We're expressing something in a certain way, I assume, or is helping or releases something. So how do we integrate that into Buddhist practice? I mean, it's... I think we should not always take anger as an example of emotion, because I think that's a rather special case. There are so many other emotions that can be expressed and I am missing a film that I recently saw from a study that was done at an American university with women who have metastatic breast cancer. and their average survival time was two years. During this time, most of them were dead. This doctor did this study with group therapy and he succeeded in doubling the survival time in this group of women. I think this really shows quite significantly that the expression of feelings or emotions is healthy. Yes, or has something to do with survival or also has to do with illness.

[01:09]

And how can we integrate this into Buddhism now? I'm thinking about a lot of things right now and I find it very difficult to formulate a question. But somehow I want to include the importance of it. I notice that many times such a point arises where feelings can be expressed very well when no one is there. But when people are alone, it becomes very difficult for them. And maybe with a blanket on my head, which I also know from myself. And I think I learned that with meditation, with myself alone. to experience that a feeling is not just an expression, but that a feeling can be there and that I can then experience that the outside world suddenly hears a picture. So this change begins in all quality and I try to work on that with my clients. I would like to know more about this from the point of view of Buddhism and the practice, so that it can influence even more.

[02:18]

I think that's a bit more like preparing your own book. Well, I mean, a lot is going through my mind right now and I'm not really able to formulate a question but I want to sort of connect with what has been said and in my life and in my therapeutic practice I find it's very easy for people to express feelings, emotions when there's somebody else there but a lot of people are alone and how do they express something? And this is what I've learned in my Buddhist practice that I sort of can express something internally without really letting it out and feel something. This is very healthy and healing, which I found for myself. So I'm sort of trying to teach my clients that, but it's kind of homemade. I just try to figure out things. So in that sense I'd like to find out more about this. Let me say something for a moment or two and then I think we should take a break.

[03:23]

Also ich möchte noch für einen Augenblick etwas sagen und ich denke, wir sollten dann eine Pause machen. I used the example of anger because it's the most classic one to use and it's also the most obvious emotion that's difficult to express with others. Ich habe das Beispiel des Ärgers benutzt, denn das ist wohl die klassischste Emotion und auch wohl die schwierigste, die wir mit anderen ausdrücken können. For some people it's difficult to express sadness and so forth, but for almost everyone it's difficult to express anger. My solution in the early days, when I was still trying to find my own territory here, was that I would tell somebody I was angry with them as a way of expressing it. So I would say, like, you know, what you have done over the last few days, I find myself very angry at you. And I might show the emotion by a certain intensity so they understood the depth of it. But I would say it rather than act on them through anger.

[04:26]

And for me at least I felt better doing it that way and it worked just as well. But I also made it, especially in those early days, I made a specific effort to tell somebody I was angry with them so that I wasn't involved in repression. My need to play with the dynamic in that way disappeared after a while, but that's what I did at one time. Now, at the same time, one of the first things I did was create an inner theatre of expression.

[06:15]

It's almost like you have an amphitheater stage in which you can allow yourself, and you create it by allowing yourself, allow yourself to express things not only fully but in an exaggerated way inside yourself. Like Angelo says, you don't have to be with someone to express something. You're first of all starting to express it in your meditation, but eventually you can have this theater that's happening all the time. But it is also important, I think, to sometimes have this theater include other people as part of your expression. And it's particularly helpful if you're meeting with someone who has their own developed inner theater.

[07:36]

Because you're expressing it not only in your own inner space, but when you express it to this kind of person, you're expressing it in their inner space, and it's not bouncing off their ego, and they're saying, well, I don't think you should do this, and I think you should do that. They're not immediately thinking of remedies for you. Okay, now I would like to stop now It's 11.30.

[08:38]

Let's start again around 12 for a little while. So let's take nearly half an hour. I'd like you to use part of that time to read at least the first page the introduction, the case, and a little bit of the commentary. I mean, you can read the whole thing, but I don't care. I just read the beginning part. And I would like to speak about that afterwards a little bit, about what it means to not fall into cause and effect, what they're talking about. And how not falling into cause and effect relates to what we've just been talking about. Thank you very much.

