Well, coming up the hill is mine. It's my exercise for the year. Well, it's not that bad. So was it correct that it's the place of receptivity? The receptivity of the bodhisattva. Okay. At least it's re-translated into English from German. All right, well, whatever. It's good enough for me to start. And Eric suggested, and I think it's a good idea, that maybe this evening, in addition to or instead of Zazen, Some of you could, all of you, some of you could meet. And review what we discussed during the day today.

[01:03]

What would be useful for the folks who come tomorrow? And it would also be, you know, part of my ongoing experiment, to see to what extent we can develop within our sangha, a mutual a mutual shared understanding. That will make it easier for me to develop the teaching.

[02:26]

There's a big difference between talking, speaking with people who are beginners. Which is kind of fun to do. I don't do it very often. But sometimes a high school or college class shows up in Crestone. But sometimes someone else does it, but sometimes I do it. It's kind of fun. And some of them show up like two years later, they show up, I was in that class and now I'd like to stay at Crestone for a month or so. But much of what I'm doing depends on the fact that I'm for the most part speaking to people who have been practicing for a pretty long time.

[03:55]

But there's an equally, probably equally big, comparable anyway, distinction between people who have been practicing a long time, people who have a shared mutual understanding. As Eric said, there's a lot more German words to cover the same territory in English. But certainly, what I'm speaking about

[04:59]

The distinctions, the articulation within what I'm saying. are only possible because of the shared distinctions we have together. English novelist Ian Forster, who's written some marvelous books. He said, how can I know what I'm thinking until I see what I say?

[06:34]

How can I know what I'm thinking until I see what I say? And sometimes, how do I know what I'm thinking until I hear what you say? hear until I feel what you hear. And the more you hear it together, the more I can move into more finely articulated practice territory. Okay, so if we have a topic like the receptivity of the Bodhisattva. What makes the Bodhisattva receptive?

[07:35]

And I would say, he or she Bodhisattva is receptive to the degree or in the way in which they know you. Something like that. So another way I could say it is a bodhisattva is in a continuous somatic engagement. Continuous somatic engagement with others and with the world.

[08:36]

And within he or she looks out. Okay. Now the question is, of course, can I try to make this understandable? And a kind of test is if you can make it understandable to each other after I try to make it understandable to you. Because we are advancing a teaching. I mean, we're also continuing a teaching to have millennia. But the same in the same ingredients cooked differently end up to be different.

[10:00]

We're cooking a teaching now in the languages and paradigms of the West. And in our particular case, we're cooking our lineage teachings within the particularity of our son, And within the particular areas of those of you who, for some reason, luckily I practice with here and also in the United States. Most of you would be familiar, of course familiar, that I find, I bring up as part of teaching, that's how I teach,

[11:25]

shifts in world view. And I spoke about this in one, two different ways in Kalishkasa earlier evening. Yeah, and I tried to, not entirely successfully, I think, in the practice week at your house, And I mentioned that because these are different contexts. different contexts and the different inhabitants of the context.

[12:31]

And in a seminar like this, you know, we can go much slower, actually. Yeah, I mean, or perhaps the work week, I have to stride through the topic. But in some artists, for instance, we can crawl. on our hands and knees through the topic. And in the practice period, you have three months to roll over in the mud a bit.

[13:33]

Okay. Now, just to help me to locate what I'm talking about, Going back to my study at practice. And long before I started practice, I always noticed what we could call sociological differences. So generational differences, class differences, so educational differences.

[14:36]

Yeah, but they were like accents. It's like going to England for a holiday and coming back with a British accent. Or almost all southerners. And the United States disguised their southern accent with a move-nock. Or gasp. Jean Rosenblum, Paul's wife, sometimes to start speaking Georgian.

[15:51]

And you usually do that unless you're a politician and you want to sort of vote. So I view these differences sort of like accents. You could incorporate if you want. I didn't see them as worldview shifts. And I suppose it was most clear to me, when I look back at least, when I read the Heraclitus, Yeah, well, I mean, that's clear enough.

[16:56]

And obviously a river or a stream that's always flowing by. But of course he meant that everything's flowing. This room is flowing. It seems to be going slowly. But when you look more carefully, it's not flowing slowly at all. There's micro movements all the time. Suzanne doesn't stand up in the same room twice. Each time she stands up, it's a little different room. So it was in this art.

