May I ask how many of you were at the, just put it that way perhaps, how many of you were not at the meditation this morning? Oh, at least half. So I would like to be open to really what you'd like to know about Zen practice, Buddhism, meditation, and so forth. Of course there's various things we could talk about. And the title that was given to this workshop is, I believe, Stepping into a New World.

[01:07]

And it is the case that we... Seems hard to believe, but it is the case that we do enter a new world through meditation. I mean, the world arises in our thinking, in our mind, in our awareness. If you meditate, the world begins to arise differently in your mind and body. And this is in effect for you a new world.

[02:20]

It's like, I think, if you fall in love, you find yourself in a new world. Trees and people look different. And something like that happens in meditation too. Now, if you feel differently about the world, if you act differently in the world, it's a new world. And I think at this particular time, at the end of this century and the end of this millennium.

[03:30]

When the world is changing. Very rapidly, as we all know. And more rapidly than we know, actually, I think. Because we keep trying to see the world with our visual way of looking at it. So there are times in a person's life, times in a community and a country's life, when which are occasions for change.

[04:42]

And I think at those times we have to come back to what we find is most basically ourselves. And what we most trust. Yeah. So sometimes coming into a new world in the outer world, or to feel a new world emerging in yourself, it's best to be able to return to what feels most basic and deeply home to us. So we could describe meditation practice as both entering a new world and also returning home. So is there something any one of you would like me to speak about or that you'd like to follow up on a little?

[06:45]

Yes. Is there maybe any kind of something about the story of the blue lips of the orphan who then hopes that Marie I don't know. I'm sorry, I don't know the story. Yes? Your meditation is without saying much and without music? Yes. Yeah, well, I agree.

[08:05]

I know there's a lot of a kind of meditation now where there's calming music and so forth. And a few times I've had a massage and they play music often. And it's kind of nice. But from a Zen point of view it's not meditation. Because the music is shaping your mind. Instead of your mind finding its own shape. I mean, just, I don't know if there's any more chairs, but there's floor up here.

[09:23]

There's one more here. There's a chair here. For example, one of the most, and I'll use your question or what any of you might say, to give you some feeling of of the world of meditation practice and the world of mindfulness practice. When you... When you do learn or have developed the habit of sitting still, say,

[10:26]

15 or 20 or 30 minutes a day. And I don't want to speak about this about It's only in the context of having to sit meditation. But in the end, all of at least Buddhist practice is based on what happens during meditation. For example, when you learn to sit still and say you sit Five times a week. And you get the habit of not acting on things. No, in the meditation just a few minutes ago I gave a very simple instruction. habe ich eine sehr einfache Anweisung gegeben, which I said was don't scratch.

[12:11]

Und es war, kratzen Sie sich nicht. This is actually quite a profound instruction. Es ist eigentlich eine sehr tiefe Anweisung. If you're sitting and you find some kind of real or imaginary fly on your cheek, also wenn Sie sitzen und es ist eine wirkliche oder eine gedachte Fliege auf Ihrem Wangenknochen, It's best to just leave it there. And if it's a real fly, you find out it has very tiny feet. And it walks around you. That is actually kind of interesting. You develop a certain kind of patience. But mostly the itches are imaginary. And in fact, often the itches come at the way your energy works or your acupuncture body works.

[13:17]

So you're beginning to feel yourself from inside which begins to take some kind of external form. You kind of have an inner body or subtle body. Usually we suppress. And every time it says hello, you say, go away. Now, if you learn to, for some period of time, it doesn't have to be very long, let's say 20 minutes a day, to not to scratch.

[14:24]

Or, you know what I mean, don't wiggle, don't scratch. Do something very profound. As you break the adhesive connection between thought and action. In other words, most of us get very scared or nervous when we have thoughts that don't make sense. Or thoughts that we're afraid we might act on. Some kind of anger or something like that. So now generally the image we have is that we either express our emotions or we suppress our emotions.

[15:30]

And there's much teaching in the West about letting Getting your emotions out of you and so forth. We don't see it that way through meditation practice. What I would suggest is you let yourself feel things without having to act on them. And that begins to create a big space. It's a little bit like a personal psychoanalysis. And Freud basically used a meditative technique in pre-association lying on a couch.

[16:34]

So when you don't invite your thoughts to tea another basic instruction you're in effect practicing a kind of free association. So And if you can just let things come without any fear, you might act on them. Because you know whatever thought comes up, except maybe the soup is boiling over. you learn to just sit still once you know you can do that thoughts and associations start coming up which you wouldn't have let come up before often childhood pains and griefs

[17:53]

Or observations about yourself that you hope nobody else makes and you don't want to make either. The kind of observations that when you think that might be what you're like, you start to squirm. And now you just sit still. This is beginning also to develop a stability of mind which is not disturbed by circumstances, outer circumstances as well as inner circumstances. So you change little habits like that and you do begin to be in a new world. A new inner world at first and then a new outer world.