[09:38]

Some of these... issues that came up just before we took a break? And they're really about how we begin to bring together our various ways, kinds, levels of understanding of meditation practice with psychotherapy and also with our own life with people here and our own culture.

[10:47]

I think we can share our experience. I don't think there's actually any definite answers. But before we go into those things anymore, I'd like to say a little something about the Koran. Now, a story like this, I presume you got to read some of it. A story like this is a kind of Rorschach.

[11:52]

Is that everyone's familiar with a Rorschach? Yes. So we don't really know... He's not. What? He's not. No. A Rorschach is a... Was he German? Mr. Rorschach? Do you know the history of it? No. Austrian? Anyway, there's a... What? Swiss. Swiss. Oh, he was a Swiss. All right. Anyway, there's an inkblot, and you look at this inkblot, and there's usually a specific one, or there's a series of them. And you see various things, your father, your mother, a monster. People fighting or kissing. So a story like this is written to have the effects it has.

[13:08]

For example, you read the story and you think, Jesus, I must be stupid. I didn't say, my God, I said, Jesus. LAUGHTER If you read a story like this and you feel, you know, I don't want to understand this or I must be stupid, you know. Then you can assume the intention of the compilers was to make you feel stupid. Now that's a little different than being stupid or the story making you feel stupid. All these stories are meant to have the obscurity of real life.

[14:25]

At least to make you aware that understanding proceeds often from perplexity, even depression. And after you accommodate yourself to feeling a little stupid, Then you read it and you start feeling anxious. My God, I better understand karma.

[15:26]

Look what might happen to me if I make a mistake. setzt man sich mit der nächsten Stufe auseinander, dass man sich womöglich etwas ängstlich fühlt und sagt, mein Gott, ich hoffe, dass ich jetzt also Karma verstehe, was das bedeutet. Ich möchte nicht als Fuchs abenden. Ja, wenn ich etwas nicht korrekt verstehe, dann kann das zu endlosem Leiden fühlen. And then after a while you read it, I mean, really, this is such a small distinction between falling into cause and effect to being blind to cause and effect. And then you conclude that such small distinctions are meaningless and so forth. So depending on where you're at, you read the story differently.

[16:27]

Now, Bai Jiang may have been out hiking a couple days before this meeting with his students. And he may have seen a dead fox in the forest. So he may have piled some leaves over it and thought, hey, this will make a good story. And he thought, yeah, I think this will make a good story. So then he came down and said, we're going to do a funeral for a monk. And so we said, what, why?

[17:31]

And then he says, well, he tells us there was this guy, I don't know if you noticed him, he was coming in the back of the lecture hall. And do Buddhists really believe, maybe Bai Jiang really believes this, that this guy was a fox? In these kind of stories, it's never made clear. This is one of your problems. Did this really happen, or do they really believe it, or is it true, or is it made up? No one is ever going to tell you. And Bai Zhang, I'm sure, felt quite capable of telling the story completely as if it were true and letting you decide whether it was true or not. Because that's the way the world is. No one's ever going to tell you whether it's really true or not.

[18:31]

This is something you have to decide. Not even in the seminar? No. Yeah. So we do have some idea that there's someone out there who's going to make it all clear eventually. Phil, let's get past the Rorschach level of the story. And look at some of the units. So what we have here is various, I think, wild, one of my favorites, wild box slobber.

[20:00]

And then there's one of the issues is karma. And cause and effect. and falling into. And then there's blind to cause and effect. And then there's great capacity. baijiang is said to have great capacity.

[21:06]

And then there's great function. What else? Being a fox. She thinks she's in Beverly Hills. The letter A. Well, we vote for India.

[22:23]

That's enough. Bai Zhang's famous for a poem in which he, though it's written in words, says that you need to find out how to think outside of words, outside of language.

