So if I look at, do you mind my using you, Martin, as an object of contemplation here? Okay. If I look at Martin, and I just look at Martin, and I don't think about Martin, I don't even know who he is exactly. He might be Bodhi Kramer. Bodhi Martin. Yeah. If I introduce no conceptual thought or no analysis, I have a certain kind of mind that sees Martin but doesn't think about Martin. That's called up their immediate consciousness. And that consciousness is also an energetic field rooted in a certain state of mind.

[01:02]

And it's rooted in non-graspable feeling. Okay. As soon as I look at Martin and think, God, he looks young. I mean, my Buddha, he looks young. And I think he's younger. And I think he's younger than me. That's called secondary consciousness. And it's a different kind of energetic field. And it requires me to stop and think about Martin. And that changes the kind of consciousness I have and it's rooted in conceptual thought and not rooted in non-graspable feeling.

[02:28]

Now, I don't know if you've ever chanted or read aloud in church or in Buddhist practices or something like that. But if I have a chant, for instance, You don't have to translate that. Or I say it in English, avalokiteshvara bodhisattva, when practicing deeply the prajnaparamita, etc. If I decide, say often I'm chanting with German people, and I know these chants by heart, But if a few people are pronouncing it, the words funny or different, it throws me off and I can't chant anymore.

[03:36]

So I have to read the card. Now, if I read the card, or sometimes I just decide to read the card to kind of read it with everybody If I read the card, I have one kind of mind, Avalokiteshvara, Bodhisattva, wind practicing, etc. If I decide I want to put away the card and chant it, I actually have to go over a little bump to do it. Because if I keep the same mind that read it, I can't chant it. I have to shift to a physically-based, feeling-based mind which chants without my thinking. So I'm reading, kanji, zai, bo, satsu, gyo, jin, han, then I have to let my breath, han, ya, ra, mi, da, ji, sho, kin, and it's actually an energetic kind of shift.

[05:05]

Do you understand what I mean? Okay. So, then if we go to borrowed consciousness, if I know Martin's birthday, If I know Martin's birthday, this is borrowed consciousness. Because I can't, by any means of analysis, even though I can tell Martin's younger than I am, I cannot figure out his birthday without knowing it from outside. Nor can Martin know his own birthday. He had to be told by his parents. He can know I must have been born two or three years ago, but he wouldn't know the dates. So even when Martin tells me his birth date, which I'm not going to ask you to do publicly, when Martin shifts to a mind that accesses his memory for his birth date, he shifted energetic levels.

[06:17]

Now, if you're going to see a tree as a poem, you're probably going to be in immediate consciousness. And you're not going to be thinking, oh, this is a tree, because already you won't see a poem. So a person, a yogic practitioner who wants to think creatively rests his mind in immediate consciousness and only goes to secondary or borrowed consciousness when it's necessary. Yeah, so most of us don't realize when we start thinking conceptually, you're actually robbing yourself of the present. No, we know this when we take a walk or go sunbathing or something, but we really don't know it.

[07:51]

Want some water? Yeah. That's all right. Well, I'll have hers. So this is a basic traditional Buddhist distinction between immediate, secondary, and borrowed. And it's actually useful in practice to get to know the difference.

[08:58]

And to feel the difference. Now I think most people, a lot of people, feel so challenged by our educational system And their ego is so sensitive to what other people think. They keep their mind mostly in borrowed consciousness. And sometimes they go into secondary consciousness. And they'd almost never in immediate consciousness, they'd consider it daydreaming or something. And so they're always concerned with, do I have this information?

[10:01]

Would I know the answer if somebody asked me? I'd better study and so forth. And my opinion is, if you live in secondary consciousness, you're going to die young. You're going to have heart attacks, you're going to have anxiety, and so forth. Because borrowed consciousness is not energetically integrated with your system. I mean, borrowed consciousness is an extremely useful, exciting state of mind. But it's still borrowed. It's not your own.

