From your lecture yesterday, we were talking about the idea of enlightenment, and that enlightenment doesn't mean that we take a delusion within. and [...] Buddhism doesn't say that things don't exist. It just says they have no inherent or permanent identity.

[01:12]

And greed will always be around as long as there's human beings. Or greed in a philosophical level of the belief you can possess something. But it won't be permanent. It's around, but it changes. So, but how do you want to relate that to Julio's, Julio got up? What Ivan from your question was that there is a pressure, for instance, it's natural for human beings to be oppressive. And how do we deal with that? And how does Zen Buddhism deal with that? And yesterday in your lecture you said there is, for instance, war, there's greed, hatred, and delusion, and enlightenment is not a solution for suffering, for instance, and suffering.

[02:25]

So I think there's a similarity or a relation between those two things. Well, this conference I just watched, it came up quite a bit, this idea of... And particularly psychotherapists think most people A lot of psychotherapists think most people don't really deal with their aggression and don't find a way in which to allow aggression to have some value in their lives. This is such a big question, I don't know, and I don't want to spend too much time on it. But first of all, the practice of Zen is to be able to sit still, as often said, is to be able to amplify your emotions, aggressions and so forth.

[03:43]

And if you can sit still and know, as I say, that you can sit through anything, many parts of your personality, even more than would come up in psychoanalysis, will come up. Because once the fear that you'll act on everything that you think is removed, you can feel things in a way when you have that fear you can't. It's actually good to amplify things sometimes. And if you have enough confidence, you'll find that even if you have murderous feelings, you can even enact the murder But you can sit in the middle of it without any fear of these feelings.

[05:02]

Yeah, so this is a little different. I think it's Dostoevsky who says, the thought of murdering the father is the same as murdering the father, or something like that. And in Buddhism, you'd never say that. There's not the same kind of karma to thoughts as there is to actions. And the kind of people we are, the more complex we are, the more all the possibilities are there in us. Suicides there, murders there, etc. And there's a stage of, you can go through a meditation where a kind of craziness is there. Where you're unable to bring yourself, it's hard to imagine how you can bring yourself back to things, the ways you check out whether the world's real.

[06:22]

Okay, so I'm showing you the extremes of practice. And as I've said, the first noble truth of suffering And the second is that there's a cause of suffering. And the third is that there's an end of suffering. And as I said the other day, a lot of people think, well, geez, I want to skip the first two and get to the third fast, the end of suffering. But each of these is an independent truth. And the first means that you have the capacity of suffering or the capacity to accept things as they are.

[07:26]

And that capacity to accept suffering is what makes it possible to see the causes. Okay. So part of this capacity to accept suffering, I'm spending more time on this than I intended, but anyway, part of this capacity to accept suffering is the ability to go through whatever human beings have gone through. Now, whether you go through a huge range or a small range, By learning to sit physically still in the midst of it, but not to suppress or repress, you develop an ability to be present in something without interfering with it, but not having to act on it.

[08:40]

Does that make sense? Do you understand? How do you do when you're not sitting? What I mean is that you develop an ability that is present all the time, not just when you're sitting. Okay, so that's one thing I'll say. Now, when you're angry, There is a dimension to anger in which you're not angry. There's still a bright clarity to your mind even though you're angry.

[09:43]

For example, again, you could be having a terrible fight with your spouse, say. You could see a baby fall into that pond and you could immediately stop your fight and go get the baby and So that means that even in the midst of anger, there's an area of mind that isn't angry. Now, in a person who practices, that area gets bigger and bigger. And a person who doesn't practice, usually the anger gets very small. Take a baby falling into a lake for you to stop being angry. What I'm talking about is very basic Buddhist. I mean the practice of mindfulness to notice your

[10:54]

Your anger has nothing to do with stopping your anger. You know, now I'm angry. Interesting. Now I'm angrier. Now I'm, wow, am I angry now. Now it's diminishing. Now this isn't to stop your anger, but it does in effect. It's not to stop your anger, it's to create a surrounding mind around the anger. Mm-hmm. So, again, Zen doesn't say anything about really not being aggressive in the way you mean, I think. It's more that can you be in a much wider state of mind even when you're being aggressive?