[23:32]

Now this reference to, if you keep so much as the letter A in your mind, is a reference to Well, at the entry of Buddhist temples, they usually have two guardian figures. And one of them has its mouth shut. And the other has its mouth open. And they're usually quite kind of fierce guys, you know. Und das sind also recht wilde Gestalten. The one with his mouth open is saying, ah.

[24:35]

Ja, der eine mit dem Mund offen sagt das. And this is meant to be not just a mantra, but all of the sutras reduced to one syllable. Und das ist jetzt nicht nur ein Mantra, sondern stellt dar, wie alle sutren nur zu einer Silbe reduziert sind. So there's the Prajnaparamita literature in several hundred thousand lines. And there's a version in 18,000 lines. And there are shorter and shorter versions down to the Heart Sutra. And then the Heart Sutra can be reduced to... So, but it says, even if you have that much in your mind, you're going to hell like an arrow shot. If that's the case, we're all there already.

[25:38]

So we don't have to read any further. Then if we get one drop of wild fox slobber, we're even in more trouble. Okay, so what is this, not even the letter A in your mind? Well, there's various ways to speak about this. Dogen speaks about it as being sealed in being time. Now, I don't know if I can give you a feeling for what is meant here, but I'll make an attempt at it.

[26:42]

Mm-hmm. Imagine a state of mind where you're feeling a little desperate. Things are overwhelming you. And you feel that, jeez, there's no way out of this. I need some help. And you think, and you may even be a Buddhist, but you lie in bed and you say, God, please help me. Someone help me. Then you think, but I'm a Buddhist. So Buddha, no, Buddha doesn't help. Maybe I should try Christianity again.

[27:48]

But what are you stuck with? Buddha doesn't help you. God isn't going to help you until you prove yourself. You'd have to learn to be a Christian or a Jew or a believer again. So what have you got? The sheets of your bed. This isn't much help. All you... You've got your pillow, the room, the night sounds. Is this really enough?

[28:53]

It has to be enough. It's all you've got. When you actually feel and that those arrows that go out there somewhere, they all turn in here. And all you have is the cloth of a cushion. Yeah, your toenails. What you happen to be feeling at the moment. Can you actually have no mind outside these particulars? Dogen calls this being sealed in being time. Where in no way do you look outside the situation. You turn the situation into the life-giving pill.

[30:11]

It's not that you stop looking, but that you turn that energy of looking into embedding yourself in your situation. And not having a feeling of, I mean, you're not wasting any energy being outside your situation. You're not thinking, oh, this is a cause and it's going to lead to effect and I better understand this because I'm going to be in trouble if I don't do this later, etc. That's all, you know, there's a certain truth to that. But that state of mind has one kind of energy.

[31:15]

And when you have this other state of mind, it's, as I put it, energetically rooted differently. And both minds give you different provisions. You have different resources in both states of mind. So not falling into cause and effect also means not falling into comparisons. And if you become a fox, what's wrong with being a fox? I mean, what kind of Buddha is this that he says, I don't want to be a fox, I want to be a human being? If you're a fox, completely be a fox. So this story is fooling you, making you think there's something wrong with being a fox. I mean, right now, you're all foxes.

[32:25]

Or, I don't know, you're all covered with hair. You have pointy ears. But we don't really know what we are. I mean, if you're comparing yourself to what your mother thought or what your friends think, yes, you have some idea, but that's a different state of mind. If you can remove all those comparisons, well, I don't know, you might be a fox, you might be an elephant, you might be a human. You don't know what this is. So this is not falling into cause and effect. And the story is saying, hey, this is the bad thing that caused all the trouble. But the story, but if you think that, you're reading the story with your ego. Because you're thinking, well, I don't want to be the bad guy.

[33:47]

I'm going to have to figure out how to be the good guy so I don't fall into, you know... So the story has trapped you into reading it with your ego. So one of the first things to do in reading a Buddhist story is to read it without ego. And then it's okay to be a fox. Or it's okay to look at the people point which the story says is the worst, and say, hey, what's happening there? It reminds me of a time I drove to when we first discovered Tassajara in 1968. where we started, Kirish and I started, the Zen Monastery in 1964 and 65.