[11:01]

And it's not a place to live all the time. Now, if I was designing an educational system, I would design a way in which we teach children to live in immediate consciousness and make use of secondary and borrowed consciousness. Instead, our educational systems reward you for borrowed consciousness. So you end up having a specialized group of creative people who don't live there, and most of us do. Instead of reaching into the natural creativity of all of us. Okay, now I think we have created enough of a sense of the topography of consciousness.

[12:18]

The structure of consciousness. And the fact which I think you get that you can experience these bumps you can experience the topography of consciousness. And with that information, I think we're prepared to go to the long list. But I think it's time for a break. So, 20 or 25 minutes? Thanks. I'd like to ask Eureka, what do you feel we should be, what do you feel coming up right now? Or what we might talk about? I feel that the topic that is in the room and that you could perhaps address more or enlighten more or ask Roshi more about it is the topic of how do I protect myself when I make myself familiar with something new in the meditation practice.

[13:47]

where on the one hand I try to go along this borderline and to push forward into these other areas and where I feel that the membranes with which I have protected myself become more transparent, And on the other hand, through this changed perception, through this refined, sharpened perception, I also suddenly notice how much more vulnerable I become or how much thinner my skin becomes and how much more exposed I am to exactly these vibrations or these non-aggressive feelings that surround me, that connect me with others, And this is also something that was mentioned in the individual conversations that I had with you during the breaks. And I think this is a very important topic at the beginning of the meditation practice.

[14:50]

And in Buddhism, or as Roshi explained it in different ways, at this point it is necessary to acquire skills to open oneself, as well as to re-settle oneself. and he uses the expression to seal, in deviation to the term, simply to seal. This is known to all of us, that we shut ourselves off, leave nothing in, leave nothing out and basically interrupt this gas exchange. And that is not meant with sealing, with sealing. And when I think of my own practice, which was also very closely linked to the fact that I had translated and was always together with a lot of people. And sometimes I was sitting here and suddenly realized I couldn't do it anymore.

[15:57]

So there's so much that touches me, moves me, that I catch, that I can't process, that I can't get rid of. How do I deal with it? And sometimes I have reached the point where I have already thought that I cannot continue. Or my practice does not develop fast enough or not parallel enough that I can somehow process it. And the interesting thing about sealing now is that it is so similar to what Bernd asked this morning, what is it actually with the fourth state of mind? I can't really describe exactly what it is or how you do it. I just know that in the moment of my practice, where I said, I want to learn to become more open, more transparent, but at the same time direct my attention to this sealing, that something has happened, where it started to take place.

[17:00]

And Yes, certainly a great help was always there when I was at the brink of feeling overwhelmed, just trying to feel my breath again. to perceive how I sit, to feel my seat cushion, to feel where my legs lie on the seat cushion, to try to go into hearing, or to hear into hearing, or into the smell, simply in a very simple sense of perception, and to anchor myself there again and to relocate myself again, without hiding myself now. It's my turn. What did you talk about? Well, I talked about what my experiences at the beginning of my practice was that in some way I felt becoming more permeable, more walking this barrier or this line you described today, and that that was often accompanied with easily feeling overwhelmed, with new sensations, with a sharpened or changed awareness that I couldn't quite place or locate in my experience of my developing practice.

[18:37]

and also that early on in my practice I translated for you that I often sat here and somehow felt completely shaken around by all the stuff coming from other people and my own psyche and sometimes I felt I couldn't continue and then I had to find a way To see for myself, and I talked a little bit about sealing and asked whether this was something people are interested in. And I would like you to continue. Yeah. And I also said it's very similar to what Bernd expressed this morning about this fourth state of mind, that actually the question alone, what is it, something starts happening, the chemistry of this fourth state of mind starts appearing. So when I started asking myself or feeling this need of sealing myself and focusing on that something started to happen, which was like sealing myself, and I can't really explain what it is.