[12:11]

Because the sense in that is there's something that there's a true part of aggression which should be expressed. And when you have this bigger space around it while you're being aggressive or receiving aggression, You can receive it much better and act in a much more subtle and complex way. I watched Suzuki Roshi a number of times with quite crazy or disturbed people or people wielding a knife. And there were a lot of, in those days in the early 60s, a lot of crazies around. In San Francisco. And almost invariably, everybody would be in the hall kind of scared of this person who came in the building.

[13:40]

And Sikirsh would come in and look. And then he'd kind of wander up in between the spaces of this guy's mind. And he would not only see the anger, he'd see another need. And I remember once when he did this, he walked, everybody was kind of, nobody knew what to do with this guy. He was just crazy and in a rage and clearly dangerous. But anyway, Suzuki just walked up in between these spaces. And sort of took his arm and said, do you like some soup? You look hungry.

[14:47]

And the guy said, oh, I'd like some soup. So he took him in the kitchen and he had some soup and then he took him to the door and closed the door and we all went... So if you can be aggressive in that way, it's probably good. So if you can be aggressive in this way, then it's probably very good. But I do know a tennis player who was one of the top tennis players in the world. And he said he couldn't really, once he started practicing meditation, he didn't have the killer edge anymore. I don't know if he was right, but that's what he told me. Okay. Anything else?

[15:51]

Any other thing we should talk about? Yeah. But how about looking at it this way, that it's an energy in the wrong part of the body. So maybe if you re-generalize the energy, you can make some bliss and joy out of it. You want to say that in German? But that's what he was saying. He thinks Buddhism is always saying that we should transform it or rechannel it or something, right? Yes? The point I'm trying to make is that marketing the world, personally, I needed aggression a couple of times in my life. People were very aggressive. People who are aggressive to you.

[17:03]

You mean, you want to say that, I'm sorry we have to keep going back to German, but you have to... It's a kind of giving also. To be aggressive sometimes means to give somebody something. Well, there's going to be, I mean, you have to learn to live in this world of greed, hate and delusion. And it's not going to go away.

[18:04]

And from that point of view, sometimes our enemies are our best friends. Yeah. And I feel in relationship to point, of course one can always channel or re-channel or move it around and the more skills you have, it's easier to do that. And I think almost any emotion actually Suzuki Roshi used to say that even a thief is stealing for his mother. And I feel that at root, almost any emotion is probably good. But to get to that good part is sometimes quite hard. But I think it's possible.

[19:25]

But if you can't do it, you from practice have the ability to just be still in the middle of things and let them happen. Somehow we're, anyway, anything else? . Okay. Immediate consciousness is... First of all, let me just say that these terms... Maybe we have to define these terms a little.

[20:52]

These three, immediate, secondary, and borrowed, are all a sort of map or topography of your conscious The main ways you can be conscious. Immediate consciousness is not awareness. Now, awareness, and I've defined it many times, that awareness is like what wakes you up at 6.02 in the morning. when you don't set the alarm. Awareness is a way in which we are... It's very hard to use awareness or consciousness, Awareness is a way we're conscious of the world in an undivided way.

[22:01]

And that awareness is always present. We can tune into it or let it happen, but we can't do much with it. It just is. But immediate consciousness is something you can do something with. You can sort of think in immediate consciousness, but you can't think conceptually. You can be aware of the world. But in immediate consciousness, there's more room for spontaneity. In immediate consciousness, there's more likelihood that awareness is functioning. Does that make sense?

[23:10]

Do we have that blackboard or the flip chart somewhere? Oh no, that's not... I don't... Yeah, but... No, no. Because we're almost through. Now it'll come up and I won't use it. Yeah. No, we're... Yes, please. Yeah.

[24:15]

And immediate consciousness. Babies have awareness, and I would say that that what we do when we educate children is we actually divide awareness into interior consciousness and exterior consciousness. It's like we take this unformed awareness and take part of it and structure it. Also, wir nehmen dieses ungeformte Gewahrsein, nehmen Teile daraus und strukturbieren. And you... Can I help? Maybe if we leave all these in.