[35:05]

I brought my daughter down, who, let's see, if it was 65, she was three years old or so. She's now 30. We were driving, and she was in a bad mood and fussing in the car. We were going down to look at Tassajara, deciding whether to try to get it for a monastery. And she usually drove in the car quite well, but this time she was fussing and we kept trying to distract her. And there were quite a lot of driving to the countryside of California coast there were cows and horses and things.

[36:19]

And we'd say, oh, did you see all, look at all the cows. Then she'd look up and they'd be too late. And I'd say, well, too bad you missed it. We actually kept having once through a whole bunch of cowboys and we said, did you see the cowboys? You're bad, you missed it. So the next, we stayed in a motel in the Carmel Valley and the next morning we got up and had breakfast. And in this little town of Carmel, I was paying the check at the counter.

[37:20]

And my little tiny daughter was at the door, and she was looking out the door into the street of Carmel Valley. And she suddenly said, little foxes, little foxes. We'd forgotten. We said, what? And we went to the door. She said, too bad you missed it. Oh. So these stories are trying to say, too bad you missed it. So the question is, and what this raises, is can you know this state of mind where there's not even the letter A in your mind?

[38:29]

This doesn't exactly mean that you're in samadhi or that you're not thinking, though that's one way to understand this part of the koan. But in the larger sense, this koan is emphasizing, can you know the state of mind that's sealed in being time? And we often say the whole world is one precious jewel. As you have lunch, you... can see if you can be in this territory of the immediate present without any thought of something outside it. Or part of this practice is every time you have a thought of something outside it or something you'd like,

[39:40]

You recognize that need and you find a way to satisfy that need right now, not later, and from whatever is in front of you. This is a very fundamental practice that takes some years to accomplish, but it starts right now. And this means not to fall into cause and effect. Not to fall into thinking this will lead to that. Right now you have everything you need. And everything that comes in the future will arise from the depth of your present.

[40:54]

The depth of your present with your friend, with your client, with your therapist, with your lunch, etc. And it requires a kind of radical trust in this immediate deep present. That you're not going to take something from outside to make yourself more secure. There's a certain danger in this trust. All you have is your breath. In your state of mind. And exactly how the world is appearing to you.

[42:10]

And this is the healing medicine of Buddhism. And this is the healing medicine in Buddhism. Okay, I understand that it takes, there's restaurants around here, and it takes a little while to eat and come back. So why don't we come back at quarter to three, about two hours, I guess. I think it will take a while to go to lunch and come back here. That's why we want to meet again in about two hours, a quarter to three. So that's about slightly less than two hours from now. Is that okay? All right, thank you very much. Please sit comfortably. If it's possible. Now, as we've seen, there's a narrative to this story, which engages you.

[43:57]

And And then there's the elements in the story and the teachings in the story that arise from the elements. And then there's a deeper story that runs through the elements that's not the same as the narrative. Und dann gibt es eine tiefere Geschichte, die von den Elementen her rührt. Und das ist etwas anderes als die Erzählung. I guess what we're doing here really is a kind of, what we could call it a workshop.

[45:01]

Und ich glaube, was wir hier tun, das können wir wirklich als einen Workshop bezeichnen. I don't know exactly what that translates into in German, but in English it implies like a... wood shop in high school. And you learn to use the tools. And at the end of semester, you have a tie rack. And tie rack. To put men's ties on. But you're usually too young to wear ties, so you don't know what to do with it. You give it to your father or something. So, anyway. Maybe what we're doing is useful and useless like that.

[46:12]

At lunch, the people I happened to have lunch with, a couple of them asked me questions or we had a discussion. And what I liked about the questions and in general, also what I emphasize in teaching is the craft of practice. There's one of the Buddhist issues and political, in a sense, issues in this koan is the difference between sudden and gradual approaches to practice and understanding.

[47:35]

And the too strong an emphasis on the sudden approach which is also one of the common ideas that floats around in western Buddhism is that you're nothing until you're enlightened and there's nothing you can do to get enlightened And you just have to wait. And you are waiting for something that's never going to happen. So after a while you get discouraged. But if it does happen, all your karma disappears. everything is nice and shiny and everyone automatically loves you and you cause no more suffering.

