I'm told we have a topic this year. That's not so usual, is it? But she's organizing the, uh, now as the director and the web page, the website, yeah. So she calls me up and says, we need a title for it. I say, we do? Well, I want to put it on the web. So I say something. So somehow I said, I don't know what was on my mind, I said, weaving your personal narrative. And none of you know that that was supposed to be the title, is that correct?

[01:13]

I hope that some do. Because earlier I said to her, really? Oh my gosh. What was on my mind when I said I'd talk about that? Yeah. But anyway, we certainly are, each of us have a personal life which works its way out. But it doesn't. I have a granddaughter named Paloma. Ich habe eine Enkelin, die heißt Paloma. Das habe ich wahrscheinlich zuvor schon erwähnt. Anyway, they had a surprise, well, it wasn't really a surprise, supposed to be a surprise early 80th birthday party for me in January, a couple of months ago.

[02:25]

Und die haben eine Überraschungs-, also es war nicht wirklich überraschend, aber eine Überraschungs-, Because it was possible for me to be in California, where I have old friends and family, a lot of family. So it happened in January. So when my nephew sort of has a Japanese restaurant, he's half Japanese, and he catered the meal for us, about 12 people or something. Mein Neffe, der hat ein japanisches Restaurant und die haben uns die Mahlzeit zubereitet.

[03:27]

His father is the Japanese wood journey carpenter who built the Zendo at Crestone and will build the Zendo at Yonezuka. He's in the process of doing it. So he and his son constructed the interior of this restaurant in a work that had been a restaurant that burned. So he sweetly said, cater the meal for us. Well anyway, I have this granddaughter. And she uncannily speaks in complete, she's 20, at that time was 26 months old.

[04:37]

Uncannily? You don't know what uncannily means? She looks to her stereo translator over here. Uncanny means hard to believe. Like it was uncanny. There were three ghosts in the room at once. Uncannily means surprising or hard to believe or something. Anyway, she speaks in complete sentences. So, the next morning after the birthday party You know, I was sleeping in the guest room, which they call the father-in-law's apartment, in case I want to retire. And my former wife does live in a mother-in-law's apartment in the house already, so...

[05:38]

So, something this little girl says Please come in here for a moment. So I go in and she's standing with both her hands on the railing of the crib. And then I go in there and she stands there with her two hands on the edge of the... on the fence of the... how do you call it in German? No, Gitterbett. Of the Gitterbett, yes. Gitterbett. Of the Gitterbett, actually. So anyway, really, she says, I have an idea. I want to get out of here. Yeah. Some kids would just cry.

[07:10]

No, I said, okay, and she said, I want to go downstairs and see all my friends at the party. I said, well, most of them have left, but I want to see them and let's celebrate. Okay. So I picked her up and took her down. But we can assume, I mean, I assume that she's different than my three daughters, but I can assume that whatever this is going on with this little girl is going to be part of her personality and her life. But she has been born into a family that has been involved with Buddhism for 50 or 60 years. So the conceptions of the views of Buddhism are going to be part of her life.

[08:37]

And how is that going to affect her? I think deciding to practice and all is an adult decision, so I've never said anything about Buddhism to my daughters, three daughters, as they've been growing up. But still it remains an unweightable part of their life. Sophia, now 15, grew up in Yonassar, primarily. And Crestone, but primarily Yonassar. Okay.

[09:37]

So deciding to practice Buddhism is called home leaving. Now that doesn't mean only that you might become a monk. But it means something like you're free or you see your birth culture as a relative expression in the world and not a final expression in the world. Whatever these ideas are, to see her culture, she's growing up in relative terms, which means she feels she has a choice, even about her own birth culture.

[11:01]

It's hard to exercise the choice, but you recognize that it's possible. And to convey the understanding that the culture is something relative, to even convey her birth culture, that she can recognize this possibility of choice, even if it is difficult to implement this possibility of choice, it is still important to recognize the decision. pondering today about weaving our personal narrative within a Buddhist culture. And what difference would that make? Now, I'm not trying to convince any of you Buddhists But it is interesting for me to talk with you about Buddhism because that's all I know anyway in the context of your presence and intelligence experience.