[18:29]

So somehow with that... I'm sorry, I'm unable to turn it off completely. So it's possibly... Is there an airplane mode or something? That's what I'm trying. You mean there's an axe? No, no. I'm sorry. It's all right. Um... Come here. Hi. Our host. Sorry, sorry. It's all right. I don't know. I have some questions. So that, you know, this Heraclitian phrase made me get a kind of physical dimensionality, dimension.

[19:42]

And I could feel a difference between us. thinking that I'm stepping into the same world each time, and that I'm not stepping into a new world each one. And this is such a basic observation, insight, that is also basic within Buddhism. So now, my giving contemplative attention to observations.

[20:52]

Yeah, it had some effect on me. But it's really when I started practicing meditation that the observation of Herakles began to have a power in my life. I always had a certain inhibition about it may not be obvious to you but a certain inhibition in promoting Zazen because I know some people don't do Zazen much even some people come to my lectures fairly regularly

[22:02]

But I don't want to exclude any part of the world from this teaching. But the fact is, unfortunately or forcibly, that actual practice makes a difference. So what happens when you start doing Zazen? Well, one is you start... Having a feeling of leading with the body. It's so contrasted leading with the mind.

[23:16]

And that belonging practice becomes more and more the case. You're a popular guy. I don't know. Everyone wants you. Okay. And the other aspect is that you begin to experience things in their separateness. And that sounds a little contradictory to how we usually speak about practice and our experience of practice.

[24:37]

Because generally the practice makes us experience things more in their connectedness and relatedness. And often, through practice, you end up feeling more integrated, more raw. So why do I say You experience things more in their separateness or as parts, P-A-R-T-E-S. Well, one thing is that if you experience things in their parts,

[26:00]

There become more ways in which you can put the parts together. There are more possible combinations. Which is something like changing your worldviews. And you not only experience things in their parts and in new ways they can be related. But you also experience the space between the parts more clearly. And you not only experience the space between the parts more, And you're not just able to perceive the space between the parts.

[27:26]

the parts appear and more and more they can fade into finally really experiencing space more than the parts. ... So that you experience there's a shift from attentiveness to the parts to attentiveness to the space. And so you feel the space as much as or more than sometimes the field parts. And then you begin to know, understand, feel that the space

[28:45]

Space is part of the parts. And this is not partly true. This is completely true. And the space and the parts themselves begin to be space. It's not just space between. The parts themselves are space. And are appearing... within this space appearing as space appearing from this space and then here you have the

[30:11]

confirmation or teaching of form and emptiness. Now what I went through just now is, you have something like four or five years of Zazen practice. Intellectually, we can understand it very clearly. But actually, bodily incorporate these shifts in experience takes credibility. And Each shift is a kind of big or small enlightenment effect.

[31:37]

When you shift the feeling you're in, connecting, embracing, supporting space. If right now, for instance, let's just take one of the shifts, one of the examples. If you each, if we each, experienced this room as, first of all, primarily space. And we experienced it more distinctly than we experience that there's, I don't know, 20 or 30 people here.

[32:44]

And if you experience the space as something we're mutually generating. It doesn't belong to you, but you can participate in it. You can not only participate in it, you recognize that you're also generating. And you can make it more viscous, something, or less. Yeah. And if you have a bodily experience of this space, as more

[34:26]

more real than you yourself are, or more able to fully absorb the vitality of attention, in the sense that if you bring attention to yourself, a certain kind of vitality of attention kind of collapses when it's focused on yourself. And then you start feeling yourself separate. You can kind of take the vitality of attention away from self-referential thinking.

[35:43]

And you have an actual experience of this mutually generated space. And And it's not a space you can think, it's only a space you can feel and probably only feel if you're a practitioner in a deep sense. Although I find that orchestral musicians and musicians in general tend to know what in their music And I find that dancers who've danced in a company like a ballet dancer Often have a feel of the space more easily than a non-practition.

[36:59]

And I suspect the genius of a great dancer It's not only can they mobilize this space with other dancers. They can generate it within the whole audience, particularly the receptive audience. No, you know, I'm not a dancer or a musician. So I'm, you know, speaking from, you know, knowing musicians and dancers. And I'm speaking from And I'm speaking from what I sense.

[38:23]

And I had such an experience in a very big way once with a South Indian dancer called Saraswati. But still, I'm bringing up this as an example. Primarily because, you know, I'm trying to say this is something that happens to us human beings, not just about yogis. But yogis are ones who try to understand or So this is one example of the territory of the receptivity of the Bodhisattva. We could say now that the Bodhisattva does or ideally does, or in fact does, generates, can generate a mutually receptive space.

