deal with Buddha nature next week in Munster. And here is the dance floor. So this is the dance of the Westerners. And I think that this dance is necessary. Because Buddhism is about how to purify. What happens is, if you can live in this territory, it purifies this territory. Or maybe clarifies it better. Do you find that clarifying or something? You make butter and, I don't know what you call it, would you call it clarification?

[01:01]

When you said about the... So... guess in response to what you said earlier is that it from here in this place there's not much anger you can make decisions of what form you want to take and you take forms that feel more whole and compassion feels more whole than anger But from this side, sometimes anger is necessary. And teachers can be very angry with their students.

[02:10]

It's like having a blowtorch shot at you or something. Blowtorch, one of those things they weld with that they heat up the pipes. You're having a conversation, suddenly... But as hard as you in the West, Westerners aren't used to that. Sometimes Suki Roshi would come. I mean, just an example. We'd all be standing like this, and he'd sort of walk up to me and say, You said I'm going to turn you into my anger! Wow! Wow! Wow! And he'd stop. And he'd go, And no one ever did that to me in college.

[03:22]

And what was interesting is often it wasn't directed at me. The last few times it happened to me. But then after a while, I saw that, yes, it was always directed to me, but often because I was somehow willing, and I didn't take offense. He was such a great guy, and I trusted him so much, I thought, well, this is what he's doing. It's strange, but, you know. But he liked to say mad at Root. And so he hit me. Because from what he was saying, I know.

[04:26]

I wrote the plan down in my life. You have to fight back. For many years, I didn't fight back. But there came a time when it was necessary for me to fight back, and it took me a while to realize that was necessary, but it is. That's part of here. You have to ensure your ordinary personality. And you can't use yogic skills and meditation skills to stay out of your interaction as an ordinary person.

[05:37]

And there's actually a tremendous energy in this. I think this kind of thing is more powerful than anyone independently. Yes? Are you talking about me or you? I'll answer that in a moment

[06:43]

I've got two characteristics. This just says, in principle, this is empty. But this is only, well you can see, and this is other dependent, still dependent on causationism. I think as long as you I think you have to work with your story to the extent that most of the time you're not trying to hurt anybody. If your story is directed at undermining other people and so forth, then you've got to work on that.

[08:18]

But the more you also have this larger territory of identity through meditation practice and mindfulness practice, and you come into your own power, your own authority, you author yourself, you have less and less need to disempower other people or something. So given that you're not trying to harm people, and just do whatever feels authentic to you. And if it's too eccentric, find some eccentric friends. I mean, my feeling is you can do anything as long as you're not hurting someone else.

[09:44]

But if you have to have a public life and you do anything, even though it doesn't hurt anybody else, people may build up hostility toward you. Average people don't like another person taking liberties with things. So you have to have common sense. Really, lots of Buddhist teaching is about how to live within the story of your culture. But if you know it's a story and you're living within it like a script, that's okay. Even if it's a script, it matures you when you're in the process of living it. But when you have a public life, it's a different story than when you have a private one.

[11:06]

Unless you make the radicalness of your story your public life, like Madonna. Ha, ha. It's the first time Madonna has been mentioned in a Zen lecture. It's easy to be unique, you know. You were just present at a historic moment. Okay. Have we talked enough? I've presented just about everything I felt might be useful.

[12:11]

And we ended up where we started. It's a Interesting to me when you take something so simple as relative, imagined and absolute. And you just arrange them either horizontally or vertically and you begin to see things. And the same is true for practice. If you can sort of get outside your story You can begin to see things about yourself. You're never completely outside, but there's different degrees. I forgot, Tina, I told you I'd wear a shirt for you today. But it's kind of foolish looking.

[13:25]

And it's not so warm, or cold, or warm. So, I think I wanted to talk about energy more, but I think we've done enough. So we could actually end early, but we will do some zazen before we end. Now, is there anything anyone wants to bring up? Is there anybody who hasn't spoken yet? I know there are some. I could get on my hands and knees and beg or anything. I see two people looking down. Tina do you have anything you'd like to ask?

[14:44]

Okay about body and the history of the body. I am a body therapist and I think that the body, in the body, my personal history is also very complex. And we are, we are first of all from the Bodymind. I said, it has nothing to do with history. I'm a body therapist, and now my question is about the body and also the history of the body. The body, Michael, has no history, has no story, has nothing to do with story. I think my personal history is established in my body.

[15:47]

Oh, there's one thing I didn't explain yet. Oh, it's on the other side. We talked about these visions. And we didn't talk about these two. Now, the storehouse, Vishnayana, is a very large idea. It's... The example I've used recently was describing Kummerlanka.

[16:57]

Or a lake. If you imagine that every leaf that ever fell on a lake in the 14th century, the impressions are still there in the water somewhere. Even if the leaf or branch is long since disintegrated. At the same time, this lake is very responsive to everything that happens to it, the sun shining on it, the insect on it, and so forth. That sense of the lake as a repository of impressions is like the storehouse. So from your reified consciousness, from your loaded consciousness, various kinds of impressions go down into the storehouse.

[18:06]

And also from the, say, your ear field consciousness, there's part of it is your story is in there, your description. and also your, shall we say, your unconscious scripted story. And there's a bigger field of perception that doesn't fall into your story. And all of these things go down in the storehouse. And the impressions from the larger field also go down or up a little. So your unconscious script and your conscious script and your story, even if I didn't put that in there, all of them grasp hold of experience a certain way, and through the way it's grasped, it's stored in your memory.

