I think to balance that we have to find some way with our children to not have the whole world come to them through thoughts. An image that's stuck in my mind. One day when I was used to doing sashimi regularly at the house distiller and outside of Hamburg. I had a day before or after Iron and Wind when I was in Hamburg for the afternoon. And there was a holiday and there were lots of housewives with their babies and so forth.

[01:06]

And this one woman had a little infant in a crib, not a crib, a pram. Or a stroller or something. And she had a little kid who was barely able to walk beside the stroller. And they were both howling. Not yet crying. And she was desperate. But she was physically comforting the infant. And shouting at the toddler. She could have physically comforted both. But her access to one, she couldn't talk to one and she could talk to the other.

[02:16]

So she was being very nice to the baby, but she was telling the little boy to shut up. And it struck me then what a predominant emphasis we put on language to influence our children once they can talk. And I think another, and I won't go into it, I've talked about it often before, The reason we believe in our thoughts is because we have to establish continuity in order to function. And on the whole, we tend to establish our continuity in thinking. And when we can't tie the world together with thinking, our experience, the process of a sequence through thinking, we're quite disturbed.

[03:38]

So it's not only the need for continuity, but it's also the deep disturbance when there's an absence of continuity. So I think that's enough. And we can come back to all these things because we have a weekend. So let's sit for a minute or so. Good evening.

[07:51]

Good night. You're in the dark corner over here. Don't fall asleep, please. Yes. Some of you I don't know. This is not bad. Okay. Yeah, we have to have some way to notice our life. Most of our life goes by unnoticed, even unexperienced. If not most of our life, certainly. Much of it or portions of it.

[08:54]

And sometimes the most important portions. We miss the turning points sometimes. Out of our habits. And then when we notice the turning point, it's too late to turn. Yeah, so we could say Buddhist practice is a way of noticing our life. The Buddhist practice is a way of noticing our life. So this weekend we decided to start with the Eightfold Path as a way of noticing our life. And there's something reassuring about a path.

[10:18]

Yeah, a path we can go someplace on. A path that leads us somewhere, takes us somewhere. Yeah, but some paths take us where we don't want to go. We find we're on a path and we really don't like the way our life turns out. somehow the path of our life is taking us. It might be our job. It might be our marriage. Yeah, it might be our... where we live. Yeah, the... Sometimes it takes a long time to notice that we don't feel we're on the path we want to be.

[11:42]

And sometimes our path is to stay on the path we don't want to stay on. That's certainly part of life. Yeah. And then there's the path that will take us where we want to go, but we won't know until we get there. Yeah. So paths aren't always reassuring, but still the sense of a path is on the whole reassuring.

[12:46]

Now, I remember once... going to a movie in Boston many years ago. And I'd just seen a very powerful movie about Greece and fascist governments or something. I can't remember the movie. It was a good movie. Quite scary movie. Yeah, and then I decided to walk home by a an alley. And it was an alley that goes right down the middle of a block.

[13:47]

There was a street on either side, but the alley went down the middle. Yeah, I was alone. I'd gone to the movie alone. And I liked the idea of being alone, walking. But at this hour of night, 11 o'clock or something like that, the alley was really full of rats. And they were running back and forth in front of me and I looked back and didn't even want to turn back because they were running back and forth behind me.

[14:48]

I had no idea that Boston was so full of rats. It was a long, you know, maybe it's where I had to walk was ten blocks of this rat-filled avenue. Yeah, I... I didn't like it, actually. I didn't want to be on this path. And the movie had been full of rats, too. The kind of world I don't want to be part of. But somehow I encouraged myself to. continue and not let the rats disturb me.

[16:00]

And not to be too biographical, but I'd gotten used to rats much earlier. Because years before that, when I lived in Pittsburgh, there were rats all over our garbage pail all the time. And I had to go down in the dark between two buildings. kind of shout to get the rats off and put them in the garbage. So I kind of learned to be brave in front of rats. So I walked the whole length of this But it was actually kind of good experience. Because it was clear I didn't want to be on this path. Our idea of the future is kind of a path. Speaking with some of you earlier today,

[17:19]

I said we often project a future from some point in our life. Maybe from childhood. Maybe from school. Or maybe when we rebelled against something. Do we want the future to be like this past we projected, this future we projected? And sometimes we don't actually know what the steps are to get there. But we hope we're feeling our way toward it. Sometimes it's not really very realistic. Yeah, because it's stuck in some point in our life where we imagined our future.