[49:07]

Now, you can construe this koan to mean that And Dogen, Zenji strongly disagrees with this interpretation and is rather critical of the main figures in the koan. Or rather critical of the compilers. If I dare say so, don't agree with Dogen. And I bring that up not to say that I'm right and Dogen's right or whatever, but just rather to emphasize that these cons are... There's no fixed answer. You can create fixed answers, but there are none, really.

[50:09]

And what they mean and how we make use of them is something we do together. And what we come up with today might be the best that's ever come up with. But best is not the point. The point is to make it useful for us. Okay. So that is what I just said was my way of saying that the questions that came up at lunchtime that I'm interested in the craft of the questions And craft is something in between sudden and gradual.

[51:32]

Because craft is one way of looking at it is how you open up realization experiences. And also how you loosen yourself up so realization is more likely. And the craft of these questions I want to respond to, just because they're coming out of your own situation and own practice, But I also want to respond to them in terms of the deeper narrative, deeper narrative of this story. Partly because that's what we're doing and partly because that's actually how I think we we function when we look at ourselves.

[52:42]

There is a story that we're involved in, that all of our friends and our situation supports. And there's almost always a deeper story in our life that's sometimes moving with the surface story and sometimes actually going, working against it until you change your life. So right now I'm discussing these issues with the feeling that for the most part they're actually arising from our own unconscious engagement with the story already. And you can begin to feel that happen when you feel, for instance, that I'm talking about things that you wanted me to talk about.

[53:54]

If that's the case, then we are creating a field here which is beginning to manifest in each of us. And so sometimes instead of trying to stick to the narrative, you have to let the field speak to you. And to shift back and forth between the narrative and the field is a skill or something you can develop a feel for. And now am I speaking with you, to you, or am I talking nonsense? Don't think too much or I'm sure you'll come up with a conclusion that's nonsense.

[55:12]

Oh, good. Thanks for saying that. So maybe, Ulrike, you could bring up the concerns you had on the five skandhas. And if you're not saying anything other than you've already talked to me about, you can say it just in German. The answer that Roshi gave brought me something to reflect on how he deals with anger and how he expresses anger that he basically only says to someone that he is angry.

[56:17]

It is also a well-known therapy exercise that you now simply communicate, so to speak, metacommunicate about the feelings that you have. Often the experiences that one makes with anger, whether as a human being or as a therapist, are different, and then the idea came to me to relate to the five skandhas. And then I would just say that when I communicate about my feelings or about my emotions, that I have basically already practiced the skandhas internally and actually come from a point where I am here. And then it is relatively easy for me to say to someone, in the last few days I have experienced you so and so, that has made me very upset, now I am here. This is a very, I would say, mature reaction from the standpoint of Buddhism or from the standpoint of practice, as well as simply from a therapeutic standpoint or from our socialization.

[57:29]

Most of us, whether we are practicing or in therapy, are somewhere here. That suddenly an emotion or a feeling It's... It's more on the level of perception, in the sense of a proprioceptive perception, that you just notice, you start to sweat, or you have very strong physical conditions, or you're all the way up here, maybe even here. And I think we are now also at the topic of this seminar. Therapists Mind and Beginners Mind. In what state am I now able to do therapy with someone? And the idea that came to me is simply to see where someone is.

[58:33]

in conjunction with the five skandhas, and then at the level where someone is, to communicate there. Or, I would like to put this to discussion maybe, if I find that I am working with someone who mainly comes from here, that I very strongly in a non-attachable, non-graspable feeling, and then try to pull someone here or in that direction. And that in this form of work the practice of the five skandhas can also be very important. I don't know what's wrong with his thinking and concepts. [...]