[25:29]

That's okay. All right. You have something like, if I'm going to give you a Buddhist topography, you have something like, I'm going to, I haven't thought about this, so I'm going to have to create awareness. And conscious. So to give you a Buddhist topography, there is awareness and consciousness. Then we have exterior consciousness and interior consciousness. Now, what the koans are trying to do is to teach you to act in several different dimensions of consciousness.

[26:54]

Okay. So when we... When you are... When we teach our babies to be conscious, now, when you teach a child to be able to count to ten, you're not just teaching them to count to ten. You're teaching them to create categories within consciousness. You're basically creating a structure of consciousness. So that through learning to count, you begin to be able to categorize things and say, oh, those are trees, and these are three trees, and those are insects or something.

[28:00]

We're actually taught to do that by... conversations with our parents and by language that we begin to be able to discriminate in a very sophisticated way. Now there's other ways to discriminate which we can call interior consciousness. And our culture doesn't teach us much about interior consciousness. And mostly we have to the extent that we activate interior consciousness we activate it through mythology and symbols And we're not really too conscious of what's happening, but we can activate it through these symbols or mythology.

[29:04]

Okay. When you, again, this is just, you know, I'm going over some things that I've gone over a lot, but maybe it's a good thing to do. When you start meditating and you can't count to ten, it's because your interior consciousness is not educated to be able to count to ten. It's not just that you're distracted, it's that the fluid that interior consciousness is in has no structure. So when you begin to structure interior consciousness, you begin to be able to develop a language of interior consciousness. And it's not the same language as the language of exterior consciousness.

[30:21]

The language of interior consciousness can know the shape of your lungs. And it can know a certain feeling that's associated with the lungs that is different than the feeling associated with the kidney. And you can begin to feel, if you're sick or cold or something, where that is and you can feel... you can feel it and you can bring other energies to improve or change it or so forth. Now I'm trying to here give you some examples of the language of interior consciousness. When you begin to educate your interior consciousness, you can discriminate between emotions and feeling.

[31:41]

And you can discriminate between feeling and non-graspable feeling. And you have the skills to allow a feeling to occur that you don't grasp or interfere with. And you begin to have different categories of memory that are associated with your sense fields. And actually, what this column is talking about is partly this one. It says that we, right in the beginning, it said, eyes, ears, nose, tongue, each one has ability, has one ability. The eyebrows are above.

[32:52]

Warriors, farmers, crafters, merchants, each returns to a job. The unskilled one is always at leisure. So this is the one who's not busy, but right now he's being described as one who's unskilled. So Cohen is asking, what skills or definitions does this When you're busy, does the one who's not busy have? And to really get a feeling for this koan, this explanation doesn't help. But I think in the long run, if you have some patience, this kind of explanation can help.

[34:06]

Because you can get a picture of how these things work. Okay. Now, consciousness is educated into exterior and interior consciousness. Now, again, another simple example of interior consciousness. You are all out there. But, in fact, for me, you're all in here. as we've been through this before, but you're in my sense fields. So I actually don't see you, I see myself seeing you. And the more I'm aware that while I'm looking at you, I'm looking at something that's happening inside my sense fields.

[35:10]

And I'm relating to that, and I'm relating to me inside your sense fields. To easily know that and to relate to that is a skill of interior consciousness. Or be able to, when you're angry with someone, be able to see their anger and your anger and to see the other things they're doing too. is a skill, this kind of skill. Without interfering with your anger. The problem with this is, if you're living with somebody intimately, if you're a monk, it's not usually a problem. Because it can be infuriating to be angry with someone who is angry back at you, but on some level is acting the anger.

[36:31]

It's infuriating to be very angry. I didn't get the last point. It can be infuriating to, let's say you and I are having a fight. And I'm quite angry at something you've done. I can imagine it, but I'm quite angry. And you're also angry at me. But I can see that simultaneously you're quite detached in the midst of your anger. And you can easily change the subject and do something else up and then go back to the anger. I can get very pissed off that you're not angry the same way I'm angry and that you're so calm in the middle of your anger. So there's actually problems as you develop more skills in this that other people get very upset with you because you're able to be detached in the middle of your anger.