[19:53]

But some experience is barely grasped at all, but is in your storehouse. For instance, somebody might see an accident and barely remember what happened, but if the person's hypnotized, they can tell you what the license plate was and pick up the... With the license plate you didn't remember because it's not part of any connection, story, perceptual noticing. So the sense is that the storehouse is... Everything is more or less everything that's ever happened to you in it.

[21:23]

And where is it located? It's not, as I think I said earlier, not in your body somewhere. It's everywhere. So if I look at you or you or you, I'm reminded of things. So you're part of my storehouse. Now, when that storehouse is externalized as the potency of the situation, It's called the Tathagata Garbha, or the womb of thusness, where form and emptiness are simultaneously arising. And through all the possibilities here and form and emptiness simultaneously arising, a Buddha could appear or anything could appear.

[22:30]

And all those possibilities are in me too. So the Tathagata Garbha and the Laya Vijnana are arising simultaneously. You can't get access to... When you try to remember some of these things, you can't get access to them through the story because they occur here. Before you have many feelings here that never turn into perceptions. So the practice of the four foundations of mindfulness, which is again a very basic teaching, Again, it's not the mindfulness of feelings.

[23:33]

It's the feelingfulness of feelings. It's to know your feelings through your feelings, not know your feelings through thinking. So, when you work with somebody's body, well, let's say, when Freud was, what, get on the right thing when he used this character of associations and pre-association to get access to people in memory. Pre-associations still depend on this scandal. And there are memories in the body which aren't in these skandhas.

[24:50]

You don't have associations with or that hide up more in the body than elsewhere. Often if you work with the pain in your back, for instance, when you're sitting. Because a great deal of people's personal history is in their back. As you begin to hurt your back, things open up. Everything, images, stuff will come up. And those images will often then trigger a whole chain of images that weren't in your back, but were connected through that, and they're lost up there in what I call the sticky stuff of time. Time travel with us and so much of our life is out there in associations that we don't know how to access. So the more you practice this kind of consciousness, the more you increase the fertility with which what you've been through, what your experience and the world's experience interact more are.

[26:11]

Well, I mean, I think you're right in what you said. But I would say the body, just like the field of your consciousness, doesn't have history in it. It requires a combination with associations of perceptions or memory. So in a sense, I can have a proprioceptive physical memory. feeling, which isn't involved with my physical history. But if I emphasize this proprioceptive channel, I can begin to open up the memories that are stored in my body.

[27:26]

Now, this standard here, the seventh standard, It's very important. It's very important because it's both associations and intent. And it's where all of this is prayed through this gana, I mean through this gana. In other words, everything that's here is inaccessible except through associations or intent. And that's why the vow is so important, because the vow comes here. And so you want to take the biggest vow you can, because this is the crucial point which links all of this.

[28:47]

And that's why, again, in Buddhist practice, so much of Buddhist practice, the background of it is attitudes. An attitude of friendliness or loving kindness. That attitude has a much more powerful effect here than to be angry at this point. So the views and intentions of Buddhist practice appear, and then they make all the rest function. That's why the vow at the end is so important. Vow and intention and imagination is important. So imagination, vow, intent are the real movers of the whole thing.

[30:12]

It's one of the reasons in Tibetan Buddhism so much visualization is practiced. Because two things are happening when you do visualizations. One is you're creating interior space. The more I learn to look at you and also visualize you, the more you appear from my interior space. So visualization practices create interior space. It works a little differently in Zen, but it's basically the same. And if you visualize constantly these Buddhas and so forth, you're very powerfully affecting how you create associations.

[31:20]

Zen thinks that Zen's decision is to look at each person and see them as a Buddha and an ordinary person simultaneously rather than visualizing. Okay, thanks for reminding me. I forgot that. Could you please explain again what took place with the coward verse? I didn't quite get it. Sorry. Tathagatagarbha just means thusness or suchness. And Garbha means both womb and embryo.

[32:21]

So it means that in this situation you're an embryo and in this situation itself is a womb. That means you can perceive things in wholeness or in mandalic patterns. Like a gardener perceives the fertility of the flower. So there's many fertilities in this room. How do you see the patterns of fertility in this room the way a gardener sees a garden? It's not like a gardener doing a garden. The gardener has to obey the garden. Tofageta means dustness. Dustness basically is non-conceptual perception. Which also means to see form and emptiness simultaneously arising.

[33:31]

So now I'm putting you to sleep. Yes. Er sagte, dass das Gelübde eine sehr große Bedeutung hat. Und da würde ich gerne was darüber hören, dass so wie ein Mantra sprechen, oder was hat das Gelübde zur Minderheit, kann es gröbe sein, kann es kleine sein, oder wie wird das abgelegt? Well, this is the last thing I'll respond to, okay? The sense of bowing is, first of all, whenever you name anything, it's a kind of vow. When you say Tina is your daughter, it's a kind of vow.

[34:49]

So you want to find the most inclusive vow you can. So you might say, you have to find what your own innermost intention is. And as I said before, something you can with the fullness of your heart intend. And as I said before, something you can with the fullness of your heart intend. But in the simplest sense, I'd say that what all of us want is wholeness. And the Buddhist vow is nothing really more than you vow to realize wholeness, whatever that is.

[35:55]

And because you also recognize you're not separate from others, You vow to realize wholeness with each person you meet. And if you take that as a deep intention that you begin to feel in all of the skandhas and in the fields of consciousness it will find small ways to begin to act. Maybe we could call it homeopathic Buddha power. So you begin to create a language of wholeness in your own being. With the sense that if we all started speaking the language of wholeness, the world would be a better place.

[37:08]

And we could all live it with more ease inside ourselves and with each other. And what, is there anything else to do? So let's sit for a little bit and then we'll start.

[37:30]

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