I think most of you know each other. That's part of the reason you're here. But you don't know Agata or Agi Shuli, is that right? who was here briefly a year ago with Myokin Roshi, her partner. And... And she's a medical doctor and a psychiatrist and a therapist. And somebody I like a lot for some reason. And she and Myokin Roshi talked me in sort of, twisted, almost twisted my arm. She and Myokin Roshi talked me in sort of, twisted, almost twisted my arm. And doing a seminar in Budapest with Hungarian psychotherapists.

[01:12]

A sort of little division in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So you're spawning other... Other aquariums. Aquariums? Aquarium. Aquariums. Foot fish. Yeah. Zoining aquariums. Oh, this is really. So here we have a new aquarium. And it seems that Hungarian psychotherapists are not as familiar with Buddhism and Buddhist practices as America and this part of Europe. So anyway, it was great to do it.

[02:16]

I enjoyed it very much. Really nice people and Nicole was there too. And Frank Hirscher is an old friend of Christian. And I think you've studied with, what is his name? Matthias. Matthias Wager, right? Yeah. who I've known in various ways for many years since the 80s, early 80s. Okay. Maybe I should say something about what you brought up about minds and bodies.

[03:29]

I think a given of everything we're doing is that there's different minds and different bodies. Because there's different minds, there's different bodies. And vice versa. So we could say that mind and body are inseparable. But they can be experienced separately. And the way you can experience separately can be developed. and the way they can be experienced together, also can be developed.

[04:46]

And we could say that Zen practice is a particular modality of mind and body. It's a particular way to weave together mind and body. To weave together the experience of mind. And even within Buddhism, there's somewhat different ways to weave together mind and body. And I would say that psychotherapy, particularly many of the body-related contemporary psychotherapeutic processes, Assume a relationship of mind and body.

[06:03]

I'm not sure that all practitioners of body-related psychotherapy would look at it the way I would look at it. At least the way I would look at it is the assumption you have for the relationship between mind and body, becomes actually a way of weaving mind and body together. It's a self-fulfilling, no, body-fulfilling prophecy. And I would say that from a Buddhist point of view, the more intentional you make the assumption, the more you make the assumption also a way to weave mind and body together.

[07:18]

The more effective probably the body-based therapeutic process would be. And then the more open you'd want such a therapist would be. to interrelating the Buddhist and the Zen Buddhist way of weaving together mind and body. But that would be something you would all understand and maybe some others might not. Now, when you said that you see, you have a feeling for the mind or the activity, state of mind, the state of mind as an activity,

[08:43]

But when you then feel there's a different body too, you tend to feel the body as an entity. I would guess that what's happening there is that you are actually looking for an entity and so you find it in the body. Partly that is that I think in this practice of noticing different minds and bodies, we have to kind of Enter this with no ground. Almost how to enter it with no place to start. How do you start with no place to start?

[10:13]

So we look for some place to start. And that often turns into looking for a ground. And that often turns into looking for an entity that seems more grounded. So a kind of antidote for that is when you find yourself looking for, discovering the body as an entity or implicitly looking for a ground or an entity. what to look for is to look for the breath body. It's harder to turn the breath body into an entity. So if you look to the breath body, then you're more open to finding the body as a different body than... or a body related to the mind.

[11:48]

If you... Look to the breath body. It's so clearly an activity. Then you're more open to finding a body, a particular body related to a particular mind. Or unrelated. Okay. You know, I told you, I said last night I had this eye operation. And it's really a miracle of modern medical technology.

[12:50]

And, you know, I have two implants now that I did and I have a plastic lens and I'm becoming half bionic. Zwei Implantate und ich werde jetzt halb bionisch. Next year I'll have plastic ears. Nächstes Jahr komme ich dann mit Plastikohren. Anyway, my daughter said to me, Sophia, several of you asked, how old is she now? She's... Eight. And Marie-Louise and Sophia are in London right now visiting relatives. And they go to... Because in the States you get... For agricultural reasons you get three months vacation in the summer. When they started the school system, everyone was farmers, so you had to have kids free for... So they'll arrive in Johanneshof about the same time I do this coming Tuesday.