[19:04]

So I'm coming back to you about sound. One thing that happens when you begin to be able to sit still is there's this, you hear a bird say and there's a strange kind of ecstasy You hear the bird perhaps as you first heard birds as a kid one spring morning. Penetrates you as a sound that goes right through you. It makes you feel transparent. Maybe late at night with some kind of train whistle or something you may have that feeling. And it feels like the sound of the bird is your own sound, it belongs to you.

[20:41]

So what's going on? From a meditative point of view, Aus der Sicht der Meditation is your hearing your own hearing. Bedeutet, dass Sie hören Ihr eigenes Hören. You hear yourself hearing the birth. Sie hören sich selbst hören. And this is a kind of basic meditation instruction even. I mean, you hear the bird, but within your own capacity that you hear. Another bird will hear that bird differently. Ein anderer Vogel wird diesen Vogel natürlich anders hören.

[21:48]

Sie hören das praktisch für sich selbst. Es ist ihr Vogelgesang. So really you're hearing your own hearing of the bird sound. And when that experience is more direct than hearing something outside of you, there's a kind of ecstasy of just being alive. Like the kind of deep satisfaction you have if you have a good, a very good deep sleep. And those kinds of experiences through meditation practice, become commonplace.

[22:51]

When you see things, hear things, it gives you some deep satisfaction just to look at something. And it's not that the sound or what you're looking at is different. It's that you're in a new world inside of yourself. If you want, there's a chair right here, if you have the courage to come up and get it. Okay. You had a question? You, yes.

[23:52]

I made the experience that I was in a meditation state where I felt very comfortable. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. and the feeling was as if I was looking down from a mountain. It was a feeling as if I was part of this wholeness, this completeness, looking down from here. And I had the feeling that everybody was connected with this knowing. And the feeling was that I would go back to that air element and I'm going to die.

[25:00]

Later, when I was back to a normal state of mind, I had the feeling that that was a new world. And also with the feeling as if that was something that I'd had before, being my own, and I had to laugh about it because I hadn't realized. And I'm afraid to take this experience seriously. That would really change, turn my very normal thinking upside down.

[26:02]

but at the same time I have the feeling that everybody is connected in that way. Yeah, don't take it seriously. Take it joyfully. That's true. This is true. Oh, I'm very... I'm not going to answer. My daughter is trying to reach me, I think. Yeah, but let me finish responding. My worst nightmare. Someone gave me that so I'd be accessible when I'm traveling, but I don't know.

[27:25]

So... I think what meditation and mindfulness practice do, it makes us more open to The world of wisdom. The way, knowing how things actually exist. And also, so not only does it help us notice it, it helps us allow the noticing to deepen our life.

[28:40]

We're less likely to say, oh, that's nothing. So, I mean, it's helpful to, let me make a distinction now between awareness and consciousness. Because for you, but also for people who take what she said seriously. Okay, so when you wake up in the morning, talking about waking up in the morning, we're going to go to one o'clock, is that right? Yes. We're all going to get hungry. Should we take a break at some point too? At some point we'll take a break. But we'll go on for a little while longer now.

[29:53]

Okay, so when you... Now I'm speaking about just observing yourself in ordinary circumstances, not necessarily meditation. Zen practice is not the truth. Zen practice is not the truth. Your life is the truth. Zen practice is just an approach or a tool or teaching that allows you to study yourself and come to the threshold of the truth. Zen is a way of one way of opening yourself to the truth of our existence. But we don't tell you what that truth is. It's up to you to find out what that truth is. And that means you have to have a basic inner confidence.

[30:56]

There's space up here. I don't know if there's chairs. There's no chair, but there's a floor. Or you could have this chair if you want. Do you like this chair? Let me just move that. When you wake up in the morning and you've been dreaming and you would like to remember the dream, but you can't. So what's going on? What's happening, if you observe this transition between waking and sleeping, it's like going from one kind of liquid to another kind of liquid.

[32:22]

So once you begin to put the world together through your senses, You know, that with the alarm clock, the sun's coming in the window. Yeah, I have to go to work. I can hear someone's already up in the house. At that point, consciousness has taken hold. Now, consciousness may have some memory of the dream. But consciousness doesn't dream. Consciousness thinks. Dreams proceed in a kind of emotion tied to images. When I'm looking at you, I see you.

[33:40]

That's an image. But images don't float in my mind. Dream-type images. And a way to understand that is... is that the images of dreams won't... won't... float in consciousness. So we have two kinds of liquids we can say. One supports thinking but images sink.

