That was fun. Yeah, it was. It was lovely. I enjoyed doing that. Is there anything? I think I said enough, actually. I might give you a couple of examples or something like that if you want. But is there anything you'd like to discuss or it doesn't make sense or does or whatever? What's a mercy teaching and when would you use a mercy teaching rather than an adept teaching? Most Buddhist teachings are mercy teachings. teaching of morality, teaching of just do zazen without really giving any instructions, practice mindfulness. Most mindfulness practices are mercy teaching. They can be adept teaching. They create the ground and conditions for it. And in general, and teachings in which you use your auric field to support someone's practice of mercy teaching.

[01:05]

In other words, the teacher lets their field help a lot of people practice, and a certain amount of context gives them a certain momentum in life that they don't really know what's happened. And where does the word mercy come from? Well, it's just a translation. I don't know what the word would be in Japanese or Chinese. It just means kindness or compassionate teaching rather than depth teaching. So you live in the house of Buddhism, but you don't know how to reconstruct the house of Buddhism. I have a question. I don't know whether it's going to be useful but I'll just put it out as a possible option. This conference is ostensibly based on Steiner and it will be kind of interesting to see what either Chris or Arthur or Robert, if he was here, would say about the practices of Steiner compared with what you said about Zen and whether there's any kind of linkage or

[02:18]

common ground or whether they're going in the same direction or in a different direction. That would be good for me. I'd like to learn some. I mean, it's fascinating for me to have heard this because, as you said, this is normally not the teaching that's so evident. Then you can't find it written down. And it's easier to find things in the Tibetan tradition or in the Theravada tradition where there are these manuals. That's true. And there you can begin to make comparisons and understand. I mean, some of the difficulties, I mean, Zen thinks the explicitness, giving people a map, means you, you know, make the shoe fit. Or they don't really, because from the Zen point of view, The map's different for each person, each person's enlightenment is different, and so forth. This to me is really quite interesting because there's a huge, it's usually a very strong complaint with regards to Steiner's path of self-development.

[03:23]

that people don't know where to begin. There are too many mantras, there are too many options, there are too many practices. If they're not quite sure, is this a practice or is this not a practice, they'll read this whole book, Knowledge of Higher Worlds and Entertainment, once or twice even, and they'll say, well, I remember a few odds and ends. There's a seed meditation, and then there's a moon rising or setting. It's sort of this... What I really want, though, I usually say, is for you to tell me, Sit here, put your hands there, put your feet in this position, close your eyes halfway, put the Kasinga device on something, which is a foot and a half high, three feet out, sit underneath the shade of a tree, six bow shots away from town. Hey, you got it down. It's very reassuring. You get this very explicit. Yeah. teaching. And Steiner continually evades that kind of specificity.

[04:25]

And for many years I was wondering, why in the world is this man not just saying, hey listen, this is where you begin. Sit this way, get in the room, put your eyes in this position. And I think the answer is much like what you spoke about. I think he also sees this as especially important for a modern path of self-development, that there's a certain importance to taking responsibility for your path, that it's not prescribed by the teacher explicitly, do this, and then I'm all the time watching and then telling you the next step to do and supporting you with my auric field and sort of manipulating the situation in you and giving you the teaching, boom, [...] boom. that the conversation is always possible. We have many conversations with individuals. We have many suggestions and helps. And even in books, as you will always find a person at the moment that you meet someone, there will be a teacher there.

[05:27]

You just can ask, and the questions will be responded to in an appropriate way. Never in a way that violates your freedoms. And I think my own experience, it's much as you described, that you're within that meditative life and you're experiencing the fruits of that meditation. And making a judgment based on your understanding of the many options of teachings, what is the next meditative task that I have to undertake? Is it going to be working with the elements? Is it going to be working with a particular cognitive process or a particular imagination? Have I lost my ability to maintain single-pointed concentration? So there's a lot of responsibilities actually thrown back on the pupil. to become an observer, if you will, of their own progress. So that was quite interesting for me.