[18:39]

But to find that out is quite good. Yeah, I know people who lived like they were still in college till they were about 35. And they realize, I don't have to look like a college student anymore. Or, they only recognized my brains in college, nobody does it anymore. They only recognize my brains in college. No one recognizes them anymore. Anyway, you can notice these kinds of ideas. When do we most feel Like who we are.

[19:47]

Maybe there's lots of times when you feel like this is who I am. But I think it's a useful question to ask. When do I most feel like myself? When I'm walking on some deserted... When I first see the leaves of fall in my path. Perhaps walking along a wharf or a dock, you know, like the ships are in Hamburg. Maybe we're walking on a wharf, a dock, where the ships are.

[20:53]

I sailed on ships for working, you know, freight ships for a couple of years and I have a certain feeling for those kind of places. Yeah. Maybe you feel most like yourself when you're in love. No, when you take walks with friends or something. Or maybe you feel most like yourself when you don't like yourself. I'm really not a very good person. I know it and... Everyone else knows it and this is me. Usually people who have that kind of feeling have the opposite feeling too.

[21:56]

I'm really the smartest and the best. No one recognizes me. Usually people who have the feeling that they're no good have this opposite feeling going too, which they're the best. I don't get that. Those people? He's never had this experience. People who tend to feel, I'm no good and it's me, often are people who also feel, oh, I'm the best, I'm really... But I think it's a useful question. When do I feel most like myself? Maybe it's when you hardly feel the presence of a self. Vielleicht wenn du kaum die Gegenwart eines Selbst bemerkst.

[23:02]

Anyway, so here I'm just talking about the sense of a path. Ich spreche einfach nur über das Gefühl eines Weges. Yeah, and we're already on a path. Und wir sind schon auf einem Weg. We can introduce today, tomorrow, that we'll just have this eightfold path. What about the path you're already on? I brought up earlier this statement of Dogen. To be in the room of the Buddhas and Buddha ancestors, far surpasses the intimacy and depth of the teaching.

[24:10]

But teaching is always, no matter how intimate and deep it is, it's always something a little bit outside us, at least a little bit outside. But the path, you know, it's already inside us. Often not noticed. We have to assume we're on some kind of a path. Other people may see it. Oh, they have a feeling that We're this kind of person and we seem to have a kind of direction in our life. But often we don't see it so clearly. To be in the room of the Buddhas and Buddha ancestors means to be inside your own experience.

[25:22]

To explore inside your own experience. And maybe Maybe the teachings will help you get inside your own experience. Yeah, but from inside our own experience we should find our path. So what's the way to do that? Now the... Could you turn that to the first page? To the first page. All the way. Thank you very much. Sorry to make you move. Maybe you'd like to move, I don't know.

[26:34]

Okay, the seventh of the eightfold path is mindfulness. And that's where most of us enter. And mindfulness is a kind of continuity. If you practice mindfulness, Wenn ihr Achtsamkeit übt... You begin to feel a... Yeah, mindfulness... Continuous mindfulness shows you a continuity. So the secret of mindfulness is not just to be alert now and then, but to develop a continuity of mindfulness in which you notice, you know, Yeah, it's a kind of... Has to be a path of acceptance.

[27:46]

Because there's a continuity of... of seeing things as they are. Perhaps not seeing things as they really are, but seeing things as they are for you. And that includes your rat-filled allies. That includes your compulsions, your bad moods, the way you treat people sometimes, your compulsions, your chaos. We're not trying to get rid of that right now.

[28:50]

We're just trying to find a Work with it. Mindfulness will make us notice it. But mindfulness also gives us the ability to work with it. So your path is also your bad moods, your self-worth. So let's use mindfulness to just notice, not try to get better, just notice. Yeah, getting better or something like that is fine, of course. But working with our path is what's most important.

[29:53]

And again, mindfulness gives us the awareness to do that. You know, when you look at a tree, you don't see the roots of the tree. If you look at a tree, you don't see the roots of the tree. You only see the tree that is above the ground. And a lot of our path is rooted underground in our life. And in the daytime, we don't see the stars. I think they're still there in the daytime, but we just don't see them.

