Okay. It is also assumed and experienced in Buddhism, in my own experience, that consciousness cannot know reality. So then we can ask ourselves, why can't consciousness know reality? And then we have to look at what is consciousness. And how selective it is and how it functions. Yeah, we needed, you know, the other day, who did I throw the Kleenex to the other day? Didn't come back today? Somebody, I think, bought Kleenex to you yesterday. You offered it? No, I actually threw it to somebody. They caught it.

[01:02]

It was next to me in the garden in the Japanese garden. Oh. It was in the Japanese garden? Oh. It was on Friday. Oh. On Friday. No, yesterday I... I think... In any case, I threw the Kleenex to somebody. He isn't here. And when I threw it, if I did throw it to somebody, you have to catch it. I mean, you don't have to catch it. And that's part of the function of consciousness. It allows us to catch things and avoid streetcars and so forth. That means that to the degree to which I really wanted to hug the person, Was perhaps somewhat apparent, but I used, instead of hugging them, through the cigarette.

[02:30]

So, there's a lot that's not apparent. Consciousness' main job is to, in this case, catch the Kleenex ball. And it deals with consistent sensory world. When you wake up from dreaming, from sleeping your mind begins to put together consistent sensory impressions. Dann setzt euer Geist wirklich ganz beständig Sinneseindrücke zusammen. Birds, light, the time of day, etc. Vögel, Licht, die Tageszeit, usw. And that produces consciousness. Und das produziert Bewusstsein. Consciousness is, you can watch it happen in the morning, is generated in stages. Und das könnt ihr am Morgen beobachten. Bewusstsein wird in Phasen, in Stufen hervorgebracht. Until you decide to get up.

[03:33]

Bis du dich entscheidest aufzustehen. And you sleep until you couldn't easily go back to sleep. Because consciousness establishes itself. It's not just there, you establish consciousness. So I'm trying to speak about consciousness. If consciousness is what prevents us from knowing how we exist. It's useful to study or observe or talk about consciousness to some extent. Okay. Now consciousness also has a quality of continuity. But we know that reality is not continuous.

[04:38]

There's a mystery right here in that there's no duration to the moment. I said to an old story I tell sometimes, I said to my father once when I was very little, there's no 12 o'clock. And he said, why, what do you mean? I said, well, it's a minute to 12, okay. And a half a minute to twelve. And a second to twelve. And a millionth of a second to twelve. And then it's a millionth of a second after twelve. There's no twelve. And he said, we can say that something that is approached and then passed exists. But the point holds that right now, when did the past start and when is the future starting?

[05:54]

We're on a knife edge of the present. If you die at this moment, your past is gone. Somebody else may carry it on, but your past is gone. And as I said, Earlier, Buddhism says the moment of death is actually the moment of each moment. From the point of view of wisdom. Okay, if we don't speak about it in terms of its minute duration, we can speak about it in terms of its uniqueness. It's absolutely unique.

[07:08]

You've never had this moment before and you'll never have it again. You might have similar feelings, but this moment is now. And it's not repeatable. And it's constantly dissolving and being replaced by another moment. This is something physics can't make sense of and they have various theories. Like all the possibilities of each moment spin off into other realities. And you can make mathematical models of this. But in any case, it's unique and not repeatable. Extremely momentary.

[08:09]

Okay. But yet most of what we know is a continuity of consciousness. Where this moment anticipates the next moment. So we could say that If what we know is only the continuity of consciousness, let's create the opposite. Like to feeling disconnected, we create already connected. So let's try to create a discontinuous consciousness. A momentary consciousness. A moment of timelessness within time. Now how can we do this? The fact is we are doing it in each moment, it's just we can't be conscious of it.

