Yesterday you said that we imagine that this me observer is one or the same. The same or consistent, yeah. But that there are actually various or different ones. how do I get to these different ones in me there is only one Oh, no. It is quite stable. I do have it since my childhood or my youth, and it's quite stable. That's good. I'm glad to hear it's stable. But I bet your friends see some differences, different me observers.

[01:03]

Anyway, yeah, so if you see only one, and maybe that's true for you. Maybe I'm wrong in what I say. Yeah, maybe we can find some examples of a difference. And what kind of differences are we looking for? The most... easy to notice this difference, is when there'd be a difference in the decisions you'd make. For example, perhaps in zazen, you might come to a different decision about something in your life than you would in your usual mind.

[02:29]

And I would say that such a difference is actually a real difference. It's a different me observer. And the more you develop the me observer that makes a decision, shall we say, in zazen, That zazen, me observer, will develop a different you'll see, I think, we'll have a somewhat different history, somewhat different associations will be part of its history.

[03:41]

Anyway, that's what I would say right now. Okay. Does anyone want to share something of the discussions you've had? Yes. One question that came up through the discussion we had in our group. In practice, is there something like renunciation, giving up of what I like, what I wish for? Or is practice... Just being aware of what I do.

[05:12]

Whatever that is. Is there perhaps a stage in the practice where something like renunciation is on the agenda? Is there renunciation in the practice in the sense that I can do something right? And is there maybe a stage in practice where renunciation is kind of asked for, where I have to sort of force myself to give something up? Is that the bad news? Yeah, I think in individual cases it's definitely the case.

[06:14]

Is it always the case? For each person? What I would call contemporary renunciation. is the decision to free ourselves from societal and social definitions of ourself. So I think our society very strongly asks us to define ourselves in a certain way. And to measure ourselves by certain...

[07:16]

to define ourselves by certain measures. Like, do I have a certain kind of job? How do I relate in a hierarchy to my brothers and sisters? Do I have certain academic degrees? Do I have at least an average amount of money? Do I have health insurance? I think Foucault, Michel Foucault, is quite right in his way of looking at this.

[08:42]

Is it these institutional benefits that society offers us? We have certain kinds of permissions through education. The safety of a good medical system. And the medical records we have and so forth. And the medical records would be Yeah, you fill out things and say who you are and define yourself, and the society is always asking you to define yourself certain ways. Yeah, which aren't, none of the stuff is bad. But there's also a hidden strategy to it.

[09:47]

Which is to control us in certain ways. A democratic society which can't, you know, like a king, queen, just say, off with her head. It might be under a certain kind of monarchy you have more freedom. Because, you know, you can do almost anything as long as you don't go too far. If you go too far, off with his head. But in a democracy, it requires us to... All basically buy into the social contract.

[11:04]

And to define ourselves through others. And to watch others all the time. Mm-hmm. And I think it doesn't mean you give up all that. But I think we have to renounce defining ourselves primarily through such a social contract. You know, I'm a primitive person. And I... I haven't had health insurance, for example, for 30 years. And many people tell me I'm stupid and so forth like that.

[12:26]

Or they tell me I depend on my genes, you know, I'm healthy. And that's really, yeah, probably too, I'm depending on my genes. But in actual fact, I don't want to put any protection between me and illness or death. I don't want any tiny bit of me to say, I'm safe. Ich möchte nicht, dass irgendein kleinster Teil von mir sagt, ich bin sicher. Ich sage immer, ich kann es mir nicht leisten. 75% true. Das stimmt zu 75%. And I could probably afford it.

[13:32]

But I have not wanted to give myself even that much security. I want to live in a way when it's time to perish, I say, okay. I mean, I don't mean... I don't want to sound dramatic. But, and I don't want you to be as primitive as me. I admire you stronger people who can feel the way I'm talking about and also have a health insurance. But I'm a person who has to walk around with a string of skulls to remind myself of impermanence.

[14:38]

And I love having this in my pocket. And it's not like a rabbit's foot. A rabbit's foot? A talisman. Because I carry this to keep me safe from feeling safe. Of course, a dead rabbit's foot shouldn't remind you too much of safety. The rabbit certainly's luck ran out. So some kind of renunciation of the... Yes, I said it clearly enough.