[30:53]

Sometimes we can see them. Occasionally, we see stars during the day. But the whole penelope of the stars we don't see. The penelope? This means the whole array. But sometimes we can pierce the daylight. Or block the sun like with an eclipse. And you see the stars in the daytime. But the stars are there. They're just not appearing to us.

[32:06]

But somehow, if we start to meditate, both mindfulness and concentration include meditation. If we start to meditate, we find a night sky mind in us. Something like that. Yeah, I like that. Night sky mind. And some people chart their path by the stars. People interested in astrology. They think the stars tell them more about their path than the daytime activity. Maybe in meditation there's some feeling like that.

[33:27]

It's not the stars in the sky, but our own night sky mind. Hmm. Sometimes we can feel even during the day our night sky mind. Sometimes if you practice, practice mindfulness, you can feel the night sky mind of others too. Not just the daytime mind which hides the stars, Now, the daytime mind is something like consciousness. Very effective to see things. But we miss the path we find in dreams.

[34:32]

We miss the path we find in dreams. So mindfulness also, you know, gives us continuity with our, you know, rat-filled alleys. You know, our problems are... bad habits and so forth. And that's part of the function of practicing mindfulness. Find continuity in the workings of our life. The workings of our life. And mindfulness is more related to awareness than consciousness.

[35:42]

So mindfulness practice begins to kind of bring somehow what I'm trying to say, this daytime mind and nighttime mind more into awareness. It brings the various parallel paths of our life more together. So first of all, mostly all I'm recommending this evening that you have an awareness of the path or paths you already have that are already beneath your feet

[37:00]

already embedded in your activity. And the past two of our night sky mind And how our paths intertwine with others. Their daytime mind, their nighttime mind. And there's no question that those who meditate together have more of a feeling of shared night sky mind. So I'm getting Please let's start the seminar with a feeling of the path in your own life, the knowing, the knowing, the knowing, the openness to discover the paths of our own life.

[39:04]

And understanding the path of mindfulness is a path of continuity and acceptance. And bringing it together. Yeah, okay. Thank you very much. Vielen Dank. Thank you for translating. Good morning. Congratulations. Glückwunsch. I hope I get to see the baby. Ich hoffe, ich kann das Baby sehen. Thank you, all of you who I know so well, for coming to the seminar.

[40:39]

It's actually rather difficult to leave Crestone. Not only because of such a nuisance to fly so far, And I almost always, as you can hear, after a flight get a cold. But, you know, the practice period goes on and it develops a kind of common body. But to leave so long, weeks, is a pretty hard decision to make.

[41:43]

But I have to confess, I miss you, too. So I have to, and I'd like to. be here during this part of the year, too. So to see you all makes it worthwhile. And then there's quite a few new people here. Yeah, and how many of you is it the first time that How many of you are for the first time in Johanneshof? How the heck did you find your way here? Is that lost on the road? And how many of you are fairly new to Buddhism? For some of you this is a kind of introduction to Buddhism.

[43:01]

That's a big responsibility, I don't know. Okay. So please, at part of the seminar, take advantage of being here with each other and the place and so forth. Think of this as a little Dharma vacation for a few days. It's not a Dharma vacation for the staff here. They're working very hard. But the reason we're here is to practice with you, so it's good.

[44:07]

So we have the good luck to have this topic of the Eightfold Path. It's actually a good way to be introduced to Buddhism. In fact, it's incumbent upon anybody practicing Buddhism to become familiar with the Eightfold Path. You can understand it. It's not just a beginning. It's also the whole of the path.

[45:08]

If you really penetrate it and study it the way it's meant to be studied, and study it the way it's meant to be studied, Yes, it can be the whole of Buddhism. And we can learn something too from it about how to study Buddhism. Some commentators said each word or each phrase is a little package that you open up. Unwrap, open up.

[46:29]

Then you find nothing's in there. Then you have to look real carefully. It's tiny. Then you add water. You'll practice and expand. It's true. It does seem like nothing until you... get very familiar with. So the first step is to, oh, can we change it again? You're my helper here. Somebody likes the five diamonds, it may appear. Not yet. So the first step is to just really get familiar with it. And we can ask, you know, what can it tell us about Buddhism?