[12:15]

And I, of course, also, as I'm semi-retiring and actually am retiring quite a bit from teaching, with old friends. Yeah, I still have a lot to do to try to find out how these institutions which are locations for practice can continue.

[13:19]

But I still have a different kind of time. Yeah, and then I think about what I should speak about differently. And instead of just going from topic to topic that arises through circumstances, And I think maybe I should review some of the basics of practice and Buddhism nowadays for myself and with you.

[14:22]

And with you too, because there's so much interest now. Somebody just sent me a pile of papers about Buddhism and psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. I'm trying to educate me. That I asked for. And it's largely a positive interest. It wasn't in the 60s, it wasn't a positive interest. It was a healthy interest. But when I read these papers, some of them are quite interesting and intelligent.

[15:28]

They still rather loosely generalize about Buddhism in a way that isn't accurate. For example, the Four Noble Truths are usually translated Everyone knows about suffering. The first one. The second, there's a cause of suffering. And third, because there's a cause of suffering, there can be an end of suffering. And fourth, there's a path that can free you from suffering.

[16:30]

Well, the translation suffering isn't actually quite right. Basically, the first is something There's conditioned existence, that's all. And there's an... Bedingungen des Seins. There's the insecurity of conditioned existence. And there is the uncertainty of the conditions of being.

[17:30]

Yes. So even if you are completely happy in your adult life, many things work for you, etc., and you don't feel suffering much, still there is an insecurity in conditioned existence. Excuse me, I'm not quite sorry that that was correct. Off-conditioned life is not the same as, or isn't the same as the conditions of life. No, conditioned means it's affected by. The conditions of life are its unconditioned. Okay, and another problem with the way the Four Noble Truths are presented is that they are presented as kind of philosophy.

[18:45]

And that's not really what it's about. It's the content of this person called the awakened ones' enlightenment experience. So it's not philosophical statements as recognitions that come upon you. Yeah, and also that the translations up to now with suffering and causes and suffering, emphasizing cause, is that it's been translated within a world, Western world, permeated by the concept of a creator, that things are created.

[19:57]

And this translation, where suffering and the cause and so on, where it is translated like that, you can also see that it was translated into a culture, a Western culture, in which the acceptance of a creator and a created world takes place. It's maybe not so easy to notice slight differences in views. But they're extremely important. Extremely effective. But they're extremely important and make a big difference. Just before I flew to Europe, I was in a science of consciousness conference, I mentioned it in a previous seminar, in Tucson, Arizona.

[21:08]

Yeah, and I stopped doing conferences, I don't know, maybe 15 years ago, because I really just prefer to talk to people I know and not to strangers. But I realized I'd lost some touch with the current lingo. Yeah. Is that what I said? Well, sorry, it was complicated what I did. Okay.

[22:09]

So anyway, part of the reason I accepted was that it was in the next state to Colorado. And generally, if I'm on a continent, I prefer to drive or train. And in America, there's no trains to go anywhere you want to go unless you're a commuter. I had no idea I'd get to Tucson by train. I'd probably have to go to Los Angeles. So I decided to drive. which was sort of stupid in a way. You can see how I lived in America.

[23:11]

I presumably am American, but I forgot that here's Colorado and here's Arizona. So driving from... From Crestone to Tucson is three full days of driving. It's like going to Oslo or something from here. It's next to Mexico. And I even had to go through American border patrol inside America. I don't know, I couldn't understand it. And so I had three days of driving to get there and three days of driving to get back to the Denver airport and fly here a week or so ago.

[24:16]

So I don't know what's wrong, but anyway, let me explain why you see me limping. I had six days of my heel resting on the floor in front of the gas pedal. Also ich bin gerade dabei zu erklären, warum ich humpel. Das hat dazu geführt, dass ich sechs Tage lang mit meinem Haken so auf den Boden hatte und damit aufs Gaspedal gedrückt habe. I got more and more sore and I tried to use my left foot to drive. It was rather confusing. Es war wirklich immer Wunder und immer Wunder. Und dann habe ich irgendwann angefangen, meinen linken Fuß zu nehmen zum Fahren. Es ist ziemlich verwirrend. But anyway, it got so sore, it's still sore. I even got a cane so I can be like Paul Rosenblum. Hi. Hey, hi. So I think I'm very distinguished.