[19:52]

Well, as a translator, you're in a kind of dangerous position because you don't know what you're translating. And often afterwards, people will ask Ulrike, what did he say? And she'll say, I don't know what he said. I just translated it. And actually, I believe they've done some studies of the process of, I can't remember it now, but the process by which information goes into speaking, into thinking, and so forth. Then if I remember correctly, the way certain things are brought into speech bypasses thinking. So I think a good translator does not think.

[20:57]

Something happens where it comes in and goes out in English, but she doesn't process it in a thinking way. Some of my translators who are good thinkers can't translate. Some of my students who are good thinkers can't translate because they're so slow because they're thinking about it. So why she as a translator is in a somewhat dangerous position because her thinking mind in a sense is turned off and you can just pour the teachings into her. And they begin affecting her and she doesn't even know what's been poured in.

[22:04]

Because a lot of teaching is... is in an area where I know you're going to resist certain things, so I have to actually get you to look at this way, and then I, you know, sort of take the salt or give you the sugar or something. But there's a certain help to the process, because if you're practicing, usually you can't... You can absorb at the rate of which your practice will lead you, but you can't absorb faster than that.

[23:04]

So in some ways, the feeling of being overwhelmed or affected too much by some new way of looking at things Or by your own material coming up in ways in which you're not used to. It's somehow usually in balance with the progression of one's own ability to sit still. And often the pain of sitting and the distraction of sitting, which keeps one from being really still and open,

[24:05]

is a built-in sort of intuitive control device that allows you only to absorb at a rate which you can handle. This is surprisingly true. I've been practiced fairly intimately with I don't know, 20,000 people, something, a large number. I've only met three or four maybe people who you actually had to slow down their practice because they were getting too rapidly over their head. Is there something any one of you would like to ask Ulrike or ask me in relationship to what Ulrike said? .

[25:31]

You just said that we have this safety device that we can only take in so much as we can actually process. So which kind of area of mind or consciousness would you assign this ability? Spiritual metabolism. There's a basic direction to being. There's a kind of direction to being. In the sense that the movement of water is based on stillness. If water wasn't always returning to stillness, it wouldn't move.

[27:04]

Because its basic state is still, it moves. And having been pushed around, it doesn't disperse. It settles back down towards stillness. As we say, water finds its own level and so forth. Well, there's a movement in beingness towards stillness. And toward a certain kind of integration. And that is a kind of control device in you. But sometimes we have to get... skillful or learn some things to mature ourselves, integrate ourselves.

[28:19]

And I believe Ulrike spoke about sealing yourself. Now what I would like you, I would like to speak about sealing yourself, but I would like to suggest something else first. I think we've ended up covering quite a bit today and yet last night. And I think that the work with Martin and the other Quaternity teachers, what I feel is you all have an ability to talk to yourselves and talk to each other. And I feel you're sharing with each other and with yourself to a greater degree than most a seminar presented with all this stuff would do.

[29:31]

And I think a lot of this practice requires a sangha. Requires a feeling that although... requires a feeling that as you're in this unshareable territory, you share it with someone. You share it by being present with each other. It's like you both say, oh, we both know we're in this unshareable territory. We can see it in each other's eyes. So even though you don't talk about it necessarily, you can feel that somebody else knows the territory.

[30:49]

And this sense of having a Dharma friend, a consequential friend, And to me, a friend is someone who can, a real friend is someone who can say something to you that you hear whether you want to or not. And who you give permission to say something to you that you're willing to hear. I spent, Ulrike and I spent several days recently with Ivan Illich. And we both agreed that at least his experience of Catholicism and our experience of Buddhism is that both are really, in essence, a search for ultimate friendship.

[32:11]

We agreed to maybe put together a conversation with a few people called Two Traditions of Prayer, Meditation and Friendship. So what I'm saying is that part of this seminar is a kind of processing we do just by having dinner, talking with each other, hanging out, looking at the trees and so forth. So I want to leave enough fallow time, unstructured time. But I'd also like you to do some things on your own. So I'd like you to read the koan tonight and see if any phrase sticks with you for no reason.