[06:29]

I hadn't appreciated that dimension of the Zen practice. The negative side of it is a large percentage of Zen has forgotten what the teachings are. And they just don't know. It's become a kind of face practice It's very much like pure land practice that you do Zazen instead of chanting mantra. But the general feeling of Zen is something like, well, from a kind of negative point of view, is that all the systems of Tibetan Buddhism are for farm boys. They're for a non-urban, unliterate population who the education starts from six or seven. On the other hand, they're fabulous teachings. They're very helpful for us in Zen because they make some of the, you can actually see in the koans, embedded in the koans, a lot of these same Tibetan Tantric teachings. Zen is basically a form of Tantrism. And, I mean, developed at the same time in, but it's got a Chinese twist to it.

[07:34]

And then Buddhism went into China and met a highly literate urbanized population and had to deal with people already highly cultivated. So it developed a very aesthetic, with a lot of poetry and resonance to the world. That's the difference. But also then, if you create all these structures, you actually take the freedom away from how many worlds could be discovered. We asked another thing which you implied in the scripture, the mercy teachings as retaining commonality. In Buddha Gosha, the first section is on moral purity. And in Steiner, you also find that the first entryway, he says, one enters the path of meditation through the portal of humility and veneration. And then he describes there and in many other places the character of this portal of veneration, the portal of humility, the moods of wonder, of veneration, reverence.

[08:49]

the experience of a kind of union with the divine, union with the divine all-being, and the kind of self-surrender. It's a whole litany, so to speak, that one moves through as one approaches even the very first act of meditation. Could you say something about that with regards to Zen? Well, Zen, the basic instructions in Zen are sit down, you know, sit straight, sit in a monastery, and sit with a teacher. And if you do those four things, something like that, everything will unfold. Now, the danger as we move into a lay practice that I see is with those instructions, Zen becomes a repressive technique for people who push down their unconscious, don't deal with what's going on around them.

[09:53]

And I mean, it's particularly true in, forgive me for saying so, in Germany. There's a lot of German Zen teachers who teach Zen in, I think, a very repressive way. And they're in America, too. A lot of Zen is taught if not in a repressive way, in such a laissez-faire way that nothing's really happening. And, I mean, it's, you know, it's opposite of what Sikhi or Shin wanted, in any case. So, excuse me, can you bring me back? So the morality is, if you, from the point, of course you practice morality, but Morality in Zen is mainly, aside from you have to have the rules that allow you to get along in your society. That's what you're told about. Get along in your society, get along with people, milk and water, etc. But in any deeper sense, and the precepts come late in the teaching specifically, because they arise out of the two practices, don't hurt and don't leak.

[11:03]

Don't leak? Don't leak. And leaking is a very particular experience that you get when you meditate. For example, if you're writing a poem, say, and you start telling somebody about the poem in the middle of it, you leak. You can't write the poem anymore. Or you talk about your book too early. Or you talk about a sashin after it happened. Because a sashin in Zen practice is a way of building up mental, physical, and subtle body energy. And you leak all the time. That's when you sit for seven days, five to seven days, all day long. And it's called, it means gathering the mind, but it also means gathering the mind as energy. And you leak. So you begin to, so there's three practices which I didn't mention are very related practices. What I call Dharma, Outer

[12:05]

and inner dharma practices. And dharma is, literally the root of the word dharma means to hold. And so that's interesting in a practice where it's entirely based on the thing that everything is profoundly changing. So how do you hold something for a moment? And originally it was an idea of there were units, there were atoms out there, but by Mahayana there's no atoms out there, but there's units of experiential experience. So, very simply, outer dharmas are to do everything with completeness. You do each thing completely. If I pick up this coffee cup, like when an artist knows when his painting is finished, because there's a sense of completeness, you know your body, I pick up this cup, I reach my hand out, and that's one motion. And I do that completely. And I bring it here completely. And I lift it up. And you'll notice, as I pointed out, Japanese dishes and things have no handles, and that's so it makes you use two hands.