[09:28]

Consciousness can't be conscious of something that isn't continuous. So it can't notice something that's so brief and non-repeatable to be, it's not noticeable. Das kann etwas nicht kennen, was so kurz und nicht wiederholbar ist. Das ist einfach nicht zu bemerken. Ja, wir verstehen das alles. Wie können wir aber damit praktizieren? Was für eine Relevanz hat das? Well, you confirm this in meditation practices. When you begin to have formless experiences in meditation, this begins to make knowledgeable sense. But just without this kind of, you know, developed meditation practice, which is partly the ability to notice your meditation practice.

[10:57]

In other words, it's not just that you've been practicing a lot and getting more and more skillful, you developed the skill to notice what was actually happening in the very first meditation experience. So we can have some kind of wisdom about the world. And we can try to bring this wisdom into the immediate situation. And the simplest way I can say to do that is to create a pause. Now at first it's rather mechanical. It has a duration. You simply pause. Or have a stop. We could say it's a little stop or we could call it a pause, whichever you like.

[12:11]

I prefer the word pause for some reason. Okay. I guess I prefer pause because something happens during the pause. No, but when you say, when I say stop though, it emphasizes the stopping of mentation. So what happens when you stop mentation? For a moment you make a little container where mentation is stopped. Non-graspable feeling rushes in. No, I'm trying to make a picture you can understand or get the feeling out. Now, the four noble truths. The first is there's suffering.

[13:12]

Mm-hmm. And the second is, primarily we're talking not about physical suffering, but mental suffering. The suffering that arises because we don't know how things exist. Which makes physical suffering and every kind of suffering worse. When we know how things exist, actually experience how things exist, everything becomes more bearable, including physical suffering.

[14:15]

When suffering doesn't attack our permanence and continuity, it's not so bad. Okay, the second noble truth is that everything is caused. And the suffering is caused. And you can do something about it because it's caused. And the conditions which make a cause operative are in the present. So there's no deterministic understanding of cause in Buddhism.

[15:15]

Each moment we actually have the chance to start afresh. That's why the moment of death is so important again in Buddhism. Because the whole of a life's karma can be dissolved at the moment of death. It's understood that way in Buddhism. If at the moment of death you have a feeling of dissolution of all these karmic formations, and at the same moment you have the ability to identify with the light of mind itself, then you have a death which we could call entering nirvana. Okay. Okay, so this third noble truth is that there's an end of suffering. We can also understand the third noble truth as the pause.

[16:44]

There's a moment in which all these causal conditions can dissolve. If that moment didn't exist, there would be no pause. freedom from a lifetime of karma at the moment of death. And then there's the path. And the path arises from the pause. The pause is that dharmic moment when you see that everything's caused Everything is constructed and you can allow the construction to happen differently.

[17:47]

The dharmic moment in contrast to a karmic moment the dharmic moment the karmic reifies all of your latent impressions. It comes in... Now, it's also useful to understand that karma is created by conscious acts. And it is a function of consciousness. It's been created by consciousness. So when your karma comes into consciousness, consciousness just reinforces it.

[18:48]

Okay. Now if you make a kind of pause, Karma comes into consciousness and doesn't know what to do. Nobody's supporting me, Rani. And that's what is meant by non-duality. Duality supports karma. Non-duality dissolves karma. So a brilliant aspect of Buddhist practice is to really see that at the moment the crucial difference is whether it's a non-dual moment or a dual moment. And at that moment, from this possibility, we have the path. So that's a way to understand the dynamic of the Four Noble Truths.

[19:52]

Okay. So now let me speak about what are the ingredients of this moment right here, of our conscious shared moment. So if I try to name the ingredients, I would say one of the ingredients that each of us has is good character. I think almost all of us have a good character. Almost all. I think most people do, actually. Sukhira, she used to say that even a thief is stealing for his mother. Suzuki Roshi said, even a thief steals for his mother.

[21:17]

He thinks somewhere he's doing what he should be doing or something. And if you approach people that way, even the thief, you have a better relationship with the thief. Because you both have mothers. But we all, and you wouldn't be here if you didn't have a good character. Okay. But you may have dysfunctional personalities. The personality sits on top of character. So although you have good character and you want to be a good person, sometimes... Your personality simply wants to be better than others. And your personality is always sort of looking down at other people. Yeah.