[25:27]

I hope so, anyway. It looks very special, I hope, with my stick And Ava and I agreed that it's a shift in tectonic plate that makes it steeper over here. And she said it's a brilliant analysis, I agree. And I also went because quite a lot of my friends were in the conference.

[26:33]

But the conference is entirely of 1,200 people there and I don't know, innumerable neuroscientists. And I gave a couple small and short talks as the wild card. Yeah, maybe like that. But all of these people, well, first of all, there's 1,200 people there, 500 people in the conference hotel as well. All walking around with what probably we can call consciousnesses With no idea in the whole group, virtually none, I was one of the few, my person, that there is a way to study, to objectively study consciousness subjectively.

[27:36]

Yeah, so most of them think you have to study it objectively. That's one assumption everyone has. by someone else other than yourself. And the idea which informed almost everybody's thinking was how do you explain how matter turned into mind?

[28:50]

And there's a lot of theories that all molecules have some component of consciousness in them, etc. All of it. But anyway, they're interested in where it came from, what was the cause and the source. Buddhism and in the culture of the Buddha, this is not a question people ask. What they asked is, here's all these things, what do we do with them? The question of where did they come from was too metaphysical for them, I think. It's... It's like if you go in the kitchen and you're a cook, you don't say, I'm not going to cook until who told me where to buy this and who the farmer group was.

[30:18]

I mean, there's good reason to do that. And she, when she was the tenzo, did do that. Yeah. But still that was more about the ingredients than their source. So the cook says, here's all these ingredients, what am I going to do with them? So the Buddha, I'm assuming, I'm channeling the Buddha right now. don't believe a word of it, said something to himself like, well, there's all these ingredients, this unsatisfying, insecure, conditioned world.

[31:26]

So the second so-called noble truth, which is also a kind of mistranslation, But the second so-called noble truth is there's a cause. But that's not what actually the words say. It just says these ingredients combine. These ingredients gather, cluster. Yeah, so then the third so-called noble truth is that he said, well, if they're just gathering, I can change the gathering.

[32:35]

I can cook these things differently. Well, that's really, do you get it? A different world. Yeah, I mean, well, you know, these things are here, right? Let's do it differently. And how to do it differently. So now also, it's not just like he said, there's one and there's two and there's three. No, no. He decided, you know, first he tried to satisfy. And from my point of view, I'm not talking about Buddhism here. I'm talking about what can be ingredients in our life. Because if there were ingredients in his life, there could be ingredients in our life. So first he tried asceticism.

[34:18]

Mortifying the body, so doing the equivalent of a hair shirt and sitting in the desert or something. A hair shirt is a shirt with the fur inside so you feel itchy and uncomfortable all the time. And the story is, and I think there's some degree of truth to the story, After a considerable period of mortifying, making your flesh die, mortifying the flesh, He decided to hack with this. This is just making me feel sick and weak. And supposedly on his way down from the mountain he met a farmer girl.

[35:50]

And she gave him some rice pudding with milk or something. He thought, well, this is the way. Anyway, he decided on meditation practice, but what is so-called the middle way, not physical asceticism. But he did decide there was this ingredient in his life of meditation. Or jhana, which is actually, as all of you know, I think is the source of the word zen.

[36:59]

Which means basically absorption. And so he said, I mean if you're running for a bus, it's hard to solve a calculus problem. So there's some common sense to just stay still and see if I can decide what I should do. So now I'm speaking about the ingredients that were in his life that may or may not be in Paloma's life. The historical Buddha decided to sit under the so-called, or actually called, I guess, people tree, P-A-L.

[38:12]

P-A-L. No, P-A-L. It sounds like people. I don't know. I have to look up how it's pronounced. The Bodhi tree. Okay. He also, from the story we know, he saw the power of the bow. He somehow had some intuition, I don't know who, how do I know, but some intuition that if you vow and you stay with it, that intention can have an effect over time.