[14:10]

Anyway, Sophia is very curious about this eye operation. As I mentioned, it's the last seminars I've done. In any case, Sophia said to me, I don't want my eye cut. I want to understand how they did this. Because they actually cut your eye with a sonar hammer or something to break up the stone of the cataract. Something like that. I can hear it. And then they suck out your genetic lens. And there's no turning back at this point.

[15:42]

You can't put that back in. And then they take a little tiny plastic lens, which they've already determined where your lens is and what it's like, so they already know that. And they pick a particular lens and put it in. And then it unfolds in the liquid of your eye and gets attached to where it's supposed to be. grown in. And you look, oh, it looks so clear. It's like a Rembrandt that's been cleaned. Okay, but Sophia thinks this is really crazy.

[16:48]

She doesn't want anybody to cut her eye. And then she said more philosophically. It's so frustrating. I said, what's so frustrating? She said, My body knows how to see, but I don't. I thought that was extremely interesting. I said, well, you know, if you ever have a baby, your body will teach your baby how to see. But she said, but I don't know how to see.

[17:49]

Or how I see. So it's clear. She's equally fluent in English and German. And she lives with a Buddhist father who doesn't think that mind and body and self are... so separated. But her own views are clearly influenced by the language she speaks. For her, the way she's speaking, the body is not her. She says, the body knows, I don't. Some cultures would assume the body is you, but she doesn't. And there's a distinction between the body knowing and she knowing that she finds very frustrating.

[19:14]

But that's at the center of really what we're talking about in some ways. But the fact that she finds it frustrating, that's where Buddhism is. Because most people, most kids wouldn't find it frustrating, they just take it for granted. She thinks there's a way that she should be able to know how the body knows And that's what we're talking about. Now in the last practice period, I spoke about... Maybe we can close that door.

[20:42]

Thank you. Thank you. I spoke about nothing but appearance. No, I can't, of course, tell how these distinctions feel in Deutsch. But recently I've been working with appearance without continuity. And I mean, it may seem strange to you, but this feels like a very or rather different practice from nothing but appearance.

[22:05]

And I'm bringing it up just to show, illustrate that If you find ways to say these things to yourself, if you find a way to incubate, If you change the wording, it may be conceptually or linguistically different. the same or nearly the same. But when incubated, it may have differences of feeling or tone or direction that are significant.

[23:10]

I want to, as I started last night, to emphasize again this sense of incubation and contrast to understand. And the best example is what I mentioned before. A good example, at least. As Sukhiroshi sang in the epilogue to Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, reality cannot be caught by thinking or feeling. I mean, if I was editing that book again now, I would probably say, change the word reality to actuality.

[24:35]

But that time I left it as reality, though I know what he meant. So he said reality cannot be caught by thinking or feeling. And by feeling he meant more something toward emotion. Then he said, moment after moment, just watch the breath. Just watch the posture, your posture.

[25:54]

There is, and then he said, this is true nature. And then he said, there is no secret beyond this point. Okay. This statement has Almost no meaning. I mean, unless you understand moment by moment means incubation. How could just to watch your breath and posture be true nature. I mean, and there's no secret beyond this point? So he The statement only has meaning and power and effectiveness unless you think of it in the context of the evolution and cultivation of incubation.

[27:29]

cultivation. Because if you do find yourself able to moment after moment be aware of And by posture, he means all of posture, but he specifically means the spine. Okay. Okay. Okay, so, yeah, that's an example of much of the sutras and the koans which don't make any sense unless they're incubated.

[28:55]

Also, this is an example also for the The understanding is not in the text. The understanding is in repeating the text. So a lot in these things is left out, which makes them hard to understand. And koans are often called riddles. Because they try to figure them out and there's missing parts so they say it's a riddle. But there's no missing parts if you incubate it. Okay.