[33:38]

Just it sticks with you, it's kind of peculiar, some phrase. So I'd like you to read the koan tonight and see if any phrase Or some phrase sticks with you from this seminar. So that's one thing, like you identify such a phrase. And then it would be also good if you found some phrase from your own life that sticks with you or resonates with you or describes, catches something elusive in your own life. And then I would like you to find a sentence from your life, any sentence that stays with you, that comes across from your everyday life. It's kind of homework, inner homework.

[34:39]

Okay. And I'd also like you to take any one of these words, any one of these words that's important to you, or for some reason stands out, and define it. How would you define it? You can write it out or whatever. I might ask you, what's your definition? You might also see if you can identify where this word, however your definition is, where it's located in your mental field and your physical field. Or... Maybe it covers your entire mental and physical field.

[35:46]

But if it doesn't, then what part does it cover? Now, I think myself, if you're going to, as we live and mature our life, that this kind of study is as important as knowing where, you know, the autobahn is and the bus stop and so forth. Okay. Now, is that enough for homework? In neat handwriting, double-spaced by tomorrow. And I want to check your script. Okay, you brought up something.

[37:01]

Could you mention it again? Yes. In English or in German? Well, if you say the same thing, you can say it just in German. Well, maybe I should add that it started to happen to me some years ago while I was still doing sitting meditation, a lot. I had a question, and it was that for some time, for some years actually, although I can't say when it started, but maybe, at least in terms of time, that over a long period of time I also sat regularly, so I also sat very regularly, so it was a temporary problem, that it started at some point, from time to time, that I don't feel like that, it's still there, that I don't feel like that, so my feeling of how I When you sit in front of a washing machine and you see the laundry behind it, it's only one second.

[38:09]

Suddenly you see the laundry in the foreground and then you see a completely different laundry in the foreground and then a third one again. Or if you have a kaleidoscope and you flip it and you look through it, you have a certain image and then you flip it again and then you have a certain image again, where there is no connection to what was seen before. And I still don't feel in those moments. Suddenly I sit there and I feel like this in that moment. Sounds like fun. Does anybody else have anything to say along these lines?

[39:22]

The linear continuity is lacking. Okay. Well, This is the kind of experience that can happen if you meditate. It's a quite normal way to see, actually. It's not normal for us, though. I think it's Kant who said something like, what is essentially human is the... experience of the continuity of self the continuity and integrity of self over time and we are taught something like this and I think St.

[40:31]

Augustine says consciousness grasps time as self At this point, for some reason, I always say St. Augustine, which is kind of this clown. When you start getting tired, I know, I've become a clown. The experience of self grasps consciousness, grasps time as self. Now, this is a basic lesson of our culture, which almost automatically means you have to stay in borrowed consciousness.

[41:43]

At least you have to stay in your thoughts and maintain a sense of continuity. When you lose that continuity, you're afraid you're going crazy. So what that means is you have to have continuity somewhere else. So very simply, you need continuity, say, in non-graspable feeling. Or you need continuity in the physical presence of your body. Or in your breath. These are all ways to anchor yourself or to seal yourself. Now I could have... Now I see... I don't know if this is too much, but I just want to share my way of thinking about this.

[43:15]

I see story as a kind of line, a thread. And story is really important in our culture. And if I were meant to define psyche, I would define psyche as the kind of experience of your story the integrated effect of your story but if you put in a salt solution a thread or a string I believe that's a saturated salt solution salt crystals will form along the string And I think, as Westerners, we need to find a way to mature our story. I don't think it's right of Westerners to try to get rid of our story with some kind of always-in-the-immediate-present consciousness.

[44:19]

And this is something I'm thinking quite a lot about, because the perfecting of personality and the maturing of your story are very late in Buddhist practice. And I think they should be very, it's got to be very early in Buddhist practice in the West. So that's another reason why I think the practice of counting to one is so essential. Not the practice of counting to ten.