[39:51]

which others can feel, and not necessarily even know they feel, but they know so much about it. And it seems to be exactly, virtually, exactly, 11 o'clock. There's elves around here. Yes, there are elves. Entities. Okay, so let's have a break. Thank you, each of you, for being here. It's fun to meet you. and to have her translate with me.

[41:28]

I don't know. Let's see what happens. You have awesome hair.

[42:47]

Let's get it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[43:59]

Did you get the second try? I have to try. But it was too high up, so every snitch caused it to hit me. I have to learn it. Okay. Let's sit. Let me expect to do something.

[45:33]

It's cold. So it's been recording everything? Since two minutes. So what did I say that made any sense to you?

[46:38]

Oh, okay. So for me it made a lot of sense, the space between the parts. And the parts which also are space. So that made a lot of sense. But it makes intellectual sense, but can it make bodily sense? So I don't know whether I experienced that during listening and hearing to you, listening to you.

[47:43]

But this sentence you mentioned, it comes with me for a long time, several years ago. And then Susan is not able to stand up in one and the same room twice. It's something I can experience and I can incorporate. And this also produces a kind of spaciousness. Because the trick is sometimes an insight arises from bodily cognition.

[48:59]

But then we tend to, not you, but we tend to really only notice its mental formation and we don't see that it was really a bodily cognition. But we But whether we recognize it as a bodily cognition or not, we still have the same problem, is how to give it a bodily articulation so that we can bodily practice it.

[50:01]

And part of it is, like you say, noticing it when Susanne steps up. or finding some other way to, in a sense, mark it. Or marking your... I'm using the term marking. I'm experimenting using marking as a term. You can mentally mark each footstep with the feeling of stepping into... A singularity.

[51:16]

Someone else. Yeah. So for me this was rather helpful because I practiced in the last year much with different spaces Particularly the different levels of consciousness and level of senses. And it... became rather liquid to change between these different level of consciousness and these levels of and these spaces of senses, the sensual spaces.

[52:39]

And that in these different spaces objects appear, this is something I got quite accustomed to. But that these spaces themselves are some kind of moving and are changing, that's an idea or an experience which was quite new to me. And this was something I got quite stuck because I didn't realize that the spaces themselves would be some kind of movable, changeable thing. Regine? Where I can notice that and where I know this kind of experience you have been talking about is when I'm doing a constellation work with other people.

[54:06]

This is a ritual action, where exactly these abilities to listen to how the room changes, how individual aspects, individual parts of the room change. So this is a kind of ritual where you learn to notice how different spaces are changing, How different parts of the space are changing. And that is some kind of, as a consequence, is a kind of the situation gets more dense, or the opposite, there's more air, it's more spacious, more airy, the situation.

[55:31]

And also things start to rearrange with the consequences. And that also starts to have consequences also on the person I am, the history I have. And that's where I have difficulties with it from the history, my history and the person I am. I noticed that I have a kind of tendency to filter it or to let it pass through my personality. And that's something I really don't want, but I keep reminding myself that that's not what I want.

[56:36]

And I think that's the point where there's a difference between our Western culture and a culture which emphasizes more connectedness. is that you are drawing these experiences through your personality. And this happens more easily in a Western culture. So one way is of course to discover these spaces and to separate the objects. So one way is to separate the parts and to experience the space.

[57:53]

But if you go deeper, then this experience starts to mix its kind of flow together, and it's hard to separate parts in space. When does it get hard to separate parts in space? If you go deeper into If you look closer to what appears. It gets more difficult to separate. For me it gets easier to separate. No, the entities are dissolving. You can sort of... So my experience in Zazen is that that the space gets more dense.

[59:25]

It's as if it would be electric and charged. Vibrant. So an image which accompanies me for some time Now, from NASA, there is a picture of the surface of the sun. How do you call it, NASA? NASA. NASA. NASA is all right. Where? On the surface of the sun. And this gives you the surface of the sun. The sun has this kind of surface, but the surface is kind of constantly moving and there's granulates or constantly... A granular process. And irgendwie...

[60:27]

And this comes very close to the feeling or the experience I have how mind works and occurs. It's not space with things floating, it can also be. Okay. It's interesting. Let's keep going because all of these things start to work. Yes, Paul? To enter this space, to experience this space the way you've described it, I have to enter my stillness. From this stillness, I then use the term inter-independence.