[37:40]

And then there's also, you can get the skill to just draw the other person's anger away from But then you deprive them of their anger, which is one of the pleasures of life. And it may be important for them to go through their anger. Actually, there are real problems that occur developing this, and it's different from their culture. Particularly if it's different from your spouse's culture. Finally, I have this problem with my brother. He thinks I'm very different and he doesn't understand me. And when I talk to him in several ways at once, simultaneously, he gets completely, I just, you know, you're just too different.

[39:00]

He wants to hang up. Because I agree with several different sides he's presenting and he doesn't want me to agree with all of them. Now, although you educate... exterior and interior, although you develop these, awareness doesn't disappear. Awareness has an underlying, I don't know, what can we say? I won't try to name it. The problem, and again, this is something I said before, with children is, we tend to, when we educate their consciousness, we deny their awareness.

[40:02]

When you educate their consciousness, we try to... deny that part of the education process is a simultaneous attempt to deny or remove awareness. So I feel that with children you want to educate their consciousness but you also want to support their awareness. Which means in a way to support their knowing things when they don't know why they know them. And if you're always asking people too much why they know something, you slowly take the power away from here.

[41:15]

Now, a way a Buddhist would educate exterior consciousness in addition to the ways we do, is to get us to notice what we talked about last night and this morning, Can you read my handwriting while I sometimes try to get one?

[42:30]

So borrowing secondary and immediate fall under exterior clutches. So this is a Buddhist way through mindfulness practice of educating exterior consciousness. And there are categories other than language categories. They're categories based on how your mind is energetically rooted and nourished by the context and by your own body. And again, most of our educational system is here. But any creative work has to be in here. Now, the general sense in Buddhist practice is home base should be in immediate consciousness.

[43:48]

That would be like having the blank page would be your base consciousness and the words either secondary or borrowed. Now, an immediate consciousness becomes a bridge to interior consciousness and awareness. Does that make sense? And as I say, you can feel, as you get to know these, you can begin to feel a bump as you go across. And the picture I drew in Berlin is something like this. So this is immediate consciousness.

[45:20]

And that's borrowed consciousness. And this is secondary. And this is immediate. Okay. So, mostly, for most people, to get to immediate consciousness is an uphill battle. As borrowed consciousness, conceptual thought and so forth, comparative thought, knowing your birth date or knowing, saying I'm 72, is where our ego resides. Where we think about our status and our relationship with other people and our success and so forth.

[46:42]

And that's a very sick-making... If you only live there, it's a very sick-making, shallow consciousness. Okay. So, you can go... you can make an effort through practice and secondary consciousness is fairly common. But if you get up into immediate consciousness, there's a tendency to be drawn back down because it's where you feel comfortable and where you can compare and where, you know, if you think about your identity. The Dalai Lama was speaking, which I told you about. Yeah, but Dalai Lama was mostly going back and forth in his talk here. And the other speakers will not be here.

[47:53]

And their tendency was when they talked about something they felt deeply or rose out of their own experience they were here but then they went back to here for a home base. And as I said the Dalai Lama was except when he mentioned the Chinese when he moved into here for a while he was always here. And when he would be talking about something, he immediately, his gravity brought him to, instead of his gravity taking him this way, the identity gravity, his identity gravity brought him here. So even though he didn't say much, everyone felt good. Yes. Well, these are just, I mean, these aren't, these are helpful distinctions.

[49:31]

They're not cast in concrete. So if someone starts telling you about Vipassana practice, say, and then they say, well, then you do this, and then you do that, and then you imagine an orange dot near something, and they've just read it there in But if they are telling you from their own experience, they're in secondary consciousness. And if they're telling you from their own experience and discovering it as they go along, because they don't even know it until they rediscover it, So they're demonstrating it as they're talking it. Then there's somewhere in here.