[22:18]

But you don't really want to do that because your character doesn't like it, but your personality has these habits that it needs the reinforcement of feeling better or superior or something. Okay, so I think that we can notice in our behavior, our character, and we can notice our personality. I think it's helpful to notice such things because it allows us to do something. Yeah. And we don't always have to identify with our personality. We can identify more fundamentally with our characters. Okay.

[23:26]

Now, another ingredient, I would say, are personal views. And these personal views function rather independently of character and personality. And personal views are views we've accumulated from our society and our personal experience about how the world is, etc. All kinds of views, like never lie and never admit you're wrong. They don't always fit together. Or that space separates, it doesn't also connect. These are all personal views we've gotten from our society. And our parents and our own experience.

[24:45]

Okay. Now, there's also one of the ingredients here are wisdom views. Or there's the way things actually exist. That things are impermanent, unique, non-repeatable. Dass Dinge vergänglich sind, einzigartig, nicht wiederholbar. That the eye is part of the scene. Dass das Auge Teil des Sehens ist. Even though there's nothing that tells me the eye is part of the scene, a wisdom view is to remind yourself that eye, E-Y-E, is part of the scene. So through a wisdom teaching, you can begin to increase the ingredients of the situation. And that almost, you know, you need it, wisdom teaching, you can't really discover these things on your own. You can discover much of it on your own.

[25:52]

I mean, I discovered on my own that there's no such thing as 12 o'clock. And then I, one day, driving in a car with Sukhi, she said, there's only space, there's no time. And I was driving. He said, yes, there is time, and hurry up. Okay. But I've understood the relevance, really, of how significant it is to recognize the... minuteness of each moment. It took Suzuki Roshi and a wisdom teaching and a wisdom practice that allowed me to have some access to kashanic moments.

[26:54]

Yeah. Kshana is K-S-A-N-A. I can't spell in English. Oh yeah, I know you can't. Anyway, it's spelled with some letters. It's spelled with some letters. And sometimes it's pronounced Kshanik and sometimes just Kshanik. It's like Akasha, no? Nothing to do with Akasha or something? No. It means the minutest moment that can be apprehended. And it's sometimes described as one sixty-fifth of a finger snap. and it's another time described as when a healthy vigorous person not some slouch scans quickly across the sky the length of time it takes to notice one of the many stars

[28:17]

So these ideas have been developed in Buddhism because it's possible to come into a very refined appreciation of the moment. Now, if it was cloudy and there were almost no stars, it's a different experience when the full Milky Way is... Particularly in Crestone where there's black desert sky. It's a different experience. And so all those little stars made the experience. Okay, so we have the ingredients of character, personality, personal views, and now bringing wisdom views into the situation.

[29:45]

And you bring them into not just the continuity of the situation, but the momentariness of the situation. And you can have a tremendous confidence because you don't have to change your whole life, you only have to change the moment. and each moment is a new opportunity and each moment that's a new opportunity conditions the succeeding moments So condition the succeeding moments, since conditioning does happen. So condition the succeeding moments with wisdom views, not with deluded views. Okay.

[30:48]

Another ingredient of the situation is the immediate present. And that is always conditioning everything that arrives in this moment from the past. Okay. Next is the Alaya Vishniana is present. Okay, I'm afraid that maybe I'm, you know, who knows, lunch, supper, dinner. Tomorrow's a holiday, isn't it? Do you have travel plans?

[31:49]

We could have had a four-day seminar. Okay. Okay. So I'll have to just stop at some point. We're gonna have an afternoon. And as I say, I think it's useful to have a sense of what is the present. So far I've described the present as character, personality, the ingredients of the present, character, personality, personal views and wisdom views. And now I want to bring up the Alaya Vishnayana. And the alaya-vijnana is translated usually as storehouse consciousness.