[61:32]

And the relationship between me and that inter-independent becomes really truly feelable. And then after the last visit in Johannesburg, I started to read the Lent of the Tauris and I encountered a wonderful sentence which has really impressed me to say, Probably can't get literally out, but it's it's like That's what arises in stillness of the waves of the alaya vishnab Say it again slowly That's what arises in the stillness That which arises in the stillness, the thoughts or whatever are the waves from the alaya vishnab Okay. Now, do you want to say this in German? Yes, he wants to say it in German. Definitely. Um den Raum zu erfahren, der hat, wie wir es besprochen haben, Musik in meiner Stille gegeben. And this is the place where I don't, in my mind, I start with a term that Becker-Rossig called inter-independence.

[62:46]

What is so beautiful about it is that we usually emphasize the dependence on each other, and in this it emphasizes the connected non-acquaintance of each other. I find that so beautiful. And then after a visit, a last visit in the palace, I began to read this letter of Tarsus. It contains a very beautiful sentence of Metius. These thoughts, or what is created in this silence, are the waves of the Illyrian. This is a metaphor I just want to come back. I added one thing. The metaphor between the waves works for me because I grew up at the seaside. And I know their days are very quiet and they're very beautiful.

[63:52]

And I know there's days with mad storms and they're very beautiful. And it feels like being at peace with mind, no matter what it starts to do, if I can enter from this stillness. And all which arises informs me of other than. It's a very beautiful way of being informed. Yeah, okay. Maybe I could say something at this point about beginnings. There are no beginnings. Beginningless time, etc. How do you have a beginning unless you have a creator? So you create beginnings. And it's a world view choice. And I like what Tukai the founder of Shingon Tantric Buddhism in Japan.

[65:10]

Kekkei, he has this term, Kekkei, K-E-K-K-E-I. He has this term, Kekkei, and it means... to begin the world by offering incense. Maybe not so different than somebody saying, I'd really like to start the day with a cup of coffee. So it kind of starts your day and it's not really about the coffee, it's about you created a way to mark the beginning. It may also be the coffee, I mean Starbucks may not do it for you.

[66:14]

So the sense is that you start the day with offering incense to the Buddha. But you have a various versions of this originary, not original, but originary moment. And in the worldview choices of Buddhism, You decide to start with the stillness. Or you decide to start with emptiness. So you can say form is emptiness, emptiness is form, but which do you give origination to or emphasis on?

[67:38]

And in various ways, this is something Heidegger discussed and came to conclusions very similarly. Christine? I would like to tell you I would like to share an experience. Last Friday I was at the lecture of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. So first of all, it was something special already to be together in a lecture with 10,000 other people. That somehow felt like a sutra. In addition, the special thing about it was that it had nowadays

[69:03]

First of all, it started with standing in the line for one and a half hours, in a rather large line, before being able to enter the room. And what was for me the most particular or the most outstanding in this whole situation was this person, this presence of this person who was completely at ease and relaxed. And this feeling and this presence he offered to the entire audience.

[70:14]

And during sitting there and listening to him, sitting there listening to him, I also experienced this being at ease and this being relaxed and I was thinking to myself, how is it possible that a person is like this? And I was struck by a question that came to my mind. We were talking about how many books we had, and there was a point where he said that one of the most important questions was what you want to learn. And this reminded me of a little book that my son Leopold had to fill out when he was at primary school.

[71:29]

And these normal questions you are asked at that age is, what would you like to become as a professional? And since I also had the opportunity to fill in this form, I fill in on the question, what would you like to become? I just fill in relaxed. And after the special experience of this relaxed person, or this relaxed presence, I realized that since I'm able to experience that, it's part of me. And then the next question is how do I deal with that? Because since I'm only, and that's another story, a rather small animal, and have a lot of things to do, how can I be relaxed all the time?

[73:10]

No. Is it business? I have many things to do, therefore I cannot be relaxed all the time. What would help my head function? And these were the kind of thoughts I was struggling with. And sometimes during night, it seems that I also struggled with that during night. So during this experience here tonight I somehow realized that the kind of practice I could do was to breathe into this space or in this And I do not really know what this means, this space in between, because I don't know the Dalai Lama is somewhere.

