Because if we're actually speaking about practice, we're speaking about, yeah, how we're put together. And often what's closest to us, most intimate to us. And the... Space we have here, you know, we make together. So it's strangely kind of intimacy or, yeah, some connection with others.

[01:04]

Again, it's that way if we actually look at practice, which is to look at how we exist, how we might change how we exist. We do not accept how we exist. And it's a continual question. You don't answer it once and for all. It's an ongoing question. How do we exist? How do we find the measure of our being in the world. Can we find the measure of our being in the world? And if this phrase makes any sense, is the measure always the same?

[02:19]

So we have this, as usual, some kind of topic, right? We have to start somewhere. So now we're starting in the golden wind. And this poster was really a beauty. I liked it. We have other groups calling us up, saying, can we use the same poster, put a different title? And I said, and it's no longer the golden wind. But, you know, it's a poetic phrase. Golden wind. But it's got to be something more than poetry for it to have any relevance in Zen practice. Aber er muss über die Poesie hinausgehen, wenn er denn in der Zen-Praxis Bedeutung hat.

[03:44]

Und auch Bedeutung für euch, außer dass er einfach schön klingt, goldener Wind. So we do have to look at where the phrase comes from. Das heißt, wir schauen, wo der Satz herkommt. And of course it comes from a koan. A monk, a monk, always a monk asks, you know. A clown asks, a monk asks, somebody asks. Yeah, Gunda asked. What about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? What about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? And one of the two or three most famous Zen masters of all times, young men, famous because he created really much of...

[04:50]

Zen dialogic technique. Zen, I mean koans, I think it helps to understand that koans are a particular form of Chinese Buddhism. The Zen school, the Chan school, the Zen school's way of making Indian Buddhism its own. It was the Zen school, Chan school's way of making Indian Buddhism its own. And then we can ask, how do we make Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese Buddhism our own? That's another question, not for this evening.

[06:23]

Tonight we can only really introduce some of the topic. But how... You can't practice Zen in the West without wondering, can I make this practice my own? And maybe the way the Chinese made it their own doesn't apply to us. But surprisingly, these stories, these dialogues that Chinese came up with, are surprisingly contemporary. This is much of the art and philosophy of that time, actually. Why? That's another question. Why? That's another question. I don't know what she's saying, but I knew she didn't say enough.

[07:49]

Yeah, so does this, can a phrase like this, the question like this, why does the, what about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? You can ask, I think we start, we want to start with what this is about. Because certainly a phrase like the golden wind It's not an ordinary wind, it's a golden wind. And the body, the body exposed in the golden wind. Is your body exposed in the golden wind? Do you have a feeling of your body being

[08:51]

open to some kind of subtle wind or some kind of other state of mind or being? And if you imagine, that's a possibility. then it implies there's some other kind of way of being than our usual mind. Our usual mind and body, perhaps. And that has to sink in. sink in, absorb. Is there some... Yeah, we have our particular life.

[10:03]

What is our life... What are the potentialities of our life? Have we used up all the potentialities now? I ask myself sometimes, am I old because I'm a grandfather? Am I young because I have a three-year-old daughter? Or am I old because I'm supposed to be old at 68? I used to think that was being old at 68. Yeah, am I getting older because I had an operation last year and so forth? Maybe so. Maybe I'm a good example of the tree withering and the leaves falling.

[11:07]

Yeah. But at whatever age I am, living is a process of absorbing living. I don't really have any idea whether I'm old or not. The only thing I notice is there's sort of a sense, let's put it simply, less alternatives. Even if I live another 20, 30 years, I don't have any idea of all the lifetimes I imagined possible before. But then, when you're young, You don't have anything to compare your life to.

[12:21]

And we often look back to our childhood. Many people look back to their childhood. As a wonderful kind of stress-free time. But when I look at Sophia, this is the name of my three-year-old. Not my three-year-old. She belongs to herself, anyway. In a way, she's in a constant state of tension. You know, thinking about, as I get older, I'll be able to do everything better.

[13:23]

So she's always aware that she can't quite do things well enough yet, but she will be able to. Yeah, I remember my grandson. I was in Portugal. He's half Portuguese. And he wanted to go swimming in the swimming pool where we were. And his mother, my daughter, said, no, you can't go in the swimming pool. When you're too young to go in by yourself. He said, get bigger, have an ocean. Well, he's bigger, he doesn't have an ocean yet. But you know, you grow up thinking it's all going to be good when you're an adult. And then you get to be an adult and it's not so good.

[14:37]

You wonder, the promise of being an adult doesn't quite live up to the promise. So what are we going to do about our life? The permanent things change. What about when we feel in ourselves things are trees withering? Not in sense of age, but just when something has changed. Things that we depended on before aren't there. Now we could, the image of this story is just, you know, autumn. Yeah, what about what about when it's autumn and The trees' leaves change and... And you have red and yellow and golden leaves.