[45:38]

Because the counting of practice of... What I mean by the practice of counting to one is you start counting one, two, and then you're lost. And sometimes you don't even get to one. Every ten or fifteen minutes you say, one, and then... But while this is going on, you're in a sense dropping a thread into a salt solution and many things are crystallizing around the thread. Now, I understand, as I said earlier, the unconscious as... First of all, I understand self... I understand the conscious-unconscious distinction in its... in the degree to which they differentiated a industrial Western creation.

[46:54]

My belief is that a 12th century European did not have such a clear distinction between conscious and unconscious. Just as my ego is different from your ego, and among you, your egos are differently structured and differently integrated, so I would say just as ego differs between people, it differs in different historical periods. So by that I come to the conclusion that Buddhist practice should be developed for Westerners and not just brought as it is from the Orient to here.

[47:56]

Because we have a different structure of consciousness and unconsciousness and a different dynamic than Asians. I know that's true from doing Doksha interview with both Asians and Westerns. And I'm always thinking about this and trying to get some images that work. And teaching in this way and your ideas help me develop what I think about it from my own practice and experience. And then Rika always is helping and me and my friends help me. And I'm writing a book, but this may be too difficult to write about, so at least right now it's just something I'm thinking about with you.

[49:32]

And I tend to think in images and put words on later, so this is the image I'm working with now of story. This is a kind of line, let's just draw it down here, that represents your story line. This is story, and this is the threshold consciousness. Okay. And what I find is, in a way, when you're practicing and counting to one, when you go into zazen mind here, this is zazen mind,

[50:38]

Waking ego or self consciousness and zazen mind. Waking consciousness. Defined by both ego and self. And this is zazen mind or uncorrected mind where the ego and self definitions tend to lessen. Is that fairly clear? Okay, so when you have, when your story's done here, things begin, as I said, to, crystals begin to form on it. For example, a simple example is... you have the experiences already that are the conditions for enlightenment.

[52:05]

And if you realize enlightenment, you'll find out you've already known enlightenment. But you haven't put it together and allowed your identity to move into that territory. Now, several people have come up and said to me or to Rika that what I'm talking about in many ways is familiar to you. And I'm specifically trying to find things, examples to talk about that are familiar, that you can get a feeling for. So this is an example. So out of the Buddhist tradition, I take various things and try to develop them or find a way to talk about them so you get a feeling for the whole of Buddhist teachings from the example.

[53:23]

Now, this is an example I've used before. This one I've only used the last month or so, the bumps here. And I don't know if these things work. I'm trying them out. You can tell me whether they work or not. Do I trust it? Well, I feel this immediate consciousness is like, please correct me if my translation is not right, immediate consciousness is tied up to word contents that relates to certain, kind of certain gateways that kind of is in relationship to certain kind of vibrations or non-graspable feelings.

[54:41]

Yeah, I think so too. I made a division before between uh story and um what i've made a distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness i don't know what did i do here i didn't put it i could have put story okay i could have put a story And as I'm doing here, and then below this, shall we put non-consciousness? Or I could have put non-graspable feeling. Okay. Okay. Now, a problem I see in people is that if you have a tendency to do, as Kant says, need a continuity of an integration of self in your thought,

[55:47]

And if you have a particular kind of consciousness or you're meditating and there's this sense of moving from form toward emptiness or movement toward stillness, Is that you will actually end up with a intermediate stage, which I call myth or mythology for archetypes. That your sense of story And continuity in your ego, if it dissolves, can get caught in myth and in archetypes and not move into non-graspable feeling.

[57:09]

Now, this is, again, a very basic thing. Whether you're perceiving A... and B and C, and you keep jumping your consciousness to there, and then to there, to there, et cetera. Or is A kind of small, and A, B, B, A is big. So then you have C, and you have B, C, C, B. The two possibilities are your consciousness is located here and then it jumps to here, jumps to here, or it's located in the in-between.

[58:13]

So from that point of view, a very simple example is that I always use in our culture, Bernd and I are separated by space. And he's way over there and I'm here. And Martin and I are separated by space, but he's nearer. But in yogic culture, space connects, space doesn't separate. And it's the space between Bernd and I connects us. It doesn't separate us. From that point of view, Martin and Bernd are the same distance from me.