[74:24]

But it feels rather satisfactory to breathe into this kind of in-betweenness. And for a time being, that's my solution. And that's related somehow to Regina, what Regina said, this difficulty to... yeah the difficulty that the personal parts the personal stuff is also present very often and for me that's quite important how do I deal with it and how in a way that it doesn't inhibit other things

[75:55]

Okay. Thanks. The Dalai Lama will be happy. The Dalai Lama will be happy. I think. Yes. For me, that's a question of trust. Where to and where from? towards where and from where. And from my own experience, I would say a bodhisattva appears and illuminates what I only experience. and shines on something, what I am only somehow... I get a feeling for, or I... Intuition, yeah, what I only have intuition for, or have glimpse for.

[77:18]

And for me the question is, how can I turn this into a possibility which is livable for me, which I can live? Well, It's important for me that this trust can be established towards the teacher. Because my so-called self because my so-called self is quite frightened in action.

[78:26]

And to have the confidence to enter into a floating space, So I deeply feel the deepness, the depth of the teacher. And this gives me courage or enables me to have courage.

[79:32]

Gives me the courage to live more and more this self. And to open myself towards these spaces which are unknown to me. Can't I already start or I feel myriads of possibilities? Well, of course, you're right that practice is deeply entwined with faith, with trust. And it's I think essential to know and trust that someone knows these experiences and ideally the teacher.

[80:56]

But also there's a trust in practice itself. And a growing and deepening trust in practice itself. and a trust in your own relationship to practice so for example if you do have an intuition of something practitioner can trust that it's already possible because you have taste. How to arrange yourself in relationship to that taste and what makes it happen.

[82:09]

Yeah, I think I'll come back to what I might say. Something else. No, he wants to speak together. Go ahead. When you entered this room today and you stepped on this platform with your left foot, For the first time I saw that this podium is also moving towards your foot. Thank goodness. And then there were these explanations about the room. And the bodhisattva which lets this room happen between himself and the others.

[83:50]

And I'm quite happy that seeing your foot gave me the opportunity to see that. Yeah, quite a bit. And to give me the physical experience of... Yeah, I understand. Yes. You're going to start with my right foot. So first I'm going to make moves on. Not quite. Go ahead. But when you were saying what you said, it reminded me of something that is still present, but the fascination of it has been in the past, and it was when I started, I got to be very fascinated by generalized relativity theory.

[85:16]

Was that true? Okay, so what you said reminded me of something that happened in the past. When I was studying, I was very interested in the general theory of relativity and was very fascinated by it. And one thing is, and that reminded me of what you said, is that in this concept, space is created by physical entities within space, but the physical entities The space creates the physical elements, but the physical elements also create the space. But the other thing, and this is something I really kind of embodied, is that time is just part of space.

[86:22]

Is that one additional dimension of space? And I had to do a kind of work at that time, constructing objects. In German, they call it . I don't know what the English word is for that. Geometry of some kind. Yeah, I had my drawing represented geometry. Represented geometry. Sounds good. It's what it's all through. And the normal thing you do is that you make projections of three-dimensional entities onto a two-dimensional piece of paper.

[87:39]

I've done it. I've done it. And I think it's because that really helped me see space very differently because you can also do something else. You can take a four-dimensional cube and project it on a two-dimensional piece of paper. And the fascinating thing is, at first you cannot actually grasp a four-dimensional cube, still you can construct it. Yes, on paper. And doing this again and again for me was like eventually to experience four-dimensional space that leaves space that equips time.

[89:09]

Und für mich, dadurch, dass ich das immer wieder gemacht habe und häufig getan habe, war ich in der Lage, einen vierdimensionalen Würfel zu erfahren, einen vierdimensionalen Würfel, der eben auch die Dimension der Zeit beinhaltet hat. which in a way is like sitting in this room and experiencing that actually first of all this room is infinite because time is coming from somewhere and going to somewhere so it is an infinite space and even if I sit totally still I'm moving all the time. Well, I think, excuse me, that you are a classic example of a practitioner And as I often wonder, why do some people start to practice and some people don't?

[90:29]

And one of the characteristics that I notice Is a person who, for some reason, starts to experience what they're doing. They don't just do it, they experience it. And they're able to let it change their experience. Yeah. Yes? There is a very fascinating experience in Wagner's Parsifal.

[91:35]

At a certain moment in Parsifal, the lights of the grail march in a school of procession. And then the words are, So Wagner himself puts the sentence, time develops into room, into space. While this music expands and you expand it, everything is so clear. So space, Time becomes space with the music, with the whole experience of these walking lights. It's very moving. I have to go back and listen to it. Thanks, thank you. Yes.