[15:58]

Yeah, but this is not golden leaves, it's the golden wind. So this is, you know... Let's just say simply the monk is asking a question, certainly in the context of practice. But he doesn't ask an obvious question. You know, what is the truth of Buddhism or something? How do I practice? Yes, what about when the tree withers and the leaves fall? Now the style in Zen is to give an answer that is at the same level as the question, the superficial level of the question.

[17:07]

You could understand the answer. What about when the wind is full of golden leaves? So the idea is the question should conceal the question. The answer should conceal the answer. Because often our life is concealed from ourself. Hidden from ourself. So then we could ask, what is practice? Could practice be a way to enter into our concealed life?

[18:14]

Is each of us leading our life to its fullest? In the way we'd like to or have imagined we'd like to? And are we able to lead our life to its fullest with others? Even when you meet a stranger, do you feel a fullness in the time with just a clerk in a store? And do we need to change into the... Is there... Yeah, is there some kind of change we could do?

[19:25]

Or is there already some way we are that we need to develop? Is there in some way a concealed life waiting to be born? Like in the spring comes and there's a concealed life in the tree and a concealed life in the ground. Yeah, a question like this, if this is a question which is now endured for more than a thousand years, Obviously, you don't come to the end of it easily. But it must be something, I think, that you're able to let a question work in you. Not necessarily with the sense that you want an answer.

[20:43]

You just let the question work in you. You know... A couple of years ago, I don't know, three or four years ago, I got lost with Marie-Louise, my wife, in the forest near Creston. No, near Johanneshof. And it was summertime out and we had short sleeves on. And in the forest, it was freezing cold. And it was actually hailed in the middle.

[21:44]

I don't know what the heck it was doing, but it was hailing in there. And we were really freezing. After about two and a half hours, we were kind of really freezing. And we made the mistake of cutting across some of these canyons in the forest. And we found no signs saying eight kilometers to villages whose name we don't know. Now, if someone appeared out of the forest at that time, to point the short way back out of the forest, When such a person appears, none of us would think, that's not the kind of person I'd take advice from.

[22:46]

We'll wait for someone else. I'm not going to ask him. You just don't think that he's a human being. How are you? What are you doing out here in the forest? Why don't we feel that way when we meet anyone, anywhere? I don't think that's a simple question. Why do we have such an open sense of being and yet we don't feel that in most contexts? Why does it take such a difficult situation sometimes before you really recognize just the presence of being itself? Warum braucht es häufig so eine schwierige Situation, um diesen Sinn, um dieses Gefühl für Sein überhaupt zu bekommen?

[24:05]

Is the presence of being itself maybe something like the golden wind? Could young men meant something like that? Anyway, it's this question of what? What is the fullness of being? What hides the being of others from us and hides our own being from ourselves? These questions are in the monk's question. What about when our culture doesn't make any sense to us?

[25:05]

What about when our life doesn't make any sense to us? But yet at the same time we have an intimation of being that isn't, fullness of being in ourselves that isn't being met. We have an intimation in ourselves. What is intimation? A feeling, a sense of... An intuition. The potential of being in ourselves which isn't being met. Now even the simplest zazen instructions imply some kind of potential. Now, maybe I'd like to mention some very simple zazen instructions.

[26:37]

Yeah. But I don't mean to say that it's necessary to do zazen. Because some of the teachings you can discover through You know, mindfulness practices. But the root of the teachings is in meditation practices. So if you want to discover the root of them in yourself, then probably you need to practice meditation. But we're also here talking, so we're talking about the root of the teachings, we're also talking about the fruit of the teachings. And how also we can find the fruit of the teachings intimated or sensed already in our life. Okay, one of the simple sasen instructions is don't scratch.

[27:58]

Yeah. Why not? There's nothing nicer than to scratch an itch. But when you sit, particularly in the beginning, you find there's a lot of itches that occur. And if you scratch them, They move around. Scratch them here and they appear over here. And if they're not mosquitoes, sometimes they are, but usually they're not. So you're just trying to sit still. Why do these... Itches appear.

[29:02]

Partly, actually. We could say a kind of acupuncture body is awakening. And your energy is beginning to work differently. But also you don't... It's very difficult to sit still, actually. And to find a stillness in yourself where you don't have to react to things. And if you discover after a while that you can actually just sit there and not scratch, You're actually creating a new kind of space in yourself where you can allow yourself to feel something and not act on it. So you don't have to repress things and you don't have to express things.

[30:05]

You can just let yourself feel something completely. Not only can you let yourself feel things that you might be afraid to feel if you thought you might act on them, But you begin to feel things that are just too subtle to act on. And the way you function, mental formations function, If there's a tendency to act on, they're simplified. They're simplified to what can be acted on. Or that you can imagine acting on.