[15:52]

And to re-enter... the definitions of our society with a feeling of simultaneously being free of them. Yeah, okay. Yeah? I also think of a more trivial kind of renunciation like say to give up or not continue doing something of which in the light of my own practice I know it hinders my practice or it's not good.

[17:11]

Yes, that's of course true. So that means this kind of renunciation is, even if I have to force myself, is good. This means I do, I should renounce this. My understanding so far was, Mayan is... My understanding was that it should be more a kind of awareness of noticing what I do and not so much a renouncing and that this renunciation is or was kind of supposed to happen more naturally.

[18:27]

Well... That would be nice. Yeah, that's very true. But no, I think progress in practice is inseparable from renunciation. But it depends which, you know, it's a fabric of choices. Just deciding to get up early in the morning is a kind of renunciation. For some people a big one. I renounce the soft bed and this beautiful person beside me. Or, you know, you give up smoking or something like that.

[19:35]

You know, and smoking is a real serious addiction. But if we can't give up smoking, it's hard to take a person's practice seriously. You really need to isolate the emotional need that smoking satisfies. And first satisfy that emotional need in some other way. That's a kind of renunciation but it's really a kind of shift in emphasis. I would call this something like a fabric of small renunciations. I mean, you brought this up the other day. Do you want to add something right now?

[20:53]

Yeah, I want to say I do get up at five in the morning and for me it is renunciation. I also give up a part of my social life like going out to dinner or to a restaurant or going to parties because then if I go to bed too late I can't get up in the morning. Oh, this is bad. But it's worth it. It's worth it. Well, I'm glad. Das freut mich. Yeah. And then you... I mean, I... Again, I'm exposing how primitive I am.

[22:01]

I noticed a bad feeling when I had a thought which compared myself favorably to another person. And I needed that comparison. That's the difference for me between comparing myself favorably to someone else or unfavorably I don't really need to, it's just an observation. I have shorter hair than you do, you know. Das ist ein Unterschied dazu, wenn ich mich mit jemand anderem begünstigend oder nicht begünstigend vergleiche und ich das nicht wirklich brauche, wenn ich sage, ich habe kürzere Haare als du.

[23:13]

And whether that's a favorable or unfavorable comparison, I'll let someone else decide. But if I had a need to make this comparison... Aber wenn ich ein Bedürfnis oder eine Notwendigkeit habe, diesen Vergleich zu machen, dann fand ich mich selbst, dann habe ich gesehen, wie ich versuchte mich darin zu stoppen. And I kind of created a mind trying to be alert, kind of mindfulness, to be alert every time I would say something. And I told you this before, you know, some of you. And I found I would try to stop it so much that sometimes if I started to say something, I'd actually bite my tongue.

[24:26]

So then I decided, okay, hey, that's good. Every time I have such a thought, I'll bite my tongue. You should have seen my tongue. Actually, it would bleed in my mouth several times a week. And it took several years. Even after a few years, every now and then I'd still bite my tongue. That's a kind of renunciation or a kind of effort to change one's behavior anyway. Okay, something else. Yeah. One point in our discussion was the trust or the confidence that while sitting the right thing will happen even if we don't know what it is.

[25:54]

Not why, but if. It's good to have such trust. And practice doesn't really develop without it. But one thing I ask myself, They said, do we have to also intellectually find out which way to go or is sitting enough? Well, we have to think out what we're doing sometimes. Yes, sometimes we have to think about what we are doing.

[27:12]

I think some things need a practical intellectual decision on the basis of conventional mind. But I try to keep going back to how I feel, not what I think. And I go back to what I feel particularly in zazen. And if I then have some... If I give a sort of... thought formation to how I feel. It might have a kind of intellectual form, but it wasn't arrived at intellectually. I try to never go against my actual feeling.

[28:22]

About something. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. The day before yesterday you said that zazen is kept alive when you bring questions to it. Now talking about or what you are talking about Zazen intellect and feeling. Does bringing questions to your zazen mean to think about them, like thinking about a koan?

