You want to say it in English? What you said about sometimes when you cook your karma and you get into also, I don't know, negative states or bad moods and sometimes it's hard to distinguish what is just a projection on somebody else that you interact with or what is just a real conflict that you have to solve. Yeah. There was, thank you. There was one other question someone asked me during the break. Anybody want to bring it up?

[01:02]

Yeah. I have a question. Several times you mentioned identity today. And I tried to understand what I said. What does it mean? And the more I tried to understand, Yes, okay. Of course, the advantage of teaching in a place like Crestone is I can go very slowly.

[02:08]

We can take one... If we divided this seminar up into a hundred, we could take one one-hundredth of it and spend two weeks on it. And I should teach at a pace which you yourself can move at, which is not the same as a mental pace. But we're developing a lay practice here together And there's some things we should discuss and I'm trying to find out how to do it with you. Mm-hmm. And so much of this is a craft that I want to keep, I would like to really be able to have the time to talk about the craft of it.

[03:22]

Right now I'm speaking words That my brain is my thinking mental capacity is putting together. But the glue of those words really is holding them together is coming from a feeling in my Schatzkister. And though I'm talking to you and you are listening, of course, on an intellectual and mental level, I can feel that this middle tandem is quite open in most of us. And the lower tongue then is a little harder for us to understand and feel, I think.

[04:43]

Now, what Giulio brought up, when we're In a situation, you can feel that you're coming from your karma. And your mood is affecting your relationships. But as your practice becomes more settled, you can really set your mood and karma aside and relate to the situation almost purely from the ingredients present in the situation.

[05:44]

but that's a kind of craft and you have to learn and make mistakes to discover the craft and you can see the ingredients of your mood or how you can pull some energy out of the mood and be not maybe 100%, but more, etc. And what I'm really talking about is identity. And... Again, I'm playing with the problems of the idea that Zen has no self and etc.

[06:58]

But when you work with your breath, I think it's useful to recognize that you're kind of identified with your breath. And I would say that we could define identity as the point from which you organize yourself. But I'm actually a little frustrated right now trying to feel out how to make this more understandable. I remember, I'll tell you a little story. The word for practitioner in Zen is unsui. And it means a cloud water person.

[08:11]

And it means really this isn't just a, it's a kind of image that can be part of your identity. Water has a very powerful course. It flows around things, but it makes its way to the ocean. And the cloud is quite free. It's another form of water. So we have things to do, etc., but you can also let this image of being a cloud water person inform your walking in the world.

[09:13]

And I was, one experience I had, which just one of many small experiences, but it was quite, affected me deeply. I was walking down a street in San Francisco. Anyway, I was thinking it was Broadway. I wish it was Broadway, but I don't remember the name right now. But I was just walking along and there was this cloud overhead. And this may sound a little funny to you, but I looked up at the cloud and I thought, the cloud is overhead. And then I saw that the cloud was actually over the park on my right.

[10:29]

And the cloud was also over some buildings down there. And I realized if I was the cloud, I mean, I'm under the moon, I'm over the trees, you know, etc. Actually, the cloud has no location. And the image of being a cloud water person really became very tangible for me. Of course, you're always in a specific place, but that space feels quite free. It feels like it's also no location. So now one way to cook your soup is to realize that you're cooking or incubating yourself.

[11:30]

So you might take a line from the koan that sticks with you. And take some decisive moment in your life. And if you have a piece of paper, write it down on a piece of paper. Or just write it down inside yourself. And let these two interact with each other, become ingredients in your soup. And just do it out of a kind of feeling or an intuition. And then put it into your background mind. And allow it to cook in your soup. You know, one of the early etymological roots of the word body is brewing vat. So you're making beer, maybe.

[13:16]

But you are kind of brewing your mind. Now, we're asking, someone asked me, why you think I could answer, I don't know. But what did you ask? The two aren't honoring water. and I think in the choir, which we play here, it is also, well, it is also a kind of, [...] No one knows what mind is.

[14:24]

But I think we should come to some kind of feeling about it or some territory that we can talk about. I think in the Catholic dictionary it defines soul as the place from which thought activity arises. And the early church connected soul with breath and spirit and spirit with breath and so forth. And soul does seem to be different from spirit in the sense it seems more grounded. And I'm not trying to look at this in a religious sense, but just when we talk about our soul or identity or psyche, what are we talking about?

[15:37]

And I think we're talking about usually one of two things. The place from which thoughts or feelings arise or the place which organizes your experience. And that, and I would say most psychotherapy is working with how you organize your experience. And to make that more inclusive. And Buddhism is too.