[59:17]

That's a very different way of looking at the world and not the way our culture teaches us to see things. And you can take that as a little koan right now, walking around between now and tomorrow morning, feeling space connecting you. And you could just use the language because language, if you find the right language, language has an hourglass effect. And if the surface of language is up here and unconscious and Undivided mind is down here. And koan language or spiritual language points both ways. So when you find a phrase like space connects, it points this way and it points this way.

[60:23]

And you can feel a little bump when it goes over here. Again. So I could give you a lot of examples on how to use language so you can begin to use words to connect the world. Okay. Yeah. I want to say something to my Sazen experience today, and what questions does it have? It has given me time to think about this dog down there.

[61:40]

And then I thought about how I feel about it. I'm here, and the dog is outside. Does it bother me? He disturbed me at the beginning. And then I thought to myself, I'll just move in and out, and I won't worry about it anymore. Me here and he outside. And in the same moment, no problem at all. at the time when this dog was barking out there first it bothered me really and then I put myself in the place of the dog and didn't maintain this feeling that the dog was over there and I was there and at the moment I put myself in the place of dog the barking wasn't a problem anymore exactly once again now You both get medals, lady. And if you want, I can explain what... The difference, because it comes up in koans and the way Buddhism talks about things, is very much just what this is.

[63:07]

You create a field of hearing. You don't hear the dog. You hear the dog in your field of hearing. So you don't know what the dog sounds like to a hummingbird. What you hear is what you can hear of a dog. And you begin to have a sense field rather than you lose yourself out there with the dog. The dog is just in your sense field and you hear everything inside of you. And then everything belongs to you. You don't feel alienated. Is it like what you mean by maturing your story? No, that's... You want to say that in German? That's discovering the underlying mind or the fields of consciousness or presence

[64:20]

which can be a process in a Buddhist terms of maturing your soul, but this is just a way of realizing this underlying mind or presence. Yeah, we're ending about the time I expected we would and I don't want to give you too much more because you'll start overflowing. But actually, I must say that part of teaching is to create an overflowing situation. Because when you can't hear anymore, you hear differently. Anyway, I will finish, though, in a moment.

[65:43]

So... My feeling is that you have a particular story more or less controlled in waking consciousness by your ego. And I would define ego as the operative center of self. That vacillates primarily between success and failure. I would say that self is a larger sense of your story. And self includes other people's experience of you.

[66:52]

Ego tends to exclude other people's experience of you. And when you, again, when you tend to identify with ego too much, you're going to be sick. But you need ego. It's a way to function. You have to have ego to function. But again, it's not where you need to live. Okay, so when you practice zazen, what happens as a psychological process is ego and self definition of consciousness tends to lessen. And more and more, unconscious material and non-conscious material tends to collect on your storyline. And certain potentials in the way your story can work, the ways that drama can unfold, also begin to collect.

[68:10]

And those potentials can be something like, since you've worked with the Quaternary Process, Could be not your experience of your mother, but your experience of how your mother experienced you. And without some work, you may not be able to discover how your mother and father experienced you. But my feeling is that it's implied, already implied in and part of your story, but not integrated into your story. So when you find something like that out, it immediately integrates into your story and widens your story, deepens your story. And also, your culture gives you certain mythological...

[69:23]

potentials. I definitely do not agree that there is a universal unconsciousness or universal something or other. I believe there may be something close to universal patterns but not universal contents. In other words, I think that the particular mythological potentials in a culture are different. So we have certain mythologies that are possibly linked in here and And they can develop your story.

[70:44]

The hero and so forth. So anyway, I think that's how your story develops and how you mature it. But in practice, you also dissolve your story. and leave it as open to as many possibilities. And when you read a koan like this, you're creating, reading about Bodhidharma and the emperor and so forth, you're creating a kind of mythology from another culture which can actually hook into your own story and be part of your own drama or plot. Okay. So if you are always used to going from A to B to C, if you begin to change this, as I said already, you then tend to end up with a mythological contest or certain special experiences taking over your consciousness.