[31:34]

But if you really find this ability to sit still, Because there's already, I mean, the example I always use is if you look at an ocean wave, the shape of the ocean wave is its desire to return to stillness. The shape of the ocean wave is its desire to return to stillness. If the water wasn't always trying to return to being still, it would just fly off somewhere. The mind, after a while through practice, you discover the mind is also quite like that.

[32:34]

it wants to return to stillness. But we don't let it. Because, well, let's say we have a kind of syntactical thinking. Now there's an unusual word, paratactic. And what it means is to set things side by side with no connection between them. Like blue sky, broken dinner plate. Now, you may find your mind immediately starts to think, blue sky, broken dinner plate. You try to relate them. And Sergei Eisenstein, the Russian filmmaker, he used paratactic techniques in movie making. I think he was the first to do it. Mm-hmm. He would, you know, like a simple example, he would show a woman crying.

[34:14]

And then the next frame was a baby. And you'd immediately assume a woman's crying because of her baby. Or he'd show a woman crying and then he'd show a field of flowers, golden flowers, blowing in the wind. Oder er zeigt ein Bild, eine Frau weint, und im nächsten Bild ein Feld voller goldener Blumen. And then you think, why is she crying if the world is so beautiful? Und dann denkst du, wieso weint sie, wenn die Welt doch so wunderschön ist? But he doesn't present any of those connections. He just puts the two pictures beside each other. And we supply the connections. But you know, I found when I was, I don't know how old, 20 maybe, I went to see Ivan the Terrible, one of his, I saw all of his movies, but Ivan the Terrible is the one that I saw the most often.

[35:30]

And I didn't know anything about movie making at the time, you know, except I saw some movies now and then. But I found myself entering into the tactical approach. And I just, for some reason, didn't supply connection between the pictures. I just looked at this picture, and he'd show another scene, I'd look at it, and I, for some reason, didn't make syntactical connections. And I found I entered into another kind of space. It lasted some days. So I saw the movie eight times or something. I began to get addicted to it.

[36:33]

what it did to me. I found myself exposed to, I don't know about a golden wind, but a silver wind. Mm-hmm. Somehow my body and mind were refreshed by not supplying syntax. There was a verticality to the world. Not just a horizontality. From past to present to future. By verticality, it was like heaven and earth were more related.

[37:52]

There was a timelessness. So this was one of the experiences that led me four years later or so to start practicing Zen. Because this stayed with me. What was it that Eisenstein was doing in his movies that allowed me to stop syntactical thinking? and come into a more paratactical thinking. Where really Zen says, practice with just this. Just this. And Paul Rosenblum, you know, teaches yourself sometimes. He likes the Japanese word kori, K-O-R-I.

[39:01]

Yeah, which means, yeah, just here or just this. But it actually means, if you look at the character, the kanji, it means inside this. So what about each particular, inside each particular? Not just this, just this, but inside this. Now this kind of experience, this kind of openness to the verticality of the world, Really, and it feels like a kind of timelessness.

[40:11]

Das fühlt sich wirklich an wie eine Art Zeitlosigkeit. Is opened into from a simple sasen instruction like don't scratch. Wird geöffnet durch eine ganz schlichte, einfache Anleitung im sasen, kratz dich nicht. You open into a mind or body mind. Du öffnest dich in einen Geist oder Körpergeist. that enters into the measure of the world at each moment. And how memory and experience settle in the vertical world. How memory and experience settle, open up in the vertical world. Memory and experience. Yeah. Which doesn't happen when we just go along. But I'm calling horizontally. When we perhaps breathe each moment of the world. Now, what I'm talking about isn't something esoteric.

[41:36]

We're not talking about something that happens after 20 years of Zen practice. Right now, when you're breathing, if you take a, you know, Breathe each particular. Feel something like on each moment inside this. Or it could be maybe there's a potential or some kind of feeling close to it could be inside this. Because through this practice of not scratching, you've broken the glue, the connection between thought and action. And certainly you still act. But now you can feel things much more, fully without limiting to what you can act on.

[43:03]

You can feel things much more fully without limiting it to what you can act on. Yes, I see that. So already, just from what I'm speaking about now, we can see that your body perhaps is exposed to the phenomenal world. and to your own memory and experience in some new way. Yeah, there's a new kind of dwelling in the world. You can still dwell your usual way, in your habits, But now you can inhabit your habits in a different way.

[44:24]

Okay, that's enough for this evening, I think. Yeah, I just wanted to get started. And So what time will we start tomorrow morning? Ten o'clock? Okay. I look forward to seeing you. Thank you very much.

[44:59]

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