[16:51]

But it's also emphasizing you can move that center of organization out. You can make that center of organization emptiness itself. And you can move it out of your thoughts and karma. And when you practice meditation, in effect, that's what you're doing. Or you're creating the possibility of doing this. Now tomorrow morning I want to go back into the koan so that we can get more of a feeling for it since it's awakened in us. But this evening I'd like to end pretty soon. But since we're not meeting tonight maybe we can have a little time right now to go on.

[17:52]

So I want to get across this feeling of incubation and this ability to change your organization point or a very good term that Castaneda uses to change your assemblage point. Now, let me give you one yogic, yogacara definition of mind. When you develop this feeling between mind and heart, and you also open that up with your breath, you're weaving your consciousness with your breath.

[19:15]

And now the first alchemical process in practice is joining mind and breath. Now, when you join your attention, the effort to do that is the first process. When you join your... And I'm going back to where I started in the beginning. When you join your mind and heart with your breath, You're creating a certain kind of feeling. Now that feeling, going back to the chanting exercise, which is basically a changing, reversing your circulation exercise, And this is an image which is also we call a subtle breath.

[20:19]

And you can begin to locate this process here in your lower, below your navel. And I think it's not by chance that this is also the area where our sexual equipment is. And this is a kind of womb mind. And as I said, this point is actually identified between the kidneys where in the embryo, between the kidneys, the genitals are. So this is also called, and I sometimes call it the embryonic point.

[21:23]

And sometimes I call it where mind arises or where form, activity arises. So when you get to know this point and you can begin weaving into it with your breath, And your mind-heart-shin connection is actually a kind of elixir or feeling which you can move into this lower place here. Now, I just gave you this word again.

[22:37]

It's this short word, enshu. And it's called relational co-arising is the middle way. And it's also called guarding the circle of light in the middle. The center where phenomena originate. This is also called the ocean of breath. Now you're not actually breathing here, but we call it the ocean of breath. And one thing we can say about this point is it's tiny. Sometimes it's called a seed. But it's the point from which you feel quite boundless and open.

[23:41]

And it's also in this teaching, it's a place you guard and take care of. Now, when you begin to feel your mind as a sensory organ, Does that make sense? Generally we think of mind as consciousness. And that's not what mind means in Buddhism. Consciousness is only a part of mind. And because this is a yogic teaching, This is both a level of reality and an experiential level. So this is not something thin and completely insubstantial, it's something you can feel.

[24:47]

So when you have this, what I'm calling mind as a sensory organ, in other words, again, It's not just consciousness which happens to be the puddle in which sounds are and thoughts are and your history is and so forth. It's not just a container for the accumulated sense impressions. It actually, you have a feeling of it as a sense organ independent of hearing and seeing and so forth.

[25:56]

Now, that feeling of mind as a sense organ is most powerful when you're located and guard this circle of light here. And if you can keep that strong and keep your ordinary sense of the world You can survive almost anything. But if your energy starts moving through your chakras, and you don't have a strongly established anchor, it can begin to disrupt the whole way you structure and organize your personality and self.

[27:00]

And you can feel without boundaries. And open to everything that comes in, from inside and outside. So if you're going to proceed in meditation practice, this tangible sense of mind needs to be located. And if you can't locate that, then you can take refuge in your breath. And always find yourself that you can be in your breath rather free from all the thoughts that come and go. So this ability to bring together mind and heart, what you're actually bringing together is these two fields of medicine, these two medicine fields.

[28:02]

And you're bringing together with your breath as the tool Into your lower tandem. More or less below the navel. Mm-hmm. Sometimes, for example, when I'm on the subway or so, I realize that some emotions or thoughts come that in some kind of... I don't feel that on my own. And when I look around, then sometimes I get some idea where those kind of thoughts can come from.

[29:07]

Is that what you mean with a kind of sense organ? The strange thing about this point here, and this is what I'm emphasizing in this seminar, This isn't the only teaching in Buddhism but it's one I'm emphasizing now. When you're emphasizing this point it's also relational. It's co-arising. So it's very interactive.

[30:16]

It's strangely extremely stabilizing and yet interactive with everybody you meet. So that sense of mind where you feel things happening in your mind It's also open to other people's feelings. But you have to know how to seal yourself. Or to stay here and let me tell you a story. The story I said I had to ask permission. Just because it's personal. Someone told me that they saw they were away from home when their father died. And they came home and of course it's quite a powerful time to be and if you felt close to your father or mother it's very powerful.