[72:09]

So you can have unintegrated, unconscious materials and so forth begin to take on a life of their own and certain symbols take on a life of their own and you don't have a way to anchor yourself and see the difference. One of the basic experiences of self is, I know I'm speaking and I know Eureka is not speaking. Or I know it's not me speaking and it's not Eureka right now. If you lose that basic experience, you can't organize your life. So part of, I think, this larger spiritual education is learning how to to anchor yourself in ways that you can be open and yet differentiated.

[73:39]

Now, one thing that happens in meditation too as you get more developed is threshold consciousness gets, moves down and down. And you have a mind in which dream-like associations are present all the time, but you can clearly choose which ones to act on. Now, I think that's one of the best examples I've ever been able to give of the dynamic of consciousness from a Buddhist point of view. And I know to the degree to which that's been a successful experiment for me to try to talk about this, I know it comes from you.

[74:45]

Ich weiß, dass das von euch kommt. And I know I couldn't have done that with a different group of people. Und ich weiß, ich hätte das nicht mit einer anderen Gruppe von Leuten machen können. And I know I may have tired you out. I'm very grateful. Und obwohl ich euch wahrscheinlich ermüdet habe, bin ich jedoch sehr dankbar. Now, again, just to end, you don't want to armor yourself. Und um zum Abschluss zu kommen, ihr wollt euch nicht abschotten. And you don't want to attach yourself always to other objects of consciousness. And many of us have the experience when you're meditating, at some point you begin to feel there's a clear plastic wall that separates you from other people. Or some kind of clear glass that separates you from the tree and the mountain and so forth. Once you sense that, it's a very big step. Because it means it'll go away. When you don't see it, don't know it's there, it won't go away.

[76:24]

But you can get very frustrated. I feel that I can't quite touch the world. I can't quite touch other people. But if you keep bringing yourself back to your breathing, Resting in your breathing. Suddenly it's gone one day. And you feel the world is touching you all over. And people are touching you all over. And at the same time you feel sealed and complete. Hmm. Well, let's sit for one or two minutes. Please sit comfortably. Okay, we'll have to go till 12.

[77:44]

And then we'll start again at 1. 1, 1.15, 1.30. For a little while. And then end at 2.30, nothing. What do you want to do? What do you reckon to do? I think asking people to come and do it. I think one hour after lunch is enough. So we get half hour long. That's something for 12. Well, you just sat for 30 minutes. Was that too much? I thought we should put a little pressure on you. Good morning.

[78:55]

Today I'd like to not give you much more because I think yesterday was enough to digest It's amazing how complex a simple teaching can be. This all arises really just from the simple observation that everything changes. And then what does that mean in our life? So, does anyone have anything you'd like to bring up from yesterday or a comment, a question or something like that? Yes. Yes. Could you define one more time the ego? Yesterday's very good definition, and I think there's something to write.

[80:19]

Yeah. Well, my experience of ego and how I define it is something I'm willing to keep refining. Is that particular structure within consciousness which measures and compares? And it's particularly concerned with success and failure. Now, you could say that about the entire organism. The entire organism has to succeed in order to stay alive. But I think that ego has some meaning, a specific meaning in relationship to self.

[81:28]

when what I see is that ego tends to exclude others' experience of us and self includes others' experience of us. I mean, maybe we could say that ego is the pilot, but not the whole vehicle. Yes, something like that. Just like the word I is operative in a sentence, but it's not the whole sentence. Some people talk to you as if I was the whole sentence. As if all the rest of the information in the sentence was irrelevant.

[82:55]

But you know, by thinking we have an ego, or by using ego, we actually create ego at the same time. That's enough. I'll come back to that idea that I just expressed in a moment, but something else when someone... Do you want to say that in German? Self-Buddhism is, as far as I know, the Madhyamika in connection, and there again there is something like self or identity, and how will it be determined there? It is what we watch, it is what we see, and it is what we see.