[50:32]

Drawing on immediate consciousness and speaking in secondary consciousness. And as Ulrike said the other day, if this varnish on this floor is off-gassing, it would be good to know that. Unless you're very sensitive measuring... A very sensitive person, probably you wouldn't know it unless someone told you or you measured it with a scientific instrument. So borrowed consciousness is very necessary. It's essential to our life. But it's a question of where you live personally in yourself. And Buddhism says that if you live in borrowed consciousness most of the time, you're going to have a harder time than if you live here.

[52:02]

You're going to be less happy. You're going to have less contact with other people. And you're much more subject to physical and mental diseases. So from the Buddhist point of view, it's essential to teach people for simple societal help. But this is in here where you should live. Then dinner is almost ready, but let me just take a minute to say there are certain signs that this is happening. The more you have a sense of secondary consciousness and a sense of immediate consciousness,

[53:10]

You can tell when your home base is immediate consciousness. Because you tend to start feeling nourished by everything you do. You not only feel nourished by these beautiful trees, you can feel nourished by the tiles in the U-Bahn station. The world even feels, I could say, it feels like it's caressing you. now it takes a while but there's a certain pace at first you get a certain pace there's various ways to develop it but you find a certain pace where you feel this

[54:43]

And once you know that, you don't have to always walk slowly or always do something a certain way, but you can feel it a certain, you discover a pace where you feel it. Another sign is you start feeling a softness in your body. Another sign is you begin to feel a kind of joy on your breath. Now, the more you live in immediate consciousness, the more this joy is just part of breathing. And this joy begins to Change the way your memory works.

[55:57]

Because the way our memory is stored and the way our... It's not just a matter of getting rid of the bad things in us. It's also a matter of strengthening the good things that are already there. And the more you have this sense of softness or ease in your body, and things begin to have a kind of clarity and settled quality, Anyway, this is a kind of sign that you've begun to settle into as home base, immediate consciousness.

[57:07]

And I think seeing this kind of showing you this way of looking at it, And again, to know that it's a more deeply rooted and more nourishing consciousness can give you permission to notice it and stay there more. But freely still speak from your own experience and secondary consciousness. or to use the information of newspapers and books and studies.

[58:08]

But still that's all present, still coming back to and melting into immediate consciousness. Anyway, that's the basic sense of Buddhism in this way of educating your exterior consciousness. Or noticing that that's how we already exist. Okay. So let's have lunch. I mean dinner. Okay. This koan presents a certain problem for me. Yao Shan is living in this monastery. Or he might be here. And the people he's practicing with would like him to teach.

[59:15]

And he wants to teach too, otherwise he wouldn't be there. But what this koan says is that people are very thirsty for teaching and you have to be careful careful in responding to that thirst. Because if you too immediately respond to the thirst, Well, most people, when they're thirsty, and the thirstier they are, the more immediately they go to the lake of ego. Which is like a pond at the bottom of the personality.

[60:36]

or the bottom of the person. And in your rush to get down there, you miss the many streams and the mountains and the many springs along the valley walls. So the thirstier you are, the more likely the only thing that satisfies your thirst is something that satisfies your... So, for instance, it says here you don't have to get your text. You don't have to get your text. You're allowed to if you want to. But... the hungry will eat anything.

[61:54]

The thirsty will drink anything. But when there's five requests from three people, you have to sort of respond. In a sense, there are certain rules to the game. And you have to play by the rules. But then when you enter the teaching hall, they show their whole bodies with half a verse. To say they show their whole bodies with half a verse means you are teaching very carefully. Sometimes it will say, showing only half his body. Because if you show too much, people immediately turn it into something that works for their ego.

[63:07]

So how do you not do that? And it very specifically says, well, let me leave that out. So how are you going to respond? And it says here, you know, pretty quick, pretty clearly that, and the whole sense of the koan is, Yaoshan decides just to appear and then retire. And he says, for scriptures, there are teachers of scriptures. For treatises, there are teachers of treatises. So he's in the language we've been developing since last night. He's clearly saying there's teachers of borrowed consciousness who use the scriptures.