[30:21]

Now, again, nothing but appearance. And Yogacara, which is the practice, Yogacara Buddhism, which is the practice base of Zen, is often translated as the mind-only school. And for 50 years, really, people kind of really start speaking about it as if it was the English philosopher Barclay. Saying it's some idealistic position that everything is just mind, not substance. And from the point of view of Buddhism, this is nonsense. But if it had been called the appearance only school, it would have made a lot of sense.

[31:41]

Because appearance only is clearly talking about what happens in your sensorium. The world, so to speak, is out there. but you know it in your sensorium. Okay. Now, karma and dharma are both words which mean what holds or sticks in the midst of change. So everything's changing.

[32:44]

But there's the sense of duration. So things are changing. Completely momentary, everything is immediately past. And yet you have an experience of duration. Which we call the present. And so things hold for a minute as some sort of present or duration. Well, a second, a minute means a moment. I like to have translators that keep me on my toes. It perdures. Okay, so that duration we can call that ability to experience it as the duration is in the Dharma, the experience of it as a duration is a Dharma.

[33:57]

And, of course, karma is all the baggage that you bring into this duration. So practice is this kind of being in the midst of the experience of both karma and duration. In the midst of change. But it's not just simple change, things change. It's more change like I suggested last night.

[35:00]

The undulation of the ocean. The... inter-penetration of currents of energy and so forth. Relationship, breaking away from relationship. So it's like finding a way to hold this image in your mind, And not think in entities. Almost as if you were treading water in the ocean. I'm exaggerating, but it's not so different. So you're treading water in the ocean and there's a big wave and then a down and then you're in the trough and then you're in something.

[36:23]

And you don't think that wave is an entity. It's obvious it's not an entity. So, I mean, you feel yourself in a field of currents. And it's almost like You think you can only breathe air. I mean, for good reasons. Or you think you can only breathe consciousness. You keep trying to stay on the surface. Oh, consciousness! But the bodhisattva fish has gills.

[37:24]

And you can sink below the surface and find out you can breathe in awareness. Consciousness is shimmering up there somewhere. When you find there's whales and minnow and herring, And you find out there are whales and the second fish, I don't know. Herons? No, herons, but the one with... Whales. But in the middle. Whales. I started to say minnows, but minnows... Minnows where? They're really small fish. Okay. Minnows. Minis. They're very small fish. But we can put them aside. So whales and herons. Minnows are the little fish you see in lakes and things.

[38:25]

It's not important. We're going to get this straight. Whatever. It's a whatever fish. No. I think we can understand that this is some kind of metaphoric... analogy for how things exist. But can we approach this in our experience. We actually can. And you can approach it through using a phrase. which is something like a mirror or a prism which directs your attention to somewhere it doesn't usually go.

[39:56]

So if you use a phrase like nothing but appearance, or I've been using recently appearance without appearance, And you incubate this phrase. Or even it's sort of incubated or held prior to perception. So it begins to be present enough as a potential view and as if... as if it were true... that it begins to influence how you perceive, how you notice, how you feel in the midst of this treading water, treading

[41:24]

water in the liquids of mind, of consciousness and awareness. with no place to start and no grounds. Now if you feel that for a moment, sometimes that can be a moment which release you from seeing the world as constructs, and we call that, it's often, an enlightenment experience. Or rather, it doesn't free you from seeing things as constructs.

[42:55]

But more accurately, it frees you to see things as nothing but constructs. All these things you identified with as really real, Just constructs. Now you can actually know that independent of knowing it so fully that we call it an enlightenment experiment. You can know it like you're kind of pouring a kind of wisdom medicine into your views. And it begins to subtly, gradually change your views. Okay, so what we've got here so far...

[44:10]

I wonder if this is also the topic of relative reality in contrast to an actual reality. Well, certainly the topic of a relative reality or actuality in contrast to a conventional reality. Realität. And I'm thinking of this description in Tibetan Buddhism where the relative reality is described in contrast to an absolute reality.