[29:39]

I mean, what I'm talking about is questions from your daily life. Well, you can certainly bring questions daily life questions to your Zazen. Maybe you have a job or you're a therapist or I don't know you have to certain conundrums come up. Du hast einen Beruf oder vielleicht bist du Therapeut und bestimmte Rätsel tauchen auf. How can I actually help this person? Wie kann ich dieser Person wirklich helfen? How can I solve this, be in the midst of this situation at work where two people hate each other and I'm in the middle? Wie kann ich in dieser Situation in der Arbeit, wie kann ich mit dieser Situation umgehen wo zwei Leute sich hassen und ich bin mittendrin?

[30:41]

Those kind of questions I think are useful to bring to Zazen. But you can bring more fundamental or existential questions to Zazen. Like here I am, one of the most extraordinary... Human beings are as extraordinary as anything gets in the cosmos that we know about. Can I say you're about to have a baby? Yeah, yes. I mean his wife or his partner. He's not going to hang on to a tree later in life. And this is extraordinary. And this is us. How can we be bored with Zazen?

[31:44]

How can we be bored with ourselves? If we're bored, we're stuck on some kind of surface that we can't penetrate. How do we penetrate this surface of boredom? Yeah, that kind of question too, Ignacio. Lots of... I can think of lots. Yeah. Tsukirushi always... brought up, what is my innermost request? That's a question that can bring life into our practice. But only if we're willing to listen to our innermost request.

[33:10]

And only if we have the capacity, courage, character to act on it if possible. There's no point in asking yourself the question if you're unwilling to listen. Yeah. There are some people who haven't said anything and some people who... You, can you... You're hiding down there, I can see. I'm not hiding well enough. You're just behind René. Not well enough. Oh, not well enough. For me a question came up, we talked about how practice widens our life.

[34:24]

We soon found out about the limits or limitations that we reach in our life or in our practice, in our conventional life. these inner postures or attitudes that in sitting you try to cultivate or develop. I said that among my friends or my relatives I have really nobody I can talk to about this. I would like to know how you can talk about this without creating resistance.

[36:00]

I sometimes got the response, for example, that, oh, this is really not the right thing for you. What, this Zen practice or doing something? This Zen practice, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's Mara. Mara is talking. Mara appears as fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters. Well, I think in this kind of case you have to really become confident in yourself, that this is what you, that this is a good thing for you to do, at least at this time. If you're really confident, generally everyone around you will accept or tolerate In fact, they may resent it, but secretly admire it.

[37:12]

Because they think it means you've grown up. And often later another thing comes out, which is they kind of wish they could do it. That's what I wanted to say earlier. I meant to say about these small, this fabric of renunciations. Often we give up something and it comes back in a better form later. Oft geben wir etwas auf und es kommt in einer besseren Form später zurück. Like we start going to nicer parties with people we like better that start earlier.

[38:23]

Zu besseren Partys gehen mit Leuten, die wir lieber mögen und die früher beginnen. That's what this is. Sorry, just before you came, you mentioned this starts to get the atmosphere of a party. That's what I hope. You didn't say it in Deutsch, though. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the reasons I think something like having guesty afternoon free is good, maybe. It changes the structures, how we relate to each other. And we can feel what we've been talking about in the seminar in our more usual state of mind.

[39:27]

For me it's that behind my sitting there is a big longing. In the discussion I noticed I want to get to this in a radical way, but I kind of lack the tools to get to it. Okay, you can ask yourself the question. what are the tools? It's good to really ask, you see a problem, you ask yourself a very simple question like that, like you just said.

[40:54]

But I don't have the tools to get there. What are the tools? Your own language offers the question. Sometimes I'm worried then to fall back into my own habits. For example, here I start to read. Something wrong with reading? Just the habit. It's not such a bad habit.

[42:02]

I hope it's not such a bad habit. But if you're seeking more than hints in reading, that's probably not so good. Nirvana is often understood as being a deep longing. And nirvana is identified with death, so in some way it's a deep longing for the peace of death. But there's various images for nirvana which express this longing.