[13:17]

It makes you do things with the field of your body, because your hands control the auric field in a lot of ways. when you drive a car. So the outer dharmas are to do each thing completely, and it makes a huge difference. If you do every little detail in your life with a sense of completeness, the smallest unit you can find, bring your hand down, bring it up, you'll feel complete at the end of the year. If you do everything incompletely, you'll feel incomplete. And you can see people who practice, because they tend to do things, you'll notice, they do things naturally and fluidly, but still there's a sense of pause. Pause. There's a little feeling of pause between each, and you can see it in Thich Nhat Hanh's behavior, you can see it in anybody who's practiced a lot. And that's, breakdationally arrives as an outer Dharma practice. Now, an inner Dharma practice would be a sense of wholeness.

[14:21]

so that when you do things, you do them with a sense of wholeness or nourishment. For example, I find out what to talk with you about by whether I'm feeling nourished by what I'm saying. If I stop feeling nourished, I change the topic or I do something else. And so when you begin to feel nourished by your actions and begin to sense nourishment, then you're not leaking. So the practice of not leaking is a very essential practice and it's one of the most important practices because a lot of people, when they meditate, get very vulnerable, very open and threatened by everything. Lights seem bright and the idea of emptiness scares the shit out of you, etc. And you have to learn to seal yourself and not armor yourself. If you armor yourself, you're nowhere. So you actually, the practice of not leaking is to seal yourself with your breath or with imagination or with various ways to seal you.

[15:30]

There's a whole list of practices I didn't go into all that. But when, what you begin to notice is the precepts are big leaks. As soon as you take what is not given, as soon as you slander somebody, you feel your energy just roaring out. So, basically, the morality arises from the intactness and wholeness of awareness. And so then, you're taught morality, and then the way you're taught not to put sand in a gas tank. It's not, you know, absolute this or that. It's a matter of, your car doesn't work when you put sand in a gas tank. And you don't work when you start doing things which harm others and so forth. So that's just the way Zen is taught. But practically, you're told to do things within your society and the way it works and so forth. So when people say Zen has no right or wrong in morality, that's not true.

[16:33]

It's really related to this not leaking. It's also very similar in Steiner's early writings, especially when he's writing on moral ethics, the Kant's categorical imperative and the tradition of thou shalt not and so forth, he says, has really reached an end. It may have served at a certain point, but it is much more this sense of if you do this, there are consequences. And you develop minor consequences, which he calls moral intuition. It's a kind of, I don't know, think of it as connected to a kind of karmic sensibility in the moment that this action is a right action or a wrong action. And then it's not a question of thou shalt or thou shalt not. You just perceive it. And then there's a skillful means he calls moral technique. by which then one can affect that right action. It's one thing to have the imagination of it. It's another thing to actually affect it in the world.

[17:35]

You can have the vision, and you can make a mess of it. Well, you can also feel just... I mean, Bob's example of being scrunched is really true. I mean, you can feel when you do things that are going to have consequences that are tightening up. You feel yourself being scrunched by what you're saying, and you can feel the way you're... the way you store and have access to what's happening inside you suddenly isn't soft. There's no pliancy inside. It's also similar to actually what St. Paul talks about, where the spirit and the law go by the spirit rather than go by the law. There are a couple of other things I'd really like to hear you talk about, because One hand is the sitting, which is obviously a receptor piece in Zazen. In Zazen, yeah.

[18:36]

I mean, mindfulness practice is actually more basic, but Zazen practice is a density of mindfulness which opens up interior space and which mindfulness really usually won't do. So you'll have... I'm going to speak very much in a similar way, where one, after entering through this portal of initiation, develops an inner tranquility and a vivid inner life. And then, it's interesting, in this case, as I understand it, in Zazen or in this practice, it's not a question of stilling the mind and emptying consciousness, putting in an intentional thought, focusing on that mantra or whatever it is, exclusion or everything else. Actually, there's a There's a world that arises, that's notated, that's related to in a certain way. But how would you characterize the difference between the way in which one relates to that which arises in the consciousness that one has during the sitting, versus, say, just the daydreaming, you know, everyday life?