[92:59]

So what stuck to my mind was a word of collapse. But my experience is that it's the other way around, in the other direction. When my self-referential thinking is moving what was breathing and body, I somehow have the feeling that all areas of my muscles, all groups of my muscles are somehow collapsing.

[94:01]

But I can understand this only by thinking, but I cannot understand it physically with my body. Okay. I can say that the process, the art direction from this spatial awareness, self-referential thinking, is not accessible to me in a positive way, but only intellectually. This description of collapse I only understand in my head. That's good to notice. Yeah. But practice is an intertwining of noticing and sometimes only noticing intellectually.

[95:34]

But even though you know you only know it intellectually, you can put this intellectual knowing into the details of your acting. And it begins to then become real change or something. And that's maybe what I just said. It's a classic definition of kind of a dance practice. Because, but anyway, how you get to take very subtle nuances and use conceptual formulations of it to program into your activity.

[96:51]

I can say this, but it's a kind of craft which one gets skillfully. I can say this, but it's a kind of craft which one gets skillfully. Okay, now we should have lunch pretty soon. They're usually ready at 12.30, aren't they? One. One, okay. Then we have a little time. Now there's some things I can't talk about. Not because they're esoteric, but because they're esoteric. Not because they're esoteric, but because it's not polite to speak politely.

[97:52]

Polite in the deep sense. Not nice. To speak about something you can't do. It's like we don't speak to children about erotic love, because they're not, they can hear it, but they can't make bodily sense of it. And what one does with such ideas if you're a child and you don't have any ability to experience it yet, it can be quite peculiar and erotic.

[98:56]

So there's aspects of practice You can only speak one-to-one with another person. Or you can only speak and have it understood if the person already knows it somehow. So I'm speaking about now things I never would have spoken about ten years ago probably. Not that they're anything special exactly, but they're nuanced in a way that requires experience. Yeah. But, and also, being Western. In practicing with Westerners.

[100:11]

And in mostly non-monastic mud. No, without the mud of monasticism. I have to explain much more. There's a great deal I say that you just will never say in Japan. You only show. And you don't say it. And people have to Like you noticed I stepped up with my left foot or something. It's at that level and you notice. And the teacher never says, I step this way or that way or with one foot rather than the other.

[101:12]

And so you notice that I'm standing on the platform with my left foot. The teacher says, you do it this way or that way, but you observe and notice it. So it's a big experiment for me, how to develop a way of teaching these things in the West when we don't live together. So much of the teaching depends on living together. And I don't know how. I don't want to really cry. And I could. But I don't know how to sometimes where to draw the line.

[102:19]

So let me go back to the concept of markings. So lasst mich bitte zurückkommen zu diesem Konzept von zu makinieren. It's a term used, and I don't know if this is going to be useful. I've never used the term before. I'm just experimenting with using the term. Und ich weiß nicht, ob das nützlich sein wird. Ich habe das Begriff noch nie benutzt vorher und experimentiere einfach damit. Markings is, I believe, a term used in ballet. And when in ballet you're developing a dance, and if any of you know more about this than I do, please tell me.

[103:23]

Developing a dance, you don't want to go full out all the time with all the motions because it's exhausting. You can't do that in every rehearsal. So a ballet dancer, right? do something like this, to indicate they're going to do it the pure way. And the other dancers know that this represents a pirouette. So two dancers running through a routine that they have to learn and do together might not both do pirouettes, but they might move together and both make this gesture, knowing we both make a pirouette at this point.

[104:42]

And in the study about this that I've written, One of the things they found interesting is, of course there's individual, personal ways one marks movements. ist, dass es natürlich persönliche Weg gibt, wie man diese Bewegungen praktisch markiert. And they're shared ways. Und gleichzeitig gibt es geteilte. And what the study found interesting is that dancers from different schools in different countries have different

[105:44]

But the dancers from different countries and different schools and different generations very quickly learn the markings of the new school. As if there is some kind of something close to a universal body, semiotic body code that is present, that's just, there's a difference in accents, but not a fundamental difference. One reason I like to be translated It's because I don't speak German.

[107:00]

Another reason I like to be translated is I know I don't know quite what I'm saying. And I know Eric doesn't know quite what I'm saying. And I know you then know, you don't know quite what I'm saying. Because what I'm saying is an approximation, what he's saying is an approximation, etc. So we know it's an approximation. You have to discover this approximation approximately in yourself. Okay. Okay. Now one of the ways I've often said is that through practice you discover

[108:32]

the bodily expression meditation states. I don't know if this is going to be a bit useful to you, but let me run through it. Okay. Okay. So one of the things you learn to do through practice is to learn to notice bodily components of meditation. modes of meditation modes of mind that appear in meditation

[109:43]

And then we emphasize not teaching them so much, but creating the opportunity for you to discover them. So you have a certain modality of mind. I've bent a number of spoons occasionally. No, I'm kidding. You know, I was... I'm just using this as an example.