[43:06]

If you know the hot, muggy climate of India, In Japanese the word is mushi-atsui, steamy hot. One image of nirvana is a cool cave high in the mountains. Another image is an island in the midst of a flood. Yeah, I used to always feel, you know, like... that I went to the mountains when I did zazen.

[44:23]

Of course, you in Switzerland, maybe you wish for it. Yes, go ahead. I stick to this phrase, to become a true person in the Buddha ancestors' palace. I tried to, for all my life I tried to become a person. I was seeking things and I built something. Now it seems I have to throw all of this away and enter a different house, a foreign house.

[45:31]

Of course, it would be good if you think about impermanence. I will die, but then there will be this lineage in which I sit. But that's only a trick that doesn't convince me. Well, maybe I'm being tricked, too. But I enjoy it. Yes, I understand. Sometimes I think we have to respect our conventional life. Sometimes it doesn't completely satisfy us.

[47:07]

Does anyone have an English Zamaio Zamaio here? I have one upstairs. I can go get it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Anything else? Yeah. I'm not clear about what happens when I leave my conventional life and enter a monastery. Ist das nicht auch konventionell, nur auf eine andere Art?

[48:15]

Is that not also conventional, but only in a different way? Yeah, of course. Ja, natürlich. But it is a different way. Aber es ist ein anderer, ein anderer Weg, eine andere Weise. Again, let's say that you wanted to make a decision, a practical decision to go to Cresta. Yeah, I mean, just so we have something to talk about. Yeah. So... You're not giving up your conventional life, you're just... putting it aside for three months or four months. And when you get there, first of all, you're never ready to go. No, you're never ready, actually.

[49:31]

If you wait till you're ready to go, you will never go. Because there's always things that keep us in our conventional line. So you have to draw a line. And Buddhism makes it easy because we're not going for the rest of our life. We're just going for three months. But when you get there, you can't fall into your usual habits. Unless you have fairly unusual usual habits. We get up at 3.30 and we have, I don't know, one, two, three... five periods of zazen a day.

[50:40]

And we have various little ceremonies that are pretty boring. Rene can tell you. And you have to do things that you think there's no point to this at all. And as long as you want there to be a point, it kind of drives you crazy. You have to get to the point where, well, if my heart's beating and my... Breathing is, you know, there's enough air, I don't care what happens. If we chant all day long, that's okay. As long as there's room for my heart to beat. So anyway, it changes your expectations, your habits.

[51:47]

We don't do it as radically as would be traditional. Because a lot of people would leave in the first few weeks. Ideally, you make no phone calls, receive no letters, write no letters. But I find I can't really enforce that. But still, it's an interruption of your usual way you know yourself through your habits. Then after three months you decide if you want to stay for another three months or a year or two or something.

[52:52]

My experience is if we have three-month practice periods, 50% of people will leave usually after the practice period. The practice hasn't really taken. But if you have two practice periods a year, six months a year of practice period, My experience has been then 70, 80% of the people stay several years. They really get the feeling of it and they don't want to lose that by leaving. But we just don't.

[54:18]

We just don't have the means to do two practice periods a year there. Plus it would mean I'd probably have to give up coming to Europe. Or I could come for only six weeks or... Or I could only come for six weeks or for two months. Okay, yes? But I also find it a beautiful challenge to live practice in normal life. For me it is not necessarily a goal to live in a monastery.

[55:19]

Yeah, that's good. There have to be people like that too. Yeah, most of us are like you. And all of us, even if somebody goes for one or two practice periods, still most of their life is like you're talking about. And that's really what I'm talking about, is that, what you're talking about. But you might find it makes a difference to come here, for instance. So the question is, how much does lay practice need a sangha? And how much does it need a Sangha which has some kind of monastic element to it?

[56:31]

That's the question we're asking right now. By the existence of this place. And you know, I've been doing seminars in various forms of teachings in Europe now since Eighty-three. Eighty-four. And When people first saw me in robes, I lost a lot of students. I had a lot of people asking for me to do sashins, but when I started sashins, some of the very people who asked stopped coming. And then there were a number of people who asked that we have a place like this and then finally this place.