[59:36]

I don't know what's wrong with his thinking and concepts. I don't know what's wrong with his thinking and concepts. Thinking is a form of mental activity that can also be explained with the five skandhas. The five skandhas are a form of self in Buddhism and I can explain each appearance and perception with them. This question is, where does the thinking come in here? Like a lot of people think they're angry, but they actually don't feel it. And the problem with working with people is to actually get them to feel something. So how can you explain thinking in terms of five skandhas? Okay. Okay. I should respond to that, but Esther, could you give us your first generation questions first?

[60:42]

The first generation, and then we'll have the second generation. Yes. So that was the first generation? Can I respond to it? Okay. Well, maybe... She asked me... If you have everything you need now, if I'm working on my book and I start thinking about the book, how do I have everything I need when I should be working on the book?

[61:48]

Something like that. If I'm practicing with what I said before lunch, that I have everything I need now, how do I deal with the idea that comes up, like you said about the trees, about whether I should work on my book or not? Yes, so when I practice what I suggested before the meeting, that everything that is directly in front of me is really sufficient, how do I deal with thoughts, for example, that I should actually write to my book or any... Schmutz, you mean the pollution? Okay. Well, first of all, I can do whatever I want to do. I can think about the book if I want.

[62:49]

I can do whatever I want. That's one position. I can do whatever I want. Up to a point. As long as I'm not hurting too many, I mean anyone. Okay, second position is I'm practicing with developing this state of mind in which just now is enough. And the third position is I've practiced enough that I'm established in that state of mind. And then if I'm established in that state of mind where just now is enough, even if I decide to think about the book, I bring that state of mind with me in the way I think about the book.

[63:50]

Okay. Now, if I'm practicing with establishing this state of mind or establishing myself in this state of mind, then there's some discipline involved. then I decide, okay, I'm thinking about the book. Well, if I'm thinking about it in terms of, well, I have a deadline in a few days, and will the publisher accept it? You know? I can do several things. One is I can get myself into a state of worry and concern. And that's kind of a waste of time.

[65:15]

So I will stop that state of mind. Okay. But I might reaffirm as partly a way to stop it that I'm intending this evening to work on the book. And once I've made that affirmation, then I drop the subject. Okay. Now another possibility is that I'm thinking about how to finish the chapter on breathing. Now, from that point of view, I would probably assume that the question about the breathing came up in relationship to the book because the book is probably an excuse for me to be actually concerned with my own breathing.

[66:25]

Or in either case, and it comes out to pretty much the same thing, I decide, well, if I want to finish the chapter on breathing, I should take what I want to work with and breathe with it right now and study my own breathing in relationship to what I want to write. So in that sense, I'm using the immediate situation to satisfy my need to finish the chapter. Even though I'm not writing, I'm working on it. Or in Ulrike's case, that the air is full of schmutz. And what can we do? Well, I can't do anything right now about changing the laws or something, so I'll have to find a way to breathe in between the schmutz. So I might try to breathe in a smoky restaurant or something in a way that I find refreshing.

[67:44]

And you can adjust yourself. I mean, this all seems pretty obvious, but I remember how startled I was when One day in a lecture in the early 60s, the heater's not on, and it was chilly, or the windows, and people were saying, could you shut the window or turn the heater on, et cetera? And while Suzuki Roshi was opening the window or shutting the window or turning the heater on, doing whatever people asked him to do, I was sitting where Werner is, And I heard him mutter under his breath.

[68:56]

Why don't you adjust your body heat? Because he would adjust himself, not the room so much. Okay. Now, your second generation question, Esther. Yes. Okay, so the real question is not just how do you practice this thing, but okay, so you adjust yourself. Well, how do you adjust yourself? How do you decide not to think about something? How do you, as the, what's that famous example, how do you not think about a polar bear peeing in the snow once I've mentioned it to you?

[70:08]

Please don't think about a polar bear peeing in the snow. Yellow, did he have some vitamin pills? The only way to do it, though you can try to force it, is you change the energy again, where your consciousness is rooted. In other words, certain consciousnesses produce images and some don't. If you have a compulsive image in your mind, you just take the image plug out, you plug it in a different socket, and then your consciousness is juiced in a different way.