[47:33]

And we can ask, what can it tell us about ourselves? And you'll see, you see that the first that right in the middle of the eightfold path is our own life. Our speech, our conduct, our livelihood. We can expand it to mean to include our intentions, and our effort. Yeah. So, but, you know, you've already... You know, you're adult people with... a life already established, and... So you've already paid considerable attention to your... how you speak, what your conduct is, and so... Yeah.

[49:02]

Most of you have already established a means of livelihood. Or you're in the process of doing so. So what, how can we look at it any more than we already have? Well, the entry, as I said last night, for us is the practice of mindfulness. Yes, you want to bring mindfulness to your speech, your conduct, and your livelihood. Well, let's just take a speech. I remember in Japan once I was with a woman who was half Japanese.

[50:05]

And she grew up in Japan. But she went to English language schools. She went to schools that taught in English. So she didn't know Japanese perfectly. And I was with my person who really was my teacher in Japan, Yamada Momonoshe. And she, you know, to speak Japanese you have to bring a lot of attention to the language. And particularly, there's lots of different formalities in how you speak.

[51:36]

And she was actually unable to really bring attention. She doesn't know Japanese well enough to really bring attention to her Japanese. And I was wanting her to translate for me. But he didn't really want to listen to her. He wanted to talk to me in my bad Japanese. Yeah. Somehow I was bringing in bad Japanese a lot of attention to it. So the point I'm making is language itself, German, demands quite a lot of attention to what you're saying to get the grammar straight and so forth. Mein Punkt hier ist, dass die Sprache, Deutsch zum Beispiel auch, sehr viel Aufmerksamkeit benötigt, sodass man die Sprache sprechen kann, die Grammatik richtig verwendet.

[52:47]

Nein. I'm told, I don't know, that even people who speak German naturally and well, still lots of people don't quite get certain forms right. So our language is developed... in fact, to demand attention from us. Let me just, I don't know, I'm just wrapping away here. What are you doing? Wrapping, just talking. Another interesting fact of the difference between Well, an aspect of Asian languages, and Japanese in particular, is that they try to make it complicated.

[53:49]

They have a writing system which uses one part of the brain and a speaking system which uses another part of the brain. So if an Asian person, Japanese or Chinese, for example, is in a car accident, may injure their brain, they may only lose their speaking, but they may not lose their reading. We would lose both. We would damage that part of our brain. And it takes until you're late in high school to really be able to read a newspaper. It takes, since MacArthur simplified things, it takes 2,000 characters to read the newspaper. And 20 or 30,000 to be a scholar. And 10,000 or more of those won't overlap with other scholarly fields.

[55:25]

Won't overlap. And MacArthur wanted to simplify that into an alphabet. And the Japanese resisted it. Most of them resisted it because they were used to Japanese. But some resisted it because they understood that it'll simplify their brains, simplify the language. The basic idea was that the complexity of language, the structure of language developed the structures of mind, the structures of consciousness.

[56:42]

So implicit in this practice of mindfulness is the understanding that mindfulness transforms you. even transforms the brain itself. And mindfulness then is to kind of let your mind rest in the particulars. Now since this is beginning Buddhism and I'm introducing Buddhism too, I have to add that the practice of mindfulness is most profoundly carried by the breath. So if you're going to enter the

[58:16]

the Eightfold Path with mindfulness. You have to enter it with your breath. Maybe it's almost like an athletic event. The Winter Olympic Games are going on right now, as probably most of you know. And I think Germany has won the most gold medals. It's quite a little country compared to America, but hey, I'm glad to be half German. At least my daughter is half German. They certainly have to have their mind and breath together when they're doing those extraordinary things they're doing.

[59:40]

And it may be that sports comes closest to yogic practice for us. So this path, you know, looks like words, speech, conduct, etc. But it's really something you're entering with your body. Now you're going to bring mindful attention to your breath, to your speech. Yeah, as a Buddhist practice, you're bringing kind of breath attention to your speech.

[60:48]

So you feel what you're saying. Another little anecdote I remember studying, same time I started studying Zen, I started studying with a woman named Charlotte Selber. He lives in America mostly, but is originally, I think, Austrian. She's a hundred years old now and still teaches in German. But when I first met her and she asked us as a group to close our eyes, And while I was sitting there, I didn't know what this was all about.