[111:05]

I mean, I have no interest in such things as food. And when Barry Geller was at the Stanford Research Institute, people I knew were studying him, and they came and talked to me about it. You know, I didn't care. There are better things to do, better spoons. So anyway, I was in the Soviet Union, So we flew out of the Soviet Union. And we flew out of the Soviet Union. If you want to see people relaxed, see them when they're flying out of the Soviet Union. In those days especially. Especially in those days.

[112:06]

Anyway, so we flew to Amsterdam and then to Cambridge. And there's an international psychic association or something meeting going on. So I was there because I was with Michael Murphy who's a wrestler and he's an old friend of mine and he's interested in such things so we went there. So we, I'm just, this is just an anecdote. So we, anyway, were walking, we hunted on the cam, which is one of these boats that you push stick. Cam is the river Cambridge. Cambridge. So then we're walking through a building and suddenly a door opened.

[113:19]

And they saw Michael and myself and And she said, Michael and myself don't And they said, we're having a spoon-bending party. Will you come? I said, oh, yes. Well, we want a Zen guy in there. So I went in. And I just learned I discovered I could douse when I was in high school. By accident, I discovered. So they immediately said, you have to douse for a spoon.

[114:21]

So I said, okay. And then you were supposed to bend it if you wanted to. Call with your mind, of course. OK. My first observation of this was, if I don't believe this is possible, it's not going to be possible. But I don't believe it's possible, so I can't pretend I don't believe it's possible. So I thought, well, I'm going to have to create a neutral state, which I don't either believe or don't believe.

[115:28]

So I created a neutral state, where I don't believe or don't believe, etc., which I knew from something. And then I held the spoon outside of consciousness by holding it away somewhere. And there were about 50 or 60 people in the room and I'm walking around with this spoon. And I suddenly realized that at certain points it felt soft. And I know a guy, I got to know him later, named Bob John, J-A-J-H-N. who is chairman of the Department of Engineering and Science for Princeton University.

[116:49]

And he happens to be a spoonbender. So he said that when you study the physical structure of a spoon that's been made, it could only be understood if it had been at a much higher temperature than you could touch. Because the bend isn't structural broken, it's like it was melted. But this certainly didn't get so hot I couldn't touch it.

[117:56]

It just got sort of warm and soft. But I didn't notice that when it was warm and soft, coincided with a particular state of mind I knew from Satan. So, because I've been doing this a long enough time, I could immediately create that state of mind. I've been told, As soon as I did, this woman would soften up and move.

[118:59]

So not only that, all the way around this way. It will also bend sideways, so that this, it bends twice around, so that it goes sideways. And I'm just holding it, move that one around, and that one around a second time, you know. I showed it to Michael and he said, that's a lot better than some people are doing. Michael said, most people are just getting face-saving bends. But there's a number of things I noticed, of course. Not only what I've already told you. Nicht nur das, was ich bereits gesagt habe.

[120:17]

But there was a woman there who was really good at it. Aber da war eine Frau, die wirklich sehr gut beim Löwen wirklich war. She picked up a fork. Die hat einen... In the sky. In the sky. Anyway. What I found is when I got near her, my spoon softened up a lot, just by being near her. And I've discovered since then, if I want to teach somebody to do it, And what, I don't know if he wants me to tell this, but one of the persons I talked to was Stu Coffin, who's a well-known scientist who created chaos theory and so forth.

[121:30]

He can't believe it, but he knows he's done it. But if you're in a large group of people who have a very And it's good if it's joyful, calm in mind. It's quite easy to do or quite easy to teach someone how to do it. I just meant this.

[122:36]

No, no. It was already flexible. My anecdotal point is that you really do get after a while to really know, almost like you can tune with a diatom, a bodily diatom, you can tune different states of mind. And, you know, it takes a while before you... then it comes naturally. Okay, so then there's some very simple aspects.

[123:36]

Let's say basics as in mind. Basic Zazen mind you can generate perhaps by the way you articulate your lower spine. And I'm in a meeting with, if that was recently, with some people to discuss the future of the dynamite novelist or something like that. And the discussion requires a certain state of mind. And someone sitting in the meeting without that posture in their lower spine, they don't come in the next meeting.