[71:20]

So you don't try to change the consciousness of what you're thinking about, but you change the field in which the thinking is occurring. Now you change the root or the source of the consciousness. Okay, now we do things like this all the time. What's the difference? Buddhism just gives you a way to do it, a structure, a teaching about how to do this and what the categories are. And you can create your own categories. That's up to you. But there have been nearly 3,000, at least 3,000 years of work in this, so you might as well take advantage of it too. Then we can start asking questions.

[72:47]

Who's doing the adjusting? Who's pulling the plugs? That's another question. Mostly that question is asked by troublemakers. This is my way of inhibiting you from asking the question. Troublemaker. Okay. Ulrike was just about to ask the question again. Actually, I had another one in mind. Okay. Now, Now, Herbert, you brought up the question of structure. Could you say something about what you said? See, I was paying attention at lunch.

[73:49]

It has something to do with your question, with the expression of feelings. In my work as a therapist, there is a relationship between structure and feelings. what you can do with that feeling. Someone who doesn't have a structure, who can express feelings only in a limited way, because they are channeled. And someone who has a lot of structure, then you use that feeling to sow the structure or to shake it, to get it to flow. And I think it's a bit like my experience with sitting. When I sit down, I get into situations where the structure is completely floating. And then suddenly I don't know what to do with it.

[74:52]

Then I think to myself, should I be old now? My spiritual fear was gone and I would have lost myself. And this relationship between structure and expression of feelings is still very clear to me. Did you add anything? My only experience was in the last few months, all the stages when I sit, it is somehow black and there is nothing, and I found myself asking, what do I am doing? Who I am? Where do I sit? I thought, oh, maybe I have Alzheimer's. And I forgot everything. Yeah, it was just giving a new structure there in this field of unstructured experience.

[75:56]

So that is it. The thinking gives the structure. Yeah. I'll tell an anecdote that I've told some of you before. The BBC Time Live did a television program some years ago called The Long Search. I used to tease Ron Eyre who did it. I said, you should call it the level ascent. The level ascent. Anyway, he interviewed, I had set up an interview with a, one of my teachers in Japan, Yamada Mumon Roshi.

[77:12]

And he was, at the time, probably the most famous teaching Roshi and also calligrapher in Japan. And... Ron said he had this wonderful engaging conversation with him. And when he got up and walked away, he walked away with the feeling that the whole thing had disappeared. Ron said he had the feeling, he said, hey, I'm still here, and I just walked away. And that's part of what I was saying earlier this morning. When you decide to act, you just, without ambivalence, you act. And you don't, you totally go forward.

[78:26]

You don't think, is this right or wrong? Once you've decided, let you do it. You can practice it in little ways. I used to practice it with dialing people's phone numbers, particularly long distance when I didn't know the number, but I just tried it. And then paid the bill. For the third attempt, you know. Okay. But Yamada Mumunroshi, late in his life, got Alzheimer's disease. And it turned out to not be too much different.

[79:26]

Instead of getting up and walking away and everything disappeared, he would get a spoonful of food and he'd bring it up and he'd look at it. Why is that there? You'd have to kind of... I went to his 80th birthday party with him and he came in and there were 80, 85, I don't remember, many famous people from all over Japan had gathered for his birthday party. And we'd driven from Kyoto together and then taken a bath together in one of those Japanese big baths. And we seemed to have a quite normal conversation. Then we went into the birthday party where there were several hundred people all there.

[81:00]

And he turned to me and said, why are all these people here? He said, I know some of these people. I said, it's your birthday, Roshi. He said, oh, yeah. That's wonderful. So... And as I've told you before, the last thing he said, at some point he stopped talking for years, and the last thing he said was, I've forgotten everything I didn't need to know. So practicing Zen may be early Alzheimer's. Drinking wild fox slobber.

[82:09]

But one of the things Norbert said, at least at lunch, was that when he sits, often he has no sense of structure. And of course, that's one of the reasons we sit, because the sitting itself is the structure. And to let go of all the interior structure, you really can't do it until you've developed a sitting posture that's more convincing than your thought process. Now, Norbert also said when he's working with a client, he can let and support the client to express or feel a lot of things if he himself, Norbert the therapist, has structure. Now in that sense, the way I would understand it is that Norbert then is the structure for the person.