[31:32]

He came into the room. And I don't know if I'm telling the story correctly, but I'll tell it as I felt it. He didn't quite know whether that his father would be on the couch. So suddenly he saw his father lying on the couch. And his mother went upstairs and he was left alone with his father. And he went over to his father with all the expectations we usually have when we see somebody lying on the couch. And he looked down at his father and there was nothing there. It was completely empty. And he said he almost fell into this emptiness. And then he looked up And he felt his father's mind present in the room.

[33:01]

And the feeling he'd had with his father when his father was alive was present there in the room, but no longer concentrated in the body. Yeah. This is a mystery. We don't know life, death, waking, dreaming. And if you're studying Buddhism, you're studying the relationship between waking and dreaming. And deep sleep. And the parallel states in meditation, of deep meditation and at various levels of meditation. And, of course, waking and dreaming. This is the most important subjects of your life. most important subjects of your life and this teaching is a way to study it but we don't fully understand it but we can say certain things

[34:20]

If this person, when he looked up, felt his father's mind in the room, he accepts that as real. He doesn't say this is just my imagination. However, If you're practicing Buddhism, you don't then suddenly... Now, what Yanmin is trying to teach us, you don't then say, ah, then this is something. You saw it, you felt it, you don't deny it, but you say, this is also empty. You don't have to.

[35:32]

I'm just saying this is the way in Zen we practice with our body, our mind, and these more subtle dimensions of mind that appear. So this teaching here of young men's is a teaching that you are generating your present consciousness and you're not born with the mature mind of enlightenment. It's something you both realize and develop. And as I said, this sense of your whole body as a field of mind, which in a subtle way, a non-graspable way, you can feel consciousness stirring up.

[36:48]

You can feel sense impressions coming into it. You can feel it as a kind of primordial silence without arising into form at all. Without arising into form at all. And the taste of this when you do meditation and you begin to feel some kind of boundarylessness, it's called the Dharmakaya. And that's your first taste of it, and it happens to beginners. And when you begin to have that feeling more and more, it begins to rearrange you, to recontextualize your experience. And as you begin to develop a more subtle body from this experience, we call that the sambhogakaya.

[37:58]

And we call it the merit body because it arises from your subtle mind. And a merit, because if you're involved in compromising actions and so forth, you can't have this kind of subtle experience. So the last thing I'd like to do is go back to my list here. And say, we have here, as I said, the first things you feel externally are quite present, thoughts and your physical body.

[39:00]

But when your mind begins to be able to be still and not respond to every distraction, you're beginning to, as I've said, change the ingredients that incubate identity. So I just added a few things here. When your practice gets more subtle and you begin to feel your backbone as your breath. Or as I said here, your mind is a sensory organ. Objects are felt in the mind and this is deeper than thoughts. And your breath mind in your daily life now is now settled and joined.

[40:03]

How experiences will happen to you will be different. Your action, you're the same person, same history, same look, but the way you move in space and with other people is different. And the way your memories come up into your experience is different. And then fourth I put, when this is integrated as a field, that whole field that you feel is your primary level of organization. Now, I think if you can look at this, you can begin to see that what this koan is talking about is this territory.

[41:04]

And when you can enter into this and still have room to turn around, but still subtle ideas of self get involved in. Can I ask, what do you mean by turn around? I'm quoting the koan. You knew that, right? It means that you can move in this kind of space without disturbing it or losing it. Does that make sense? And But when subtle ideas of self creep in here, this can be this change, particularly in the early stages, the whole way your energy works and you're not ready for what happens here if subtle ideas of self creep in.

[42:29]

Can you say that a little bit? Yeah. If ideas of self come in at these stages of meditation, It can disturb the way your energy works. So that at this stage it's important to find some simple clear way to keep practicing. And if you can't practice in, you can't obviously live in a monastery all the time or be in a Sashin. And even that doesn't necessarily help. So you have to find some way of locating yourself And the most basic again is the sense of your breath, your backbone, and your tendon.

[43:39]

And I think that's enough for this afternoon. I don't think I can say this much better than I've done. But I hope it gives you some background for looking at the koan. And much more important, looking at your own life as a mind and body. And to recognize these possibilities are there through mindfulness practice and paying attention to your breath. Und ihr erkennt, dass diese Möglichkeiten da sind, mithilfe von Achtsamkeitspraxis und indem ihr eurem Atem Aufmerksamkeit schafft. That you're actually weaving a more subtle and integrated identity.

[44:40]

Und dass ihr im Grunde eine subtilere und feinere Identität lebt. And a new way, an additional way of organizing your identity. Und eine neue und zusätzliche Art, eure Identität zu organisieren. Organizing your experience or your becoming. So let's sit for a few minutes.

[45:00]

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