[62:00]

She said, close your eyes. So I sat there with closing my eyes. And she just said, blue. And somehow it blew across the room to me and hit me physically, you know. I can't exactly explain the experience. But after that, I began to feel words physically. After all, I'm making the words with my mouth and I also form the words with my mouth and with my voice apparatus. But mostly we just don't notice so much, I think, the physicality of the words.

[63:09]

So we're talking here in this path of bringing a kind of physical breath, attention to your speech. Feeling your own breath and body in your speech. That kind of changes the way you speak, actually. It feels something like the source of the words is not just in the mind anymore. Yeah, it arises more out of parts of your body. It arises more out of your experience.

[64:12]

Your experience of words, not just your knowing of the words, like from a dictionary. So we're trying, if we're entering this path, Right now I'm not speaking about it as what it's telling us about Buddhism, but just what it might tell us about ourselves. So as a practitioner, you're bringing a new kind of attention to the details of your life. And you feel yourself present in each word. Last night I asked, when do you most feel like yourself? Well, I mean, right now I could say you feel like yourself in each word.

[65:59]

You stand by each word. We say in English that's a person who's honest, but maybe here we stand in each word. And when you bring this kind of physical attention to your speaking, You also can feel more how others understand what you're saying. Because somehow it opens you to feeling their body feel the word.

[67:01]

Maybe it sounds like I'm talking nonsense here. But I don't. For me, I don't think so. But I don't. I have sort of primitive means available to speak about it. Anyway, I'm speaking about a physicalized attention brought to the details of your life. It's almost like you're eating the details of your life. And sometimes they're hard to chew. And they're hard to digest. Is this the detail of my life? Somehow it is almost a digestion process involved.

[68:21]

and I've very often used for the very reasons we're talking about now. The sense of checking up on what you're doing, measuring by what you're doing, measuring what you're doing. Checking up on what you're doing or measuring what you're doing. Didn't get the first sense. As a means to measure or check up on what you're doing. To see if you feel nourished. Nourished by what you're saying. Or do you feel depleted by what you're saying? Lost energy or something. And there's even a kind of morality in here. An implicit or natural morality.

[69:46]

Because if you say things to another person, which are kind of mean, the person No, no. You say things to another person and the things you say are kind of mean. Or you say things too much from your own point of view. Or you say things really not respecting the other person. It makes you feel sick. It's just mental. Sorry, we can hardly notice that the other person is, you know. when it's just mental, you hardly notice that what you've said has made the other person feel... But somehow, if you bring your... If you physically feel your words...

[71:13]

But if you feel your words physically, you physically feel their impact. And you feel nourished or sick by what you say. But there's also a problem, too. Because when we... physically feel our words. Our words have much more impact on others. And it's hard to take responsibility for the impact your words have on others. And if you're new to the whole realm of meditation practice and all, you don't realize how you're affecting people. And when you are new in this whole realm of meditation practice, then you don't even know how you influence other people.

[72:46]

So bringing mindfulness into our speech is a way of bringing our speech more in line with our intentions. more closely connected to the person we want to be. and through practicing with our speech like this, we can see how far we are from from who we imagine we are.

[73:58]

Because this is the Eightfold Path is designed to bring your actions Speech and livelihood. Into a true expression of your intention. A consistent expression of your intention. And part of that process is to show us how divergent our speaking and actions are, how different our speaking and actions are, often from our intention.

[75:09]

Because the Eightfold Path starts with views. The beginning of Buddhism starts with view. Because as we talked about yesterday, everything we do is rooted in our views. And if those views are mistaken, or false in some way, Yeah, not clear. It will affect everything we do. But how do we get at our views? They're more deeply buried than the roots of our... Sie sind tiefer vergraben als die Wurzeln meines Baumes. Yeah, but somehow, if we bring this alchemy, this alchemy, aber irgendwie, indem wir diese Alchemie of a kind of...

[76:30]

which is what we could call mindfulness, to the details of our life, we begin somehow, it pries open this relationship between our views, intentions, and our actions. Prize open, like you probably open a can. Oh, yeah, well, I'm impressed with myself. I said quite a bit this morning. And before I came down, I didn't know how can I speak about this.

[77:33]

So somehow I've started better than I expected. Since I didn't know what to do upstairs and I found out down here it must be you. I think I have to be impressed with you. Yeah. So let's sit for a couple of minutes and then we'll take a break.

[78:28]

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