[84:17]

What did you say? Do you mean in English, Madhyamika or Vedic? What is that? It is a certain school. You don't need to know. Madhyamaka is a particular school of Buddhism which it's not necessary to know which school. Zen is, for the curious, Zen teaching is basically based on Madhyamaka, Yogacara, and Hawaiian teachings, primarily. If you were going to take a fundamental position, which school does Zen more belong in? As a practice, it belongs in Yogacara. But we have to be careful because I don't know, somehow we have a tendency as Westerners to read teachings to mean that they're always true.

[85:25]

All teachings are only sometimes true. And if they deny your experience, watch out. Because your experience comes first, not the teachings. So what Zen teaches, and Madhyamakan particularly, it does not teach that there's no self. It teaches that there's no inherent self nor no permanent self, which does not to say there's no operating self.

[86:27]

Es lehrt jedoch, dass es kein inhärentes Selbst gibt oder kein andauerndes Selbst. Das gibt es nicht, aber es gibt ganz sicherlich ein funktionierendes Selbst. Also es gibt eine Funktion des Selbst, solange dies erforderlich ist, und wenn nicht, dann gibt es keins. And if you notice, I mean, all in all, Buddhism is a teaching of multiple selves. If you begin to notice, if you begin to think of yourself as multiple selves that communicate with each other, Then you can see more clearly that when you go to the office, you're one person. When you're talking to your spouse at home, you're another person, and so forth. And I think it's actually helpful to see how different these cells are, which allows you then to see, to experience the underlying ways they're similar.

[87:43]

Okay, something else? I wanted just to ask, I don't know if this is actually the basis of the maternity philosophy, and why he sat there for another seven years. I would like to know why this don't know or whether this don't know is the basic of the Majjhāmakā teaching, and then if it is, why he then had to still continue sitting nine years. Because he was a bad boy. Giving that emperor a hard time. Don't know is a... I'm beginning to speak in tongues.

[89:05]

Having a religious experience here. Anyway. Let's come back to that. Okay, something else? Yeah. Yeah. And then I spontaneously found my mantra from the pre-imitation, which we collected in this relaxed, conscious state. Question about the mantra. I would like to know that the cell also has a kind of mantra function. For the practical question to my meditation, it was somewhat hard on me, this counting, and it was much easier for me to go back to my mantra practice, which I have started practicing with the TM meditation. It's much easier for me then to kind of go into this relaxed state than with counting.

[90:28]

Yeah. Maybe is there's a relationship between mantra practice and counting? Yeah. Counting is a... maybe a kind of mantra. But the way it functions is actually rather different. And I think if I was... You know, I haven't studied TM, though I've practiced with a lot of TM students and TM teachers. And in fact, the children of some of the first TM teachers in Europe have been doing it since childhood. So, again, I don't, but I haven't studied it myself, so I can't speak for it. But I think that it differs, Hindu teachings differ from Buddhist teachings and particularly from Zen.

[91:48]

I think there's a tendency in Hindu teachings to know what the end result should be. And to think that certain practices lead to certain results. And that specific mantras have specific effects, which is true. and that the goal is a certain kind of state and samadhi and different kinds of samadhi and different kinds of approach to a kind of deity, not in the Western sense, but a kind of deity. Zen differs from that which it says we actually don't know what a human being is. We don't know what your particular experience will be. And you may advance Buddhism a few steps if we don't give you too much structure.

[93:16]

So the Zen practice is always involved with a little bit of doubt or chaos in that you're not given anything to rely on. In fact, my teacher used to say, each person has their own enlightenment. There's not one enlightenment that everyone enters. So we always say also that the... the student should surpass the teacher by half, at least by half. That means you learn fully what the teacher knows, but then you have your own version. As each tree, unless you graft it, is slightly different from its parent.

[94:19]

So in Zen, we don't usually give mantras. And when we give mantras, they're more like in the form of koan phrases. And even when we work with mantras, they're late in the practice. In Zen.

[94:48]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_72.78