[19:42]

Is there a different relationship between the self, in the proper sense that we're speaking about it, and that which arises? Yeah, because when you're practicing, you begin to be able to hold or stay located in background mind during your daily life, the way a pregnant woman might be aware of her baby, even though she's shopping and doing things, she's still aware of this thing growing. And the way you become pregnant with your practice, sense, and it develops a background mind. And in zazen, you really develop a sense of the field. And so the field immediately changes it from daydreaming. So in the initial practice you don't tell people to do anything much because you really want them to be in this unconstructed, unfabricated mind, uncorrected mind. Don't invite your thoughts to tea and so forth. But you haven't thrown them out the door either. But until you develop field awareness, a stable field awareness, then you can begin specific practices.

[20:51]

And then you can direct that. It's fascinating because the very first exercise after this development of the tranquil inner life, as Bennett describes, is one where he says, choose a moment. So in some sense it is more of an invitation. But for him to imagine, take an occasion which arises in life. He recommends something which is a little bit further away than the immediate present. But take something which arises in life and then adopt to it an attitude which is not, as it were, if you're, say, inviting a moment of anger, say an exchange, then one of the ways of engaging that is to get back into the exchange and think of all the things you should have said and get back at that person and generate all the same anger and feelings and whatever you want. And I take it, he will say, that is this permanent self, this artificially absolute self, whatever. That's the personality getting back into the action. But it can also happen that there arises another self, which will take a different stance, a higher or a different stance with regards to that which arises.

[22:02]

And if one can find that position, Then what it is that the knot that was created begins to be seen in a different light. The turmoil in one's own inner life and soul life begins to become sort of sorted out. I think you begin to have the possibility to attend with the kind of tranquility, even in the moments of adversity and all kinds of turmoil. Those things begin to stabilize. you destabilize the consciousness. And then he says there's this birth of a higher self, birth of a self which can attend in a different way. Does that sound in any way familiar to you? Yeah, I mean, it's the same territory. Then he would say in the third, let me just see, because it sounds like it's just based on what you just finished saying, that once this kind of, I think of it as a practice which is basically where most of us are most of the time, of sorting things out, of clearing the terrain, of creating a space, a world, in which one can sit, can have presence, awareness.

[23:17]

then once that terrain has been fashioned, once that landscape has been fashioned, it's possible then to work with the text or with a particular thought drawn out of a great tradition. And he doesn't even specify. He says you would pick a text that you find uplifting. So again, he's not saying, think this thought. And it's placed, in some sense, I think it has been placed on the horizon. It becomes an object of intention. In that sense, then, you have still the mind. It is a single point of concentration, and it is a meditation on an object. Well, I mean, that's very similar to working with koans, or your life as a koan, because, again, to use the same phrase, you need a metalogic engagement in which... you trust what comes up or what hooks into you. You read a koan and you want to be engaged in the koan in your present.

[24:19]

So whatever phrase is, then you start a contemplation. Now this koan I gave you, for instance, virtually every phrase in there can be a subject of meditation and you meditate on the subject of constant. What's constant? Self-constant? Do you need constancy? What could be constant underneath or other than self and so forth? or what is an uncut jewel, how do you visualize an uncut jewel, how do you hold the uncut jewel, etc. So you take Zen particularly, in Chinese Buddhism, Chinese Zen particularly, develop this way of working with words and language and shifting them out of, in a mantric way, shifting them out of consciousness into undivided consciousness or into awareness. And so they start being image and intention, and then they turn into presence. They're not even language anymore. They're just a presence that you live within. And that's really the process of working with taunts or with anything, like, why am I not getting along with my spouse?

[25:26]

And so... Yeah, it's that shifting from a particular kind of consciousness to this undivided consciousness or awareness. I think it's very similar. Swami sometimes says, in pictorial way, he'll say, when you're working with the mantra, you shouldn't work with it with your everyday intelligence. He says, really, you carry within you, or as it were, left behind you, the ego of your past life. That's what it's supposed to be. But as a picture... And that if you still this one activity, there is this other, which is this higher self, which is in some sense the thing which will continue to the next life and so forth, which can actually take this up. And I think the small experience of it, it is much more the character that you're speaking about. You work with hearts and so forth, but you then come to the point where it becomes... I like the image that Bob Thurnan used also of something, a space, a kind of mandala in which you place yourself.