[39:19]

Er hatte irgendeine Art von Intuition, die ihm sagte, dass wenn man ein Gelöbnis ablegt und bei diesem Gelöbnis bleibt, dass diese Intention dann eine Wirkung über die Zeit hinweg hat. And something happens when you hold something, not just think it now, but think it over and over again, moment after moment. It's not to instill or install a belief, but to instill and install a feeling of openness. What's the difference between instill and install? instilled as to, you don't have to really translate it, just say one and the other. To, if you repeat something,

[40:22]

a view, you put it in you in circumstances which you're gathering, clustering, changing. You're not in a fixed world. So the fixed world and your intention are interacting. And here's one of these differences. A vow is not a rule you follow. A vow is something you bring into your moment by moment existence. And then you see what happens. And that's what I call, trying to find an English word, incubating of mental postures. So he somehow, one ingredient he brought into his life was absorption, sinning absorption.

[41:49]

And another is an intention that you expect circumstances to help you respond to. That you expect circumstances to participate in helping you understand something. It's the scientific method. You try things and you get results or you don't. Okay. So the vow he made, though, was pretty serious. He said, I'm not going to stop meditating until I discover how to rearrange my life so it works better. And the promise that he made was a pretty serious promise.

[43:26]

He said to himself, I will not stop meditating until I So he supposedly sat for 49 days. And it's a custom now even for a Zen teacher who people are, you know, related to, they do a 49-day sashin after the teacher dies. But you're not going to look forward to my death if you think 49 minutes will be okay. You're not supposed to look forward to my death, I know it.

[44:32]

Okay, so we hope, we don't know what happened during the 49 days, I don't know, except it was like near the end of time. We hope that farm girl kept bringing him rice pudding. That's not part of the story. So he brought into his life the concept of an incubated vow. He brought this into his life through this sitting absorption. And so again, this is the content of his enlightenment.

[45:37]

So at some point he had the recognition that the overall dynamic of our life was its basic insecurity. And he also recognized insight or stage of enlightenment. He also recognized that it's the mind that's the problem, not so much the body. Now you can think, oh, well, he probably thought of all kinds of things. But when you get desperate, you know, on the 44th day, willing to reduce things to simple solutions.

[46:53]

And the overriding thing, we could suggest, we could feel, as he said, it's simply unsatisfactory, this insecure, unconditioned world is not satisfactory. And he did not think he was a created person, a caused person from the past. He could see that this unsatisfactoriness was all being arranged by his mind. So basically at some point he said, hey, these things belong to me,

[47:56]

They're not outside me, they belong to me, I can rearrange them. Now, lest you think this is too obvious an observation by the Buddha, How many of you or how many of the people you know really say, these ingredients are all mine, I can rearrange them, I'm going to decide how to do it? So his enlightenment was, which took some time, 49 days at least, these ingredients can be rearranged. There's no dimension of fate or self built into me which is so

[49:25]

strong that it doesn't let me rearrange these ingredients. And then he developed the Eightfold Path, which is about how you rearrange the ingredients of your mind. And we've been studying and developing the rearrangements and arrangements for 2,500 years. So Paloma, And by the way, my three daughters, so far none of them are becoming committed practices of meditation.

[50:48]

So we can draw several conclusions from that. One I'm not very convincing. Or two, I'm not trying to convince anyone. And it may sound like I'm trying to convince you. I hope not. But I am speaking about what the situation is that Buddhism is rooted in. So will Paloma decide to add to her life sitting absorption? Will she really recognize that she can observe the ingredients of her life and make a decision to rearrange them.

[52:12]

Okay, so although we weave our personal narratives, We can add ingredients to our personal narrative. We can add it by our intention. We can add sitting meditation. We can add the wisdom of the teachings. And the wisdom is just that it can be rearranged. And then how do I have the power to rearrange them when I am the subject to Dimension doing the rearranging. And those of you who've done Sashin, Seven Days of Sitting, which I'll be doing one next week,

[53:17]

Or done the 90-day practice period. I think those of you who have done sashins or practice periods know that things happen in the practice period that you can't imagine happening outside of doing these practices. Although this question originally dawned on me as a kind of joke, I think it's a real question. Would Socrates and Plato and Aristotle have asked the question, know thyself or know yourself, in a different way if they had a sashin or...

[54:37]

90-day practice periods to explore themselves with. Since you're all, or many of you, are experts, experienced experts, on weaving your own and helping others weave their personal narratives, Or how to free people sometimes from their personal narrative. I hope we can have a fruitful discussion. And thank you for making me happy by showing up.

[55:39]

And thank you for translating. You're welcome. I didn't bring my German with me.

[55:44]

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