[33:00]

And you could call it root consciousness too. But maybe we should call it the alaya process. Because it's a kind of process. It's the alaya-vijnana which gives us the contents of identity. We have no experience of identity without all our past experience being available to us to various degrees. And the alaya-vijnana also gives us the sensation of duration. and of continuity. We wouldn't have an experience of continuity without this past experience material assembling itself in the present

[34:03]

in a way that makes the present to significant degrees predictable. It's the predictability that allows us to have a sense of continuity. Now, if George Lucas was in charge here and I looked at you and suddenly you were a Wookiee, Remember Wookiee? Haven't you seen Star Wars? And the Wookiee is this big bear kind of. Or if I looked over there and you were shape-shifting into something else. He was the director of Star Wars, yeah. That much I know. A cultural thing, you should see it. Anyway, I would have a hard time with continuity if suddenly you all began, the Martians of various kind or something.

[35:18]

So it's the alaya-vijnana which functions to give us a sense of both duration and continuity. And it also is a process of a larger identity which is calling to us all the time. The other day Maria-Louise and I saw in the newspaper or magazine or something a photograph of two albino deer. There was this lawn, front lawn, and some guy took a picture. There's this mother deer, and she had two little white, completely white deers. Why is these flowers? And that... And those two albino deer made me think about the dream process to some extent.

[36:30]

So before we go to lunch, I'd like to use this moment to talk about the practice of dreaming from the point of view of Buddhism. Würde ich gerne über die Praxis des Träumens reden, von dem Standpunkt des Buddhismus aus. Did you ever wonder why something like two albino deer photograph the next night you dream about it? Why do seemingly inconsequential events in your day become part of your dreams? Your dream is a very important dream, you know, but it was... turns around something that just happened to happen the day before.

[37:31]

That seems quite unimportant. Well, we can say there's consciousness. Then we can say there's what's less conscious. And then we can say there's what's unconscious and what's non-conscious. Now these are flowing underneath consciousness. Sometimes they're way down like in a stream, 90% of the stream or a large portion of the stream is actually underground and only In the bed, there's only a surface water. Sometimes underneath the surface of the water, there's different currents. We can understand consciousness as being the surface of the water. What we're able to be conscious of.

[38:53]

The other streams going underneath of less consciousness and a larger identity. And the other streams, the invisible streams, are less conscious, they have a different identity. And the Alaya-Vijjana process is also sometimes understood as a name for Buddha-nature. These streams we're not capable of being conscious of, but sometimes they cause ripples in our consciousness. Like sometimes the Rhine, you look at it near Bad Säckien. And they're tremendous currents. You can feel some real fast, deeper currents surfacing here and there. In general, we don't notice these other currents. We can't notice them.

[39:59]

But I think what happens sometimes is a particular event of the day that seems inconsequential, like seeing two alpine aldeer, Aber was manchmal passiert, ist das irgendetwas ganz Belangloses am Tag, dass uns das auffällt, wie so zwei weiße Hirsche zu sehen? Das führt jetzt dazu, dass eine andere Strömung an die Oberfläche gibt. Das haftet geradezu an diesem Bild der Hirsche und verschwindet dann wieder. And then when you go to sleep, because consciousness subsides, consistent sensory impressions diminish. As I say, dreaming mind is a different kind of liquid than waking mind. In which images float, but not conceptual thought. So suddenly this image of the deer is present.

[41:14]

And larger processes of identity which can't get involved in consciousness yet stick to the deer. So you begin dreaming about the deer Because it's the surface of this deeper process of identity. Okay. Now, we don't in Buddhism do dream analysis particularly. The deer function to draw this up because it represents something. That's okay. I mean, dream analysis can be interesting. But as they say, if you do Jungian analysis, you have Jungian dreams.

[42:31]

If Freudian analysis, you have Freudian dreams. Yeah, and there's probably some truth to that. And what system you bring to dream interpret, et cetera. But still, I do analyze dreams, my own dreams sometimes. That's interesting. But more commonly what I do is practice with the dream. In other words, I understand the dream to be something that's wanting to surface. Or rather, I understand there's a larger identity process going on which surfaces in the dream. The dream may represent a lot of this larger identity process. But I understand it only as a version of the deer.