[83:43]

And if the person doesn't have any structure, at least some, that Norbert feels very wary about letting them express too many things because they get totally lost. Okay. Now what Ulrike brought up here is And I might ask Ulrike later to, because I think it'd be particularly useful for therapists, I know perhaps tiresome I always feel for those of you who've heard it too often, Ulrike might teach us or present the three forms of daily consciousness.

[85:01]

And I'd like to ask Rurika, and I'd actually like to just randomly take some of you who have been practicing with me and ask you to explain it or teach it, because until you can teach it, you don't know it. That's a little too much to say because many of the things I've practiced, I don't know even some aspects of it till you ask me questions. There's an interaction between knowing something and being ready to express it, which is almost the same as expressing it. I think what Ulrike said was that sometimes you may have anger or feelings which are just not conscious and are just kind of expressed.

[86:24]

They have not much form except themselves. And I think what Ulrike meant is that sometimes some feelings are just not very conscious, but they are simply expressed without having a certain form. Thank you. I hope I look better. Whenever I have such a beautiful bunch of flowers, I think that we should do the practices of direct perception because they lend themselves The Buddha of course enlightened the multitude by holding up one flower, but I'm not as good, so... Okay, so...

[87:32]

Of course, they're happening instantaneously, but most of them. I don't think, now, the overall practice of Buddhism, you could say, is mindfulness. And I would say that the most important practice in Buddhism is the practice of mindfulness. In daily life and in meditation. But if you just practice mindfulness in your daily life, I don't think you can ever really understand these or develop them. You need the structure of still sitting, which then allows you to have no structure, which allows you to begin to see these things functioning outside your own categories.

[88:57]

Now let me give you an example of consciousness of structure, the structure of consciousness itself. And this is related to this but is also a bit different. Now, one of the things that you talked about, or Esther talked about the glasses. Okay, one glass is therapy, and you're looking at the silverware, and the other glass is Buddhism, and you're looking at the silverware. That's different silverware. One sees the silverware as dirty and the other sees the silverware as just as it is. It's beautiful. And there's problems both ways.

[90:29]

And part of this koan is that you can get fooled by a state of mind that sees everything as beautiful and then you actually don't do anything about it yourself. Sometimes you have to see the ship in the schmutz as well as the diamonds in the schmutz. Now, One thing that is characteristic of Zen practice is when you look at the silverware through under the soapsuds, you shift your consciousness to the silverware and the silverware is looking back at you.

[91:31]

You're not just looking at the silverware and thinking about it and having it, the silverware should be washed, you have no idea about silverware at all, it's just you see it. Now, this is related to the practice of compassion in Buddhism. And I'd like to bring that up before we leave. So one of the ways this happens is, let's call these different kinds of silverware. By practicing moving on this and then going back from consciousness and beginning to see what organized your thoughts here. Here you see your instincts or your attitudes or your values organize perceptions into a pattern.

[92:48]

And then you see past your organization of the attitudes, and you see that a particular perception was involved. You saw somebody in a green sweater, or you... And then you go behind that and you see that there was a particular emotion and behind that usually a feeling, a non-grasperal feeling. And again right now, Trying to give you an example, there's a feeling in this room that if you tried to identify, you couldn't. But we actually are all in the feeling.

[93:59]

And this non-graspable feeling level in the teaching of the five skandhas accompanies all thinking and motion. Now, mostly because consciousness grasps difference. Most perception is the perception of difference. So you notice a specific emotion, you notice a specific thought, but you don't notice the background, which there's no difference, it's just a field of feeling. One of the main practices of Buddhism is to begin to be able to stay in the tonal topography of non-graspable feeling without interfering.

[95:21]

And when you do that, when you get better at it, you actually begin to live in non-graspable feeling, not your thoughts or your emotions. And when you become smarter, you begin to live within these intangible feelings and not in thoughts and emotions.

[95:51]

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