[26:33]

When you begin to... One thing is that, by the way, I think there's a Catholic practice where you read a text and you read till it sort of sends you. And you read it for a while and then you go back. That kind of feeling is very much like working with a column. You work with a line and it kind of sends you and then you find out how to put that in the non-graspable feeling level. So every word that I speak also has a feeling level that's not language, but the language, the level of non-graspable feeling. So you begin to be able to translate, transfer the koan or the mantra or the turning word into this feeling level, and then stay with that present, and then it begins to touch and cover everything. And... And also you practice with this sense of pausing when you come in a room, for instance. You come in a room and you pause and you allow a kind of proprioceptive feeling to happen to the room.

[27:35]

And what you're really doing is creating a mandala. Because there's hundreds of lines crossing this room all the time. There's energy connections all the way across it. And there's a point where all those needs... If you take hold of that point, you can affect everything that's happening in the room. It can be extremely manipulative. And some people, Hitler types, learn how to do that by some kind of, you know, shamanic intuition. So you learn where that point is and how to stay off of that point, really. So you don't... It's hard. I mean, if you have an intuition of it, it's hard to stay away from it sometimes. And that point is shifting all the time. So in that sense, this is another meaning of the word emptiness. And the word for this in Japanese is ma, which means the intersection of space and time. And so you begin to know the ma of each situation.

[28:39]

And you feel it, and you feel it with your body. But Len does not say that you don't fight, you don't argue, and things like that. It says that don't fight with somebody if you're leaking. So if you feel sealed and you feel them in your field and you're not leaking, then you can express your anger. Or something like that. But generally, you don't have much anger because you feel so connected. And one of the first practices in Zen is to sit down and recognize this precious human stuff. Because if you can't feel blessed by the physicality and mentality of you, how can you start practicing? Because practice is ultimately based on trusting yourself. So you really have to kind of sit there and you find you're shitty and you know it better. That's your first practice. Really? What's shitty about this, man? So the more you sense this precious human stuff, and we have arguments here in the community and different politics and different things, I guess.

[29:48]

I'm kind of stupid about it. But still, underneath it all, there's these precious, most precious thing that anybody knows about on the planet. These incredible creatures we are. And it's a blessing just to be present with another human being Does that feel... I interrupted you. That's all right. Another aspect which I'd love to have a conversation around are the freedom premises. Yeah. Because as you probably have picked up sitting in the very early years of Steinem's You know, he was around 40 years old before he began to speak about these things. And he had, as a child, certain experiences, understanding. So he was transmuted, repressed, transmuted into this conscious engagement with the psycho-spiritual dimensions. And in the very early private teachings, there are certain breathing exercises that are given.

[30:57]

Yeah, I'll go up to the first four or five years. And then, this was, I have to remember, the Theosophical Society, it was Eastern-oriented, it was looking to the East, and so forth. Steiner made it look more toward Christianity. Then Steiner really, he's all the time trying to do this, but he's working within the milieu he's given, he's very appreciative for the opportunity. Those were, that was the audience that was there. And so he tried, it's finding the skillful means to work what it is he felt was part of his task, I think, to work that in. But then at a certain point he began to speak quite clearly that there were different practices he felt that were mostly or better suited to the most of the West. And I'd love to to talk a little bit about what's going on in the breathing practices. I've never done a breathing practice, probably because of this admonition as it would shift one's attention to a different kind of practice.