[45:21]

Yeah, well, that's the teaching of the two truths. And it is an example of it. But an absolute reality does not mean an actual reality. Absolute should not be used to describe reality. fundamental reality. It's absolute only in the sense that it's empty. And as soon as you describe conventional reality as relative, You already have the idea of emptiness.

[46:29]

So sometimes you can understand these as three ways of looking at it. Reality taken as real Reality is taken as relative and reality taken as empty. So basically the I think the way, at least in English, to look at it. You experience the world as relatively predictable. Because you can't function unless you do. So it's true to how we function.

[47:40]

But it's truly not predictable. So to also function in the world knowing it's truly not predictable is fundamental reality. Okay. Okay. Oh dear. Oh dear, it's wonderful. Okay. Okay. Okay, what we've got so far is an appearance-only space.

[48:48]

So... I think I have to come back to this practice of appearance only. Or appearance without continuity. to make it relevant as a practice and relevant to our ordinary lives. And you know, when I say ordinary lives, the word ordinary in English, the etymology is weaving things. is a weaving image.

[49:54]

So when I say, how do we weave this into our ordinary lives, I'm assuming our ordinary lives or a place where we can weave. Now perhaps in addition to saying instead of saying appearance without continuity I could say paratactic appearance. Now this is a word which I've used here in the past. And paratactic simply means side by side.

[51:07]

There's no connection. And it's actually a film term because in the movies you put two things side by side and the audience makes the connection. But I'm suggesting you just leave them side by side and don't make any connections. So it's appearance. Appearance. And you try not to have any associations. You lessen the mem signs. Okay. And this is something, you know, once you have a sort of somatic feel for it, physical feel for it, you can let things just appear.

[52:23]

And one way to do it, and I've said before, is you go from the particular as an appearance without thinking about it. And you don't name it, it just appears. You see if you can cut off the naming before it happens. Yeah, once the name's done it, you take it off. Now another Buddhist technique used which sounds the opposite, A name is not yet a word. A word is in the context of a sentence. Mm-hmm. A name is just a name.

[53:50]

So if you just name every appearance, glass, microphone, floor, The naming cuts off thinking. Cuts off associations. So you can play with Appearance prior to naming. You can play with appearance, named appearance, which cuts off thinking. What? Naming appearance tends to keep it in consciousness and generates a somewhat different mind.

[54:52]

than naming prior to appearance. I mean, appearance prior to naming. Very quickly, you're under the surface of consciousness. And you're in a world you can only feel but can't think. Now, again, this is all accessible to us through these simple ingredients that we rearrange differently than we usually arrange. These simple ingredients of perception, naming, not naming, etc. Okay. All right. So, appearance prior to naming. which paratactically just lay side by side, one appearance after another.

[56:21]

There's a vividness. the birds, the green of the trees. So if I go likewise, as I said, if I go from the particular as an appearance to the field of, in this case, you all at once, Which I can't really name because there's too many names. So I can only feel all of you all at once. I can't think all of you all at once. So I've said this before last year and the year before probably.

[57:34]

But if you just develop this yogic skill of going from the particular to appearance, excuse me, particular to all at once, particular to all at once, Very funny. I gave a talk, I won't go into the background of it, but one gave a talk the other day, a few weeks ago, at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. And I spoke about this sense of the particular and at the same time an all at once mind.

[58:35]

And afterwards one of the flight instructors came up to me and said, we have to teach fighter pilots how to do this. I said, I'm very happy to be useful, you kill it. I didn't say that. That's certainly why the martial arts and samurais and all are interested in these things. He said you cannot be looking at your instruments as there's a plane flying over you two different directions. You've got to know what's going on in your instrument panel without losing this

[59:44]

So I use that as an example just to say, you know, these are ordinary guys, these pilots, men and women, they have to teach them this stuff. And I'm sure that for each of you as therapists, You've both discovered and learned how to suspend or generate particular minds in order to listen. There's a French philosopher named Jean-Luc Nancy. Yeah, and he has, with a woman, I guess, philosopher, he writes one section of this book I've been reading.