[34:45]

And dreaming mind supports images but thinking sinks. So if you're lying in bed at night trying to go to sleep and you're thinking, it's pretty hard to go to sleep. Your thinking has to sink. That means like there's another kind of liquid that that begins to come up and it pushes thinking out. Do you understand the image? Okay. So, if you want to recover a dream then, We're giving you a chair.

[35:52]

If you don't want it, it's okay, but we're giving it to you. is to recover the liquid of dreaming mind. And you can do that in a couple of ways. One way, if you can really stay with one of the images in the dream, you can really concentrate on that image. What was that? Sometimes dreaming mind begins to collect around the image and take over. Or if you know what dreaming mind feels in your body, a basic truism of yogic culture, Buddhism is a yogic practice.

[37:07]

Zen is especially a yogic practice. And what's characteristic of a yogic practice is that you approach the mind and spirit through the body. One of the truisms of yogic worldview is that all mental phenomena has a physical component. And all sentient physical phenomena has a mental component. Do you believe that? Okay. That means that every state of mind has a different feeling in your body.

[38:10]

So you can physically feel states of mind. Okay. So if you know a particular state of mind, you can generate the... Let's put it this way. if you know the physical feeling of a particular state of mind, you can generate that mind by generating that feeling in your body. And the memory we actually have a term called dharanic memory, which means to be able to remember mental states with the body. Now, it's quite common. If you go out on a particular fall day and the coldness and the smell of the leaves, you come into a state of mind when you were in college or something.

[39:25]

Das ist eigentlich ganz normal. Sie gehen an einem Herbsttag nach draußen, Sie riechen und fühlen die Blätter und die Kühle und plötzlich sind Sie versetzt in einen Tag, wo Sie zum Beispiel in der Schule waren oder studiert haben. And you feel you're going back to school, it's fall. Und Sie gehen zurück zur Schule und es ist Herbst. Okay, this is common, but to make it part of our power is practice. So say you want to go back into a dream. You can also just generate dream mind in your body. You can move to that feeling in your body that you know dream mind is anchored in. And then you suddenly find yourself back in dream dreaming.

[40:40]

And you can even be in dreaming without being asleep. You can sort of finish or sometimes it's a new dream while you're still holding part of you waiting to get up. Okay. Now I'm mentioning all these things because they are part of the skill of developing interior consciousness. It's a capacity of all of us. And meditation is one of the ways, the shortcut way to develop it. Okay. So, now what I've just done now is tried to make a distinction in quality and characteristic between dreaming mind and waking mind.

[41:46]

That you can feel. And now you know that there's different kinds of mind. And that different minds have different structures and capacity. Now say that you really know this. And say you're a depressive person. Now, if you're a person who gets depressed a lot, it's kind of hard to meditate and do things. You're too discouraged. But if you have meditative skills, or let's say mind skills, you can feel yourself slipping into a depressive state of mind. And you can actually change the location of your mind in your body and find a different mind than the depressive mind.

[43:08]

Now, probably you don't want to do that. If you're getting depressed, maybe you should be depressed. We don't want to interfere too much. So if you can have a big... calm, stable state of mind, which allows you to also be depressed. Because depression is often an exploration of things that you need to let come out. But you're in a different world when you can work physically and mentally with your depression than when you're just at the victim of it.

[44:09]

Okay, so now let me go back to the distinction between awareness and consciousness. When you go to bed, and you don't have an alarm clock. And you decide to wake up, as I always say, at 6.02, say. Now many people can do this. Most people don't have an exact body sense of time during the day. They don't. They don't. Most people, you can't say to them, what time is it exactly right now? Some people can actually tell you to the minute, but most people Well, it's after 10 o'clock, I think.

[45:11]

But if you can go to sleep and wake up at exactly 6.02, you have a very exact sense of time at night. Now, if you can do this, what is... you're asleep. So, what is waking you up at 6.02? It's not consciousness. Because you're not conscious. we have to, let's call it awareness. Awareness is present even while you're asleep. And awareness is a kind of, let's say, another mental liquid which particularly supports intention.

[46:17]

So you can in awareness intend to get up at a particular time and you can sleep on top of that, and awareness continues the intention. Do you understand? If I get up from here, and as I'm getting up, I fall down. I will probably catch myself and not hurt myself. Even if I'm carrying this, I'll somehow hold this and catch myself. I can't think that fast. Awareness is extremely fast. So awareness is both. Often understand meditation the concept of the minds of meditation, because they know if they're playing tennis or whatever, they have to move into awareness out of thinking to play.

[47:50]

So awareness is a kind of, I think when a person has the experience of in an accident or before an operation or something, that their life passes before them in a few seconds. Another fairly common experience. It means we have a kind of awareness which isn't this and this and this, but... everything all at once. And that awareness is not limited to our body image. So that kind of awareness we can, let's call it simply, keep it simple, try to keep it simple, we can call that kind of awareness a wisdom consciousness.