[64:30]

That's not me. Okay. So the problem this koan presents for me is I don't think it would be too helpful if I just went upstairs now. But how do I tell you something, help you with, practice with you in the field of this koan? Without falling into the kind of teaching or borrowed consciousness or explanatory consciousness, that Yaoshan is clearly not doing, is presenting not doing. Going back to the story again of Yaoshan and Shido, Yaoshan is sitting.

[65:54]

And Shido says, what are you doing? And Yaoshan says, I'm not doing anything. So Shido says, then you're sitting idly. And Yaoshan says, if I were sitting idly, I'd be doing something. So Siddho says, you say you're not doing anything, but what is this not doing you're doing? And Yashan says, not even the saints know. Okay, so are there any saints here who could get up on the air and could explain this stuff? Or maybe your dead grandmother could help us.

[66:55]

So, now many of you ask very good questions after the seminar session is over. It belongs, I think, most of them belong to the field of the seminar. But you ask them to me personally. Which is okay. I'm very pleased to feel your real engagement in this and your real questions. But also, if you can ask the same question as if we were one person, It's actually more powerful and the response will be more powerful if it's asked in the field of the seminar.

[68:04]

No, what am I saying here? Well, maybe I don't know. But what I found myself saying in the quite long discussion we had during the dinner break, which is everything is a trance. The problem is not getting in a trance. The problem is, can you have a perspective from outside the trance? In other words, if Eric and I have a conversation, we created a trance. A self-organizing field with its own integrity.

[69:11]

For instance, right now we're talking, if a stranger walked in here, he would kind of disturb the trance. Now, I'm using trance in a very positive way here. And I think it's useful because it's helpful to notice that most of the time we're in a trance. Now, the negative side is when you're in a trance, it's very difficult to see anything outside the trance. So your ego is a kind of trance. And when people tell you things that go against your ego, it's very difficult to hear it.

[70:38]

No, no, I have a much better explanation for what's happened. The positive side of trance is that there's an intentionality to a field. And there's an intentionality to our cognitive faculties. It's not just that we think about things. Embedded in the thinking is an intentionality. So when the Buddha holds up a flower, he's not just to transmit his understanding to Mahakashyapa. As Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, this may not be a true story.

[71:52]

But it's very representative of our teaching, which is to find some simple teaching that touches everything. In other words, it touches the intentionality of our beingness, of the field of being. Okay, so if a person asks me a question individually, for me to answer and for the person to understand, for me to understand the question and together for us to come to some understanding,

[73:14]

requires the creation of a field. Does that make sense? Yes. And if there's three or four or five people, again, if we're all talking together, if I respond to him and we create a field, what I say to him answers her question even though she hasn't asked it yet. And it's not clear why that's so, but it is so. So in that sense, if you don't think you're asking the question to me, but you're asking the question to a field, then if you can ask the question to the field of the seminar, to us people, as if we were one person, something very fruitful happens.

[74:26]

So in order for me to carry something, we have to have a certain field here, because what I'm talking about is too subtle to be just told in words. So that's part of what it says when there's five requests from three people, is that what it says? When there's five requests from three people, this is the establishment of a field. And when you do that, you have an obligation to expound the teaching for the sake of humanity, it says. It says literally, in the course of humanity and duty, in the capacity of host and guest.

[75:52]

So Yaoshan had the bell rung and he went and taught. And then they talk about this in very big terms. They call this the thunderous issue of command. That's a, you know, It's a nice sound, but I don't know if it's a thunderous issue of command. And then he says, when Yao Shan was silent, and he got down and then he returned to the abbot's room, This is described as an act of supernormal power.

[77:12]

Are these just Zen Buddhists blowing up their scene? I mean, we're Zen Buddhists and we're supernormal. It could be. Let's assume that it's something else. The story has lasted a long time. and been told and passed along by just ordinary folks deeply engaged in practice. But the koan says, this kind of thing can be taught only when there's five requests from three people.