[61:06]

And she says the demand of nearness, of proximity, is you must speak. And you must let the other person speak. And you must... And then you must hear. Now, I don't think that... proximity or nearness or letting someone come close means you have to speak. But of course there has to be some recognition of this nearness.

[62:16]

And if it is nearness a deep and societal perhaps request, demand that you speak. You can interrupt that. What is it? Utterings interruptus. You can interrupt that demand that you speak. and some other kind of communication then occurs. And I think that must be, it's certainly part of the process of doksan, the face-to-face meeting between teacher and disciple. So I'm sure in therapeutic situations there's some kind of tension or play between speaking and not speaking.

[63:36]

And answering or not answering silence. Now this is taking, I wanted to get to a fairly simple point, but it's taking me rather long. I'm in trouble because I really have to go to the toilet. No, please go. I drank too much coffee. It happens to everyone. Maybe we should just go to lunch. I'm in trouble now.

[64:39]

without the proximity of the translator. There's no demand to speak. My impression is that the field of arts is very getting in touch with this. The field of art? Art, yeah. A painter or poet. Working in art is very near to this before me. Prior, I think it is, yeah, completely. In fact, if you read poetic theories of the poetic composition in China, it just parallels what I'm talking about. They particularly don't want to enter into a poem through analogy or metaphor.

[66:15]

They want to incite the poem. My English is OK? In other words, they don't want to nudge the poem into existence. They don't want to explain the poem into existence. I've often noticed that people want to understand art and this is actually a misunderstanding. That's right. The only art you can... No understanding. The only art you can understand is hotel art. The art in hotel rooms. And luckily you're in a different room next time. A little drawing of Matisse you can look at a thousand times, but... You won't ever look at that drawing in that hotel room again.

[67:18]

Yes. we were having various different interpretations of a poem by Dickinson. Emily. And I was saying, how can I take it? This is true and that is true and this is true. And the teacher replied, just... Consider it a web through which you can see. And then put one above the other and look through it. And that's the whole of it. So that meanings, different meanings, shine through these transparent interpretations. Yeah, that's good.

[68:19]

Thanks. You know, I am always embarrassed to speak about constellation. The craft of constellation therapy. Because it's not a craft I practice. And I know that not all of you are constellation therapists, systemic therapists. But where we started all this 20 years ago, Phil, was a focus on constellation therapy.

[69:25]

And my own focus was trying to understand Constellation Theory. Or rather, I was happy not to understand it. But I wanted to see if I could approach Like my daughter, how does it work? I'm happy not to understand things, like German. But I like the incitement. Incitement? Insight to get something started. It happens through when you don't understand. Like in English, you incite a riot.

[70:48]

But it's too strong used that way. Insight means to nudge something into existence, to get something started. Like an impulse, yeah. But I imagine if I talked about as I've been talking about. A appearance only mind space. And then I also posited or spoke about a association, associative mind space So let's say something to make it parallel.

[72:00]

Appearance-only mind. An association-only mind. An association-only mind. Maybe we should put the word space after each. Association only minds space. Sorry. Einen geistigen Raum des nur Erscheinens und einen geistigen Raum des... It's association only. You want? Are you just saying associative mind space? Oh yeah, okay, that's good. It takes me forever to find these phrases in English. And then I let them flow off the tongue. And then Christian has to take Germanic.

[73:02]

And I can rest while he does it. It's all a construct. And let's then add a third, the self-referencing narrative present. Space? Space. As it is self-referential. Okay. So let's put those three things over here. Okay. Okay, now lunch is at 1, so we've got 20 minutes to put this together.

[74:38]

Okay. Now, one of the practices you can do in meditation is you discover on your own or it's hinted to you. One of the most basic things that happens early in meditation Is that you find that you begin to experience the space around you in a way not confined to the physical body sheath,

[75:55]

And if you also can just drop the form of the body, the feel and sense of the body is not exactly the same as the form of the body. Okay, so you find in meditation you enter a kind of spatial body that's not only the physical body. And sometimes the spatial body feels like it's tipped way over here or something and you discover the physical body is just slightly tipped.