[49:13]

And since it's free of the body image, sometimes we can observe ourselves in the world as if we were Not just here. It's not independent of the body. But it's not only located in the body. And sometimes an insight comes to us from this more timeless way of being. Children have them. Particularly children before they have a concept of past, present and future. And usually the parents suppress the insights. Because they suppress them in themselves. So one thing mindfulness and meditation practice do is give you the confidence give you the developing experience

[50:24]

and enough confidence in that experience that you have confidence when these deeper insights or observations come. And they are often like the experiences we have when we die. I haven't died yet. But I'm quite sure of this. Okay. Yeah, let me try someone else first, okay? Yes? Yes? Yeah? Yeah, the woman in, right there, yeah. We'll start with this. I would like to know more about Zen in general. Zen in general? Okay, I'm General Zen.

[51:44]

He's Major Zen. I'll come back to it I'll come back to it I'd like to add something how do we separate awareness from intuition is it okay that's a good question It's almost always women who ask questions about intuition. What's wrong with you men? Okay. Just you, why don't you bring up... Deep experience I have is my dreaming.

[52:47]

How to break consciousness? Why should I bring up my dream? Why should I bring up my dream? What helps my dream? What does it help my daily consciousness? How does dreaming help your daily consciousness? Does it help your daily consciousness? Does it help you? I don't know. You don't know. You don't know your dreams. I couldn't understand your translation then.

[53:48]

Yeah, I wasn't sure what you were saying, actually. I'm sorry. So the question is, how does it help my daily consciousness if I work with my dreams? Okay, I haven't forgotten. Yes? What role does the will play in Zen? On the one hand you add a new way when you are open for it. On the other hand, you also have to want to do what you will to do. Yes, OK. That's OK? I would like to ask something about awareness If I make music with other people the musicians play together although their technique is not so perfect

[55:04]

So they play intuitively and wait intuitively and pick up the threat. So there's something else that's happening now. That's not becoming weak. They're playing out of themselves. Is that kind of awareness? Yes. Okay, this is going to be too complicated if we have any more questions. Let me just respond to dreaming and to intuition. And after the break I'll come back to will, the will body. And perhaps I can say something to your question relating to music. I would say that for the most part intuition

[56:21]

is an eruption into your ordinary thinking or of some kind of deeper thinking. And that deeper thinking may come from awareness. And it may come from other kinds of thinking that we're doing underneath our conscious thinking. And because we mostly live in our conscious thinking, an intuition seems to push in from somewhere else. We could also describe mindfulness practice and meditation practice as a way to come to live

[57:46]

in those interiorities from which our experience of intuition arises. So it's more just a familiar kind of knowing that's present all the time. At least that's my experience and understanding. And as for dreaming... I really kind of resist the idea of working with our dreams. I think it can be very useful to interpret your dreams. And it fits into the Freudian way and Jungian ways are different. And it fits in this way in which Freud and Jung interpreted it, although they are also interrelated.

[59:09]

And some artists and poets and writers, painters, use dreams as their muse. Now, in Zen practice we don't do any of those things, but you can if you want to. No problem. Or rather, it can be a problem. It can be a problem. I mean, in a way, I say it's no problem, I mean that, but also it can be something of a problem. When you apply dream interpretation to a dream, you're not fully listening to the dream. You're trying to listen to it, but in many ways you're trying to control it.

[60:14]

Or you're trying to make sense of it in terms of some theory or in terms of your ordinary consciousness. So you're basically asking, what does the dream mean in my conscious identity? You're not asking, what does my conscious identity mean to the dream? Do you see the difference between the two questions? We're giving a very clear priority to consciousness as where we actually live. But we live through the entirety of our mind. emotion, thinking, dreaming, consciousness.

[61:27]

So dreams are one of the places we live. And so to bring dreaming consciousness into your daily life, In a non-interpretive way is that when you wake up You say you don't, but say that you do know or you feel a dream. You hold that feeling during the day. You don't try to understand it. Let's say you have the green water of consciousness. And you have the blue water of the dream.

[62:29]

Instead of trying to understand the blue water the dream is like a little pitcher of blue water. And you pour it into the green water. Without saying What it is, you just, well, I add this green, I pour it into my daily consciousness. And then you have a kind of blue-green consciousness. And it begins to, the details of the day begin to tell you things. So this way of looking at things has a kind of integrity. Again, you can do what you'd like, but I'm suggesting you understand how this Zen in general

[63:32]

And I'll come back to Zen in general after the break. Let's sit still for just one minute or so. So I'll hit the bell three times at the beginning. And once at the end. It will be less than an hour. And more than 30 seconds.

[64:11]

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