[78:28]

Which means, actually, that I need five requests from you guys. How many people are here? 35? 40? 30? All right, say there's 40 people here. So that would be 10 people. I need, I don't know, 50 or 60 requests. So So I need your help in creating a field which allows this to be talked about. And I can't talk about it if there's a few of you who are kind of bored with it. And this is even more complicated with whether you're bored or not, but rather there's lots of you who have different relationships to Buddhism, different experience, so there's a lot of different levels of familiarity here.

[80:00]

Now I'm talking to you here about the fact of Dharma Sangha practice. The fact of a Dharma friend. In fact, we don't get very far in practice usually unless you have some Dharma friends. Not only do you drink too much of the water of the Dharma ego, but there's a certain field that that occurs among people that deepens each individual's thought.

[81:08]

And I don't think we realize how important friends are. We think friends are nice, but we don't think they're an integral part of our identity and an integral part of our development. But even if you go outside the fields of Buddhism and you look at a new art movement or poetry or architecture, if it's creative, it's usually a group of people. If it's Wittgenstein in Vienna, it's a group of people together who generate a certain kind of consciousness. Or the New York Art School, wherever you look. So this is not only true among friends and practicing together.

[82:38]

It's also a certain skill in feeling the identity of any two or three people. Well, to some extent we do it naturally at dinner or wherever. And so again, when you ask a question, if you can have a feeling of asking it, not just to the field you create with me, But the field of us. And again, as Ivan Illich said to me, he feels... in our conversations that both Buddhism and Catholicism, as he understands it, are a search for ultimate friendship.

[83:58]

So the question I have here is the feeling I have here arising from our discussion before dinner. We were having a pretty interesting discussion to some people. We kind of lost the field of the seminar I think to some extent by afternoon break and by new people and so forth. So, I mean, I can go back to these things and I think it's probably useful for us to go back to them. But I would like to try to do it in the field of looking at this koan. And I don't know if I can do that. It's not so easy, but we're trying. Now, I'd like to take a little pause right there in what I'm saying and go to a couple questions.

[85:41]

I think... We had the question about how you practice. You? Yeah? Could you ask? How do you get into immediate and secondary consciousness? How do you get into immediate and secondary consciousness? Yeah. You want to say that in the mother tongue? In Goich? Goich? Yeah. And you had a question too? I am very sceptical, and I can only imagine how one can, beyond the Koran, and how it is that we sit here, apparently very little active, for an understanding of these terms here, just as they have been at the last day.

[87:09]

And I think there are some pieces of the practice, and I see that in the 10th section, something is missing. Yes. I see that the ten practitioners, mostly outsiders, are only sitting and the way in which their own practice exists. Okay, can you tell me what he said in German? In English? I don't quite understand how the practice of sitting and what we're doing here can lead to a real understanding of these things and to a realization.

[88:29]

So you don't understand how just sitting still in zazen can lead to this kind of understanding and so forth. Is that right? You're a skeptic. Me too. Thank you. Both of those are very good questions.

[89:31]

And sometimes I wonder myself. When we were sitting, there was a highly textured web of insects and birds and little birds and big birds and tiny cries. And the more relaxed you were in not listening, but hearing your own hearing, Or hearing the field of hearing. You could hear all the birds very distinctly. And I think maybe most of you, there was no difficulty in sorting it out.

[90:41]

You could hear the hum of the insects and then other Now you may be able to hear it. in the midst of my voice and Christian's voice. But it's more background now. And the hum of different layers of insects is hard to hear. But when you're sitting still, you can hear this texture in finer and finer detail. We can almost not ever reach the end of the fine structure of being. And when you are listening to such birds, just listening to the field, they are also educating your consciousness.

[91:55]

I think just in a simple sense of Giorgio being a forester, Or your tall father also being a forester. Who was just speaking to me earlier and saying, how you have to listen to the forest. You can't just go out there and have a conversation like you're in a cocktail party. And I would expect that, this is his father's words, and I would expect that Giorgio and his father hear the forest in a way we don't hear it. So in a way they're consciousness has been educated to hear the forest the way some people are educated to hear music.

[93:14]

And we are enormously complex beings of an enormous simultaneity.

[93:19]

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