[76:58]

So you begin to find some experience of the body as space. Or the spatial body. But then it gets even more reality as the body as space. So the spatial body is one kind of experience. That's very related to the body. But then you begin to have an experience of the body as space almost somewhat independent from the physical body. So then you begin to notice this space

[78:09]

body as space, is populated by other bodies. Okay. I mean, we are created by a mother and father. Or two people who become mother and father, we hope. And there's all these ancestors embedded in our parents. And there's all these experiences of other people embedded in our parents. And then there's the infant's relationship to caregivers and teachers and lovers and so forth.

[79:26]

die Erfahrung des Kindes zu anderen Personen, Pflegepersonen und Lehrern und Liebhabern. And somehow all these people or a very large percent of them occupy this spatial body around us. Und all diese Menschen sind anwesend oder ein Großteil dieser Menschen ist And if you ask yourself the simple question, in zazen, where is my mother? you will have, I think most people will have a distinct apparent experience that your mother is somewhere in this space. And the person probably feels it's in a distinct place in this space.

[80:40]

And it might be on the left, say. And then you might say, Boy, you're over there, Mom. Get over here on the right. But she won't get over on the right. You kind of like shift it in your... And then she jumps back. Well, that's very interesting. Why does your mother feel like she's here? And then, so then you ask yourself another question, where's Pop? Where's Dad? And, oh, he's over here. That's why Mom wouldn't go there. Or you find dad is really way over there and mom is here.

[81:55]

Or maybe they are next to each other. When I began to explore this and play with this, it was one of the scariest things I did in meditation. I felt terribly vulnerable to kind of actualize the space around me as my parents. It's almost like all of my experiences with my mother, and childhood experiences in general were suddenly not back in the past.

[83:13]

They were all filtering through this space of my mother in my space. And I put that and the same happened with my father. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I felt I actually couldn't control it. I'd put all of this in the past, and when I began to feel in meditation these spatial bodies of my parents within my space, in the present space, I was not able to put it all back in the past again. I mean, I wanted to be in the present and not have this in... not in the present. But what I discovered was I thought it was in the past but actually it was in the present even if I didn't pay attention to it.

[84:31]

But paying attention to it in meditation made me feel extremely vulnerable and insecure. And then I thought, my parents are there, other people must be there too. It's like in European paintings from the Middle Ages or Christian paintings or Buddhist paintings. Unimportant people are small and important people are big. I think in both European paintings and Buddhist paintings, the donor is sometimes a little small in the corner. And... And so I found when I began to pay attention who else is occupying this space around you and how the hell did you get there?

[86:00]

There were all kinds of people there. Some were small, some were big, some were farther away. And some would change position. And I would say it took me six or seven or eight months, if I remember correctly, somewhat scary months before I the word to use came to some acceptance and resolution of this space.

[87:01]

And eventually cleared it up. So most of the time the space around me is not occupied by people. But I have discovered that during this relatively long adult life, There are people who've come to occupy that space. Or sometimes occupy that space. with an intensity and presence equivalent to my parents.

[88:30]

When I find these people are in this spatial body, also appear in my dreams. as persons or as context. And my feeling is that while they only sometimes appear in my dreams, or appear through some association in a movie or a poem or something.

[89:35]

And they may be vivid for a while, like a vivid dream. And my feeling is that My sense of it is that while they only occasionally appear in my dreams or whatever, they're always present in the space around me. So what did I mean by that I cleared up the space around me? It's that the dynamic of the space around me has clarity, is clear. Yeah.

[90:44]

Before it was clear, the presence of these significant others influenced my activity. At some point they stopped influencing my activity or they didn't influence it much. So they weren't dynamically related to my present, but they were still present somehow. Okay. Now, whether this experience of mine is related to constellation work or not, I don't know, but it sure seems like it is.

[91:51]

Now what I want to do is bring that together with mind appearance only space association only mind and the self-referencing narrative presence. Now, that must be obvious, so I don't have to say it. But if it's not entirely obvious, we can come back to it after lunch.

[92:40]

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