort of look past the suds at the mind itself.

[54:04]

So I began to be able to look at the ingredients of mind with a certain detachment. And as I said, maybe I said in the last seminar, one of the reasons movies engage us so powerfully, the cinema. Because, you know, the word for detachment in Japanese... actually means detached yet not separate from. And often when you're in the movies, you know, there's one aspect of movies is there's a timeless quality to it.

[55:07]

A child is a particular child, but somehow represents children. The oceans on the waves on a beach are like the waves in Greek times as well as today. Anyway, streets and buildings take on an archetypal, in their particularity, take on an archetypal quality. But this is actually much like the experience of when observing mind is not self-referential mind. So movies often are powerful because they simulate spiritual experience. And that's really a shift when there's an observing but not self-referential mind.

[56:13]

You're not separate from it, but the self is detached. Okay. So somehow bringing attention to the breath, the ingredients remain the same. But the context of the ingredients changes. And you begin to be able to participate with all your ingredients, including self-referential food. So just to end, first there's learning the habit of bringing mind to the ingredients of mind through the breath, refining the mind in the process,

[57:52]

And loosening the attachment of self-referential thinking It's almost like the ingredients of mind, the kind of muddy water of mind starts receding and you start feeling a certain clarity. It takes a while though. Okay, then the next step we could say is breath becomes more a kind of presence like your posture, as I said this morning. There's a physicality of the breath which is independent, joined to the body, or is the body, which is not joined to self-referential thinking.

[59:07]

Now you've not only now broken the connection between thought and action, so you're afraid, if you think this, you might act on it, You now also have joined breath to the body and separated it from emotions. You still have emotions, feelings, anxieties, etc. But the breath doesn't get caught up in them.

[60:12]

Now notice when your emotions get affected, how the wetness of your mouth changes. When you get emotional about something, you're under stress, your mouth gets dry. And if you're feeling fearful, your breath goes faster. And anger has another quality of breath. So, now what seems to be the case is you can still be angry or fearful, but breath stays like a slow kind of movement of the ocean. And the waves of strong emotions somehow don't affect this So you can begin to have this steady, let's call it a steady kind of beat of the breath.

[61:21]

And this is not unrelated to why osteopathy originally wasn't anything like chiropractic. It was a way of inducing spiritual experiences. And why shamanic drumming, by taking over the beat of us, can put us in another state of mind. So your breath is your own kind of calm shamanic drum, maybe. So that your breath is your own calm shamanic drum. And your body begins to change so that your skin becomes looser.

[62:52]

So different things happen. It's not a simple process. So that a kind of stretchability of the body becomes clear. And you can begin to choose whether you bring attention or identification with the thoughts or with this deeper bodily pace. Or both at once. So you end up, this is, you know, this is exactly why samurais practiced Zen. Because if some other guy's there with a sword and you're with a sword, these are just ordinary guys like you and me. And Suzuki Roshi grew up in the samurai period.

[64:01]

Not really in terms of the dates, but the life he led still was that world. I remember he said once, we were all nice young American boys and girls sitting there, and he said, you know, Sometimes people have their heads just sliced off. This really does happen. I said, oh, really? And here was this little guy actually. He once said to the group, you know, you can try to knock me over, but you can't. So if you're actually facing another person with the great big shiny sword, if you're thinking self-referential thoughts, this is a sure way to end the self.

[65:21]

Am I going to do this right? but if you can just be located in your breath and not care and then the whole technique is to attack when the other person is starting to inhale I think that's right And the skill is, if both are good, then it's all about breath. And the more you can just be in your breath, you can be in that situation and function. So really, samurai or not, you can have this choice of being located in what becomes an imperturbable mind.

[66:35]

You can decide what ingredients of your mind you're going to participate in or emphasize. And one of the reasons Suzuki Roshi was so believable because he created a truth body. What he said and did came from his body, not his thinking. came through his body. And as I've said, lie detectors work a lot of the time because it's very difficult for the body to lie. So we bring our thinking, our feelings, our emotions into our breath and into our body. And it's a way to transform the ingredients of your life.

[67:57]

Okay, so this morning I got to step one, and today I get to step two. The next steps are simple. Thank you very much. Very nice. Thank you for translating.

[68:30]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_75.61