[32:05]

Interestingly enough, he speaks about the breathing practices as he says, breathing practices of the ancient systems, which were completely valid, authentic practices and produced exactly what they were intended to produce, worked in a particular way with the spinal column, the spinal fluids, and that when one breathes, there's a rhythmic process set up in the spinal fluids which works its way up into, in fact, the cranium, into the... There's a whole pulse, your whole skeleton pulses, and your cranium pulses, and that's very related to the subtle body and... There's a certain 32-word ending. I mean, it's quite an elaborate... description of the magnificence, in some ways, the power and the honesty of that system. Now, I would like to ask this as a question. The way he phrases it says that in that period of time when these practices were developed and then continued in the ancient tradition, part of the process that was being evoked

[33:13]

was to connect one's psycho-spiritual dimension with a physical process. It was important to do that. It was important to actually take, in some ways, in these very ancient, if you want to take the evolution of consciousness seriously, then in the very ancient world, this spiritual dimension, the psycho-spiritual was a potent reality, and in fact was a little disincarnate. And that the breathing practice actually helped to incarnate that dimension of human being into an integrated way, in a healthy way, into the body. Does that sound familiar? Very. I mean, he's probably reading somebody, but I don't know. But in any case, that was it. Well, I mean, go ahead, Joan. Just in the practice, one of the main objectives is to harmonize mind and body. that the gap between mind and body is really the place of alienation.

[34:16]

It's like sort of alienation stuff. And it's an incredible experience. At first, it's very hard to actually realize it all. You sit on the cushion and it's very chaotic because mind and body are moving at different velocities. have different viscosities, are producing different substances. And the only thing that joins it is the breath. It's the thread. And that's why I can't imagine doing any practice, I mean, whether it's qigong or walking in the mountains or sitting on the zappu or weaving, without breath practice, or ceramics without breath practice. It's all rooted in the breath. The mind gets ahead of the body, or the body gets... And that's exactly in that gap where you find disease. It comes right into that hole, and that's when you get sick.

[35:18]

That's why we have burnout. If we were in that mind-body harmony, if we were in that state of deep absorption internally, then that connectivity with the world, the so-called external world, would be obvious to us. And then we would so-called walk in harmony and beauty in terms of, you know, being in the field of absolute resonance. So to me, and of course Richard might have another perspective on this, this, you know, is only... from my own experience in Buddhist practice, there's nothing else to do but breath practice. Everything else is built around the breath practice. That's it. Now, maybe you have it. Well, I think actually the attitudes you have, really the worldview you have, are the most important part of practice.

[36:21]

The main technology, though, is breath practice and Zen. But that breath practice outside the worldview or the attitudes could be anything. And one of the reasons I'm trying so hard to bring monastic practice, I mean, part of the reason I'm trying so hard with lay practice is because I believe in monastic practice. I believe in monastic practice. And as I was saying to Bob Filio earlier, but in fact, most of the people I practice with are lay people, and I have mostly led a lay life. And I've seen the damage or the nonsense of oversimplified Zen practice or misunderstood Zen practice does. And everyone's doing it. They pick it up from there, they pick it up from people, etc. So what I'm trying to do in my book, make a fairly simple presentation, but with some depth and complexity, Zen practice, so laymen don't misuse Zen practice, because Zen is a very powerful tool, and it can be powerfully misused.

[37:34]

So I feel that my belief in Zen practice necessitates me to bring the practices out of and my belief in monastic practice necessitates my bringing many of these practices out as bridges into lay practice. And certainly one of the main ones is breath. And although the jhanas of breath practice in the main way are actually, I believe, not originally Buddhist and they're a late addition into the Buddhist scene. They're now so basic and so identified with Zen, and the word jhana means Zen. But there have certainly been breath practices from the beginning in Zen. But one of the differences, I think, is that although Zen is primarily a mental yoga, not a physical yoga, That was an interesting thing, and I hadn't appreciated that until you got to the complexity of these other practices.

[38:37]

Because there's a place where Steiner says, and this helped me a lot in trying to understand the relationship between the yoga, the breathing practices, and what it presents. Because what he says is, at one point that is later on in his life, he says, if you go back to my knowledge of higher worlds and say, what was I trying to affect there? This is his manual, here, in practice. Even though it is not very prescriptive, which is the reason people would like it to be, he'll say, what I was trying to do is to take the breathing practice, the yoga practices, and bring them onto the level of mind, or cognition. And that there is what he then terms a yoga of light. He uses it, obviously, metaphorically, but in an actually quite specific sense. that, for example, one can attend to an object in the natural world, say a flower which is decaying, and one can create that field of attention, that awareness of the flower which is decaying, and there will arise within that attention, within that field of attention, a gesture, a very particular gesture.