[57:41]

Yes, several of you are here in this room. And so we, yeah, we decided to get this place. But quite a lot of people used to come to several seminars a year, stopped coming. So most of you are people who are in effect voting for some kind of monastic element in their lay practice. And there's no question for me. In other words, you know, when we first started Tuesday morning, As usual, I'm happy to see you.

[59:14]

And I'm happy to see the people of you who are meeting for the first time. But I actually have really very little idea of how to proceed with the seminar. You may think, oh, he does this all the time, it's easy for him. Um... Yeah, and maybe certain kinds of public talks aren't so hard for me to do anymore.

[60:21]

But really, to do what we've done this week depends on you. And depends on your practicing together. And depends on quite a few of you having practiced a long time. I can't talk from the inside of you. if you're all strangers.

[61:23]

And I can't fully talk from the inside of you, but I can try to talk from the inside. And I hope, mostly, we can start talking from inside ourselves. And I hope that we... And I simply can't do that in a weekend in Munster or Berlin or something. If there's enough people who have been practicing a long time, we can come close. But I think if you look at what I've been teaching, In a way, you can look way back into the 60s, even in the 70s.

[62:41]

My lectures aren't that different. I have a sort of rule, personal rule, that I don't repeat myself. or I repeat myself only enough to bring out some new point. So, from my point of view, every lecture I give or seminar has some individual lecture, has something new in it I've never said before. So that's one of the questions I ask myself. But I think if you could look carefully at what I've been teaching since the 70s and then before and after Yohannesov, You'll find that there's actually a significant difference.

[64:02]

The statements might have the same thing, but there's lots more filaments around them. And that's because I'm taking refuge in the Sangha. Okay. Now, I suppose we're supposed to stop one of these days. What I wanted to say What I wanted to say was that we don't want to bring attention just to our conventional life or our wider conventional

[65:45]

Or we also want to bring attention to our Buddha life. Or maybe our deepest longing. Mm-hmm. And so I've taken the image from this samay-o-samay to sit in the meditation posture. is to transcend the deepest and most intimate teaching of the Buddha ancestors. In this sentence, even the teaching of the Buddha ancestors somehow falls into conventional life.

[66:47]

It's the me observer who's studying the sutras. And he says, Dogen says, know that the world of sitting practice is far different from other worlds. Is that true? Clarify this for yourself. It's not for me to tell you it's true or not. Clarify this for yourself. Activate way-seeking mind. Practice.

[68:06]

The mind of enlightenment. Study the world at this very moment of sitting. Then he has this far out thing. Is it an acrobat's graceful somersault? Then he has this far out thing. Far out. Abgefahren. Abgefahren. Was ist abgefahren? Dieses abgefahrene, hat er dieses abgefahrene Ding da? Ist es der anmutige Salto des Akrobaten? Is it thinking or not thinking? Ist es denken oder nicht denken? They're sitting and letting go of body-mind. They're sitting with the body, which is not the same as sitting with the mind.

[69:11]

What's he trying to say? Investigate this awareness. So this... curtain over the Buddha ancestor's room. What is it made of? How do we open it? I think we feel its presence or hear it kind of call. That's what I was thinking of speaking about this afternoon. Maybe it makes sense to come back to it tomorrow morning. Maybe it makes sense to come back tomorrow.

[70:26]

Tomorrow morning. I hate to stop, but it's... We're warming up. It's a shame that we're warming up. We're warming up. Thanks for translating again. You're welcome. Thanks for saying something.

[71:33]

I had to. It wasn't that hard. Satsang with Mooji [...] I know you watch what murder is doing now, and for all my dharma, you need to show people that thousands of millions got what they wanted.

[72:52]

Now that I can see you in real life and be able to protect you, I need to find out the truth from you. Well, I feel anyway pretty engaged in how we understand our practice life. Yeah, and... Yeah, I must say that I wish we were in a three-month practice period.

[74:05]

I'll take the linchpins out of your carriage wheels. The linchpins are... There's an old story about you don't want somebody to leave. So you take the pins out of their wheels of the carriage wheels. There is a story that you don't want someone to drive off and then you pull the spokes out of the wheels. Yes, pins. It's not too important. And now we have this, yeah, this eight of us are taking the precepts this afternoon. And that tends to gather our day, certainly our day, into the moment when perhaps we'll feel the earth tremble.