[124:40]

If they're sitting in their slumps like this. Yeah. Just do what it is. So that, okay, so that, say the Bao, The bow is something you can feel in the heels of the hand. Now this sign right now is on the edge of what we don't really talk about. Because not everyone wants to do it or bothers to do it or is interested or whatever.

[126:02]

But I've been experimenting with speaking about this recently. Because what I've been struck with in recent couple of years How much of a world difference there is, a worldview difference there is between Western East and then between practitioners and yogis, non-practitioners and yogis. And I think it's useful to notice the differences and make use of the worldview differences. But the word

[127:23]

degree to notice the difference or present the difference, I don't know. I've been reading, I'm not a scholar, but I've been reading about Heidegger recently. And others, but he's been a reference point. And one thing he seems to challenge himself with And one of them is what he challenged himself to do and what he worked on. My impression is he tried to always be in a state of mind where he was thinking through and thinking toward and thinking as.

[128:40]

Whatever was the situation. And the practitioner is doing something similar, but you wouldn't call it thinking. And, you know, one of the scary things, you read Yuan Wu, who's one of our best and most authoritative Zen examples. And one of the frightening or frightening things, if you read Wangu, one of the... He said something like, practice really happens when it's uninterrupted. When you're uninterruptedly practicing, you're never taking a vacation in your own culture.

[129:58]

Or in your own views. Or in some kind of, I don't know. You know what I mean. That's a big order. Why would one have to shoot a tree? Uninterruptedly, it sounds like a horrible burden. But the more you develop what I could call an attentional vitality, It's only in that uninterrupted practice that attentional vitality is realized. And when you have developed that attentional vitality, to not make use of it, you just feel like you're spinning your wheels.

[131:18]

It almost makes you sick not to use it. So one example of this attentional vitality, and it's just a term I just made up, is you feel an aroused feeling of accentuated feeling in the hands. And in the whole body. And you can particularly concentrate that in the palm of the hands.

[132:35]

And it's no accident that they put circles on the hands of Buddhas and feet of Buddhas. And in any good statue, the hands are given at least as much attention as the face. As you begin to feel Like there's a warm, elastic sunspot. Between the hands.

[133:37]

And it's also related to your temple and your heart and particularly the top of your head. And it's related to the top of the head in ways which have to do with exactly how the head's inclined. So you feel this kind of... think between your hands all the time. Developing it, but also because you feel it, that's why you do think between your hands. But in general, A Zen teacher in Japan would never point this out.

[134:56]

My teacher never pointed it out. But while he was talking, he might say something and go like this, and then that was enough for me to learn. That's all you need. Now a ballet dancer might know what this means from another dancer. But there's a kind of non-linguistic semiotic body code that has something to do as real as our organs, kidneys, stomach, lungs. And that has something to do with the fact that it is as real as our kidneys, our lungs, our stomachs.

[136:00]

What we really understand about this is the receptivity and acceptance of the bodhisattva. So, if, the last thing I'll say, is make it simple, a little bit gross. Gross in English means coarse. If, A particular articulation of the lower spine represents a certain meditation posture.

[137:02]

Say that I'm having a conversation with... someone at Crestone who's been practicing a long time together with us, with me. If in the middle of a conversation When I or another shift their lower spine, we all shift our lower spine to have a certain kind of conversation. Or we change our upper spine. We move attentional space into our hand or into the room. But what's interesting is that middle range practitioners

[138:12]

By middle age. I mean, maybe we've been practicing together five, ten years, but not 15 years. They often don't know they're doing it, but they're doing it. But when they become more adept becomes like a more than subconscious, a conscious language. Now you can see why this is not easily talked about. And why it's usually only shown. And the shown is much more subtle. I can say there's a... the courtyard of the floss here where we all stay.

[139:30]

Man kann sagen, dass der... It's a right thing. 50 or 60 feet across back and forth. And you could immediately visualize it. But that visualization has none of the physical characteristics of the actual space. So the physical characteristics can only be learned by experiencing them, not by visualizing. Anyway, I apologize, but that's what we did.

[140:40]

Thank you very much. That's true. This is a good question. You should ask it in English. You translate it. So the question is, when do we continue in the afternoon? That's a good question. We start at about 3, isn't that right?

[141:44]

3.30? 4 o'clock? 3? Okay, 3 o'clock. I'll see you soon.

[141:46]

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