[39:53]

One says it will move out, and one then moves back in. It moves out into the world, and it echoes back what it has to offer. And that that rhythmic, and I think it has the rhythm of breathing, we flip from one thing to the next, and we can't experience it. You have to pause, as you said, and you expand that proprioceptive field. And you're attending. Now for him, that's the breathing practice. Well, central to Zen practice is that it's a pulse. form and emptiness is not form is emptiness exactly, that's one way of understanding it, and there's a whole lot of ways of understanding form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is emptiness, is that it's actually a pulse of form and emptiness, a pulse of awareness and consciousness and so forth. And you're in the midst of that pulse and you become adept literally at that pulse. But still, a big difference in a bias, the bias of Buddhism, if you're going to look for a limitation in Buddhism, I think it has to be looked at in the bias toward the body.

[41:20]

Now, Mike Murphy, one of my closest friends, has written a book called The Future of the Body, which I hear is fifth on the bestseller list in California these days. And he chose the word body for the same reason, because nobody understands and the body is kind of put down in the West and so forth. But in Buddhism, the emphasis is so much on the body. You wouldn't say you're bringing higher worlds down. You'd say, starting with the body, then everything becomes a body. Space is a body. In Buddhism, everything's a body. Space is a body. Everything's a body. Nothing is another world. Everything in the body, continuous from, in a continuous present. And at the body level, there is a continuous present from now to Buddha. I mean, you are, I mean, you're actually in the past. You're in the past, as much in the past as Rilke's that distant star of these thousand years is dead or something.

[42:22]

But I have a sensation of you in the present because there's feedback. and because you're in my eye consciousness field. But if you were outside my eye consciousness field, then I could hear you maybe, but then again, but if you're in Chicago, even though it's simultaneous, you can call me on the phone, you're in the past, in a sense. In that sense, Buddha's 90 generations back, but he's in the present at a proprioceptive level because there can be a continuous field of proprioceptive awareness that continues ignoring past and present. This is the inner meaning of transmissions. that you're in a continuous present with the Buddha at some level, not at the level of an I Consciousness. But everything is in the past. There's no such thing as the present. So working with that at another level is transmission. Very helpful. Yeah.

[43:24]

So the main breath practices, are really to bring your attention to your breath. Now, I have the whole practice. Somebody asked me earlier to talk about the six attentions, and I actually don't want to because it's a whole teaching in itself. And it's a teaching I've created. It's basically Buddhism, but I've put it together. It's what I call the six attentions. And the way you give attention to the world, individually or interior, through the world as a construct, changes the frequency level of response. There's a kind of frequency shift when you change attention. And one of the practices of the Six Attentions is to separate consensual attention out from cultural attention. Because in a way, cultural attention has co-opted consensual attention. So our culture is basically a consensual attention that we've all been born into and creates a common world.

[44:33]

To practice Zen at a depth level, you have to be able to see that consensual attention and then move yourself from it. Now, good examples of a consensual attention, and you can see how powerful it is, that are separated from consensual attention as culture happens in group therapy sessions. And one of my students told me about one in Europe, which is extremely interesting and completely... It's what consensual tension pulled away from cultural tension is, is they were... Were you there, Randy, when he told us this story? Where was I? Erichina told us this story. I guess it occurred in Vienna, or in Rostendorf. He was in a group therapy session And what they did was, this woman was there, and they were working with her, and they all played family members. So one person played the father, one person played the mother, one person played the brother and sister.

[45:40]

And when they started doing that, they began knowing things about her. And they even began knowing diseases that the mother had. They created a consensual attention And then this woman was amazed because they began telling her not only about her, but about her family who wasn't present, but they were playing. And that's a consensual tension which has a kind of, we can't explain it scientifically, can't explain spoonbending either. There's a... something happens at the level of consensual attention, which is extremely powerful, and you can see why culture is based on it. Why civilization, kingship, etc., are all methods of developing consensual attention to create order, etc. But part of the practice is to be aware that we have a consensual attention right now that floats a little bit free of cultural attention. and we can begin to understand each other and communicate at that level.