[75:12]

But I still want to see if we can pull the curtain of the Buddha and ancestor's room aside a little bit. So what we've discovered this week is that mindfulness and meditation bring our wider life onto the stage of the present. And that's a lot. Sometimes I call this the practice of well-being. In contrast to the practice of non-being.

[76:25]

Not I. It's as I say, non-being, I feel I lose you. Right, yeah. Anyway, or we can consider the way mindfulness and meditation bring our wider conventional life onto the stage of the present, as the basis for realizing our Buddha nature, discovering the Buddha nature. or the Dharma nature.

[77:48]

Perhaps in some ways we could understand, as it says, when Buddha is enlightened, the earth testifies to his enlightenment. And it's again said that the earth trembles. Perhaps we can understand this as, you know, the ground of our being trembling or something. Now, Zami, the... person who with his father pretty much created what we know as Noh theater in Japan. When you come to a moment in a, in this case through a play, through a theater.

[79:31]

Where everything feels, feels, where there's, you begin to feel each thing is unique. Or somehow very particular and universal at the same time. Or you enter the time of the play and you find it discontinuous with your own time. I'm glad you have as much trouble saying it in German as I have in English. Ich bin froh, dass du so große Schwierigkeiten hast, das auf Deutsch zu sagen, wie ich es, wie ich es, wie ich auf Englisch.

[80:50]

But it's, many times I've spoken in the past about the No stage has an invisible line down the middle. And in the front of the stage, you're in the ordinary time of the audience. But when you step toward the back of the stage at a certain point, the audience knows that you're in a kind of more timeless space. But when the audience knows and the actors know that at that point you can begin speaking almost in a different kind of voice and your The past and future is present.

[82:09]

Your people involved in your life who are dead are now present. So again, Sami calls these moments when you feel this, some say, timelessness or uniqueness. He calls it hana. Hana means flower. Somehow this situation flowers for a moment. Now there's a koan, you know, which tries to say something about this.

[83:13]

Rather famous koan. And the main character is Manjushri. I don't know how he got... got there and come on from China, but anyway. The bodhisattva of wisdom. And Manjushri asks Wu Zhou, where have you come from? Manjushri asked Vujo, Vujo, Vujo, where are you from? And he says, oh, I just came here from the south. How's the practice going there? How's the Sangha? And Wu Zhou says, well, many of the congregation, many of the mendicants are not, don't follow the precepts anymore.

[84:24]

Yeah. And Manjushri says, how large is the congregation? Oh, sometimes 300, sometimes 500. And then Wu Zhou says, How's it going here in the north? And Manjushri says, sages and ordinary people practice together. Dragons and snakes intermingle. I was just thinking about dragons and snakes intermingling.

[85:27]

And how many are there in the congregation? And he says, in front, three by three. In back, three by three. From your practice of the three minds of daily consciousness, maybe you have some insight into this. Manjushri, what's Manjushri saying? Well, he's not counting, first of all. He's not separating them, the ones who follow the precepts and the ones who don't follow the precepts.

[86:50]

We can say, he's talking about something more like an actual experience of you being right here in this group. Yeah, no, you know, in general in this group, You know, one is one, two is an addition to one. But three is many. As soon as you have three of anything, you start having much more complicated relationships among the things. So three in sense means many. So three by three in front and in back, three by three. Yeah, but again, if you're standing in this group right here, what do you feel?

[87:56]

You feel, well, there's two or three people behind me, two or three people in front of me. And if you feel the people around you, behind you, Yeah, one person actually might feel like three. In any case, there's a feeling of the people around you. Almost a presence with topography. If you look in the mirror at your own image, and you substitute the me observer with an ancient Buddha, so you...

[89:01]

you see an ancient Buddha. Or you feel like an ancient Buddha is observing the image in the mirror. Three by three in front, three by three in back. Yeah, it's not the same as saying, oh, I'm an ancient Buddha. If you say, I am, you already have the me observer's function. But if you just can see the image as if being seen by an ancient Buddha.

[90:03]

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