[46:46]

And that's really what a sangha is. A sangha is a group of people who develop a consensual attention that interplays with the cultural attention, in which the dharma can be transmitted. Are you saying the culture is kind of missionized? Yeah, that's right. And you don't have a sense anymore of being part of it or creating it. But one reason why Buddhism is and understands itself as a culture machine and sees itself as producing culture is that it sees and separates it from the consensual culture and then interplays with it and in effect changes culture. And that's the main way Buddhism sees itself doing good works. It's not so much in... Anyway. In that Sangha, you have... At first blush, Steiner's is a lay practice. In many places, what he says, no matter what walk of life you have, within certain limitations, maybe even physically, you know, you're on the battlefield, or you're born into a family of a brewery or a winemaker, there are going to be certain physical constraints as to exactly what can happen.

[48:01]

But no matter where you are, there are certain practices that can be fruitful. and that your way, there is a path, basically, without the monasticism. On the other hand, he also provided right from the beginning, I think from 1904 or so on, a esoteric school, which was a sangha, which was a community. In fact, it was a very tight community, a very sort of privileged community to begin with. That's why the Buddha established a monastic life, because he saw that as the only way to ground these practices, to create a sangha. It's independent of culture. And that early, it's interesting, in those early years, that group, had very specific meditations. And they even had little books. They had to check whether they meditated each day, and they had to show them to Steiner, who was the person in charge of that community in that city. And they would, you know, take grades. And it was kind of Masonic rituals where we enlivened and we shaped and what have you.

[49:07]

It was a very occult-y kind of thing. Then the First World War intervened. And the psychic atmosphere, he said the astral atmosphere was so devastated by these horrors that he had to stop, basically. And so there was a hiatus, essentially, until after the Second World War. It was only in the 20s, and especially around 1924, that a new community was created, quite different than the others. Now, in this case, neither of them are reading monastic communities. In other words, they don't share the rhythm of monastic life. I'm saying this because it sounds to me like you're working with this issue. On the one hand, lay practice. On the other hand, monastic practice. If I had a light word, that's what it is. Yeah, and whatever is in between, especially in the West. I've known many people like Alan Wallace or Bach. Both of them were monks.

[50:08]

Both of them gave up their monastic life, basically, because they just found it was so difficult. They've had another task, they continue to be Buddhists, they continue very much to be Buddhists, continue their practice, and yet they can't keep the vows, they can't keep the, you know, all the rhythms and rituals and what have you of monastic life in a Western situation. So, the Ascender was very much confronted with a similar situation and try to find the right sangha, the right form for the sangha. And I think it has many, many ways. It's a very public thing on the one hand, and then there's a kind of a closer, slightly closer group that hasn't committed to the monastery, so to speak, but is nonetheless, and the offerings are there. They're not just tuning in on weekends or whatever. They're actually doing the offerings, supporting you, supporting the group. Well, one difference with with Buddhism, of course, is there's no Christ event.

[51:09]

And just so that there'd be no Christ event, Buddhism created the seven Buddhas before Buddha. So Buddha does not stand out as the main event. And in fact, for Zen, the historical Buddha and so forth is almost, you can practice Zen all your life and never even know one diddly bit about the Buddha. The lineage, in effect, becomes the Buddha. And you look to the lineage always. And as you can see in reading, you can see in the koan that it's completely ahistorical. There's no reference to time in any sense, or when it occurred, what era. There are teachings, and Bob brought it out, about that certain eras were in in teaching, but Zen practically ignores all of that. And the Sangha is different from the lineage. The Sangha is the present people you practice.

[52:12]

The Sangha means those people you have this Sanghic consensual identity with. It also means all people, when you recognize them and have them in the history of the Buddha, well, even though they don't know it, but they're already enlightened, they already have Buddha nature. And lineage means that specific teaching, almost like a water hose that goes back to the Buddha, And you're nourishing.

[52:38]

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