[43:31]

It's an excuse for this larger identity process to become noticeable? Okay, so my practice is, how can I let this larger identity process surface within my particular identity? surface into my character and my personality, and surface into my personal views and developing wisdom views. no that's not so easy but what I do is I try to and what one can do is try to stay with the feeling of the dream the feeling of the dream is more important than the details

[44:36]

So through the contents the deer or whatever if you happen to dream about whatever it was you stay with the feeling that those contents show you and you keep trying to bring that feeling into your daily life. And it makes other things surface. There's millions of things happening at every moment. We only see some of them. Okay. When you bring this other feeling of this larger identity process going on, it begins to draw things that you wouldn't have noticed out of the immediate situation and create a picture of this deeper process becomes more present to you.

[45:54]

Now, this is all to say that the deer caused a pause. You're going along, you're reading this paper or whatever, and then there's these two albino deer, and you think, well, that's pretty funny. So there's been a little pause. And something surfaces. And it didn't surface so completely because then we dreamed about the deer in order to let it surface. So if you can begin to see how we function you can begin to use that functionally. So you can begin to cause, create pauses.

[46:56]

Very useful way to develop the technology of pausing. um um um I had a bad feeling that the practice was not integrated, that it was on the edge of bad conscience. But also that you just don't feel at ease anyway, because the practice is not there, because it is so beautiful, and that when you are at work, you don't get over it. And the other thing was that you are confident in your own sitting and not in some that you are satisfied with what you have and that you trust it.

[48:00]

And then at the end we talked about what different people do when they sit on the chair. He said, he talked about what people do when you sit on their cushions. Somebody said, what do they do? Sure. If one observes the position of the breath, if one counts, if one breathes in a circular motion, or if one breathes in a circular motion, or if one has a kind of background awareness that the breath works by itself, or that one doesn't do anything at all, that one doesn't follow any rules, What was that?

[49:06]

The fish? I have to say I'm responsible for that. I said I'd take up my flounder nature. Fresh, I mean, I want to enter. I could observe during the discussion in our group one... And I noticed that I separated myself, listening, and started to judge. In the group? Yeah. And it was very helpful to use your familiarity to say, already connected.

[50:08]

I was doing this discussion to see that it really... this pierce, this separation, because I could recognize everything what each person said. So it was really a practice during discussion, a discussing practice of the opening of my experience. Deutsch, bitte. During the discussion in the group I noticed that I started to judge myself or to separate myself from others. And that was very helpful for me. It is already connected, as I always say, to find out that what I actually see as separation is exactly the same for me. Yes, I would like to add something to that. actual practice is actually pretty simple.

[51:54]

And if you have if you do some mindfulness practice and so forth and you have a good teacher or you have a good intuition about what teachings to work with You don't have to understand why and how practice works. That's of course helpful if you have to teach. And it's helpful to open up one's view of the world. But usually the understanding of practice comes much later. And we just need to understand enough to have confidence in practice.

[52:56]

But I think what some people don't get is how simple Really simple statements work in practice. So if you take in the middle of a situation, just as you said, if you notice that you've separated yourself, That's already pretty important to notice that. And then to decide to have an antidote. That's already also pretty important. And then the antidote can be extremely simple. It can be just the opposite of what the problem is.

[54:05]

So you feel unconnected and you simply in the midst of the situation say already connected. This is fundamental Buddhist practice. And you can in a similar way use the feeling of dissolving the subject-object distinction. So you can say, for instance, space connects. Or you can say already connected. There's the same thing, but actually when you say the different phrase makes a difference in what you feel. Or you could say, for instance, to have a feeling of it, I don't have a phrase for it, to dissolve the subject-object distinction.

[55:19]

That can have the same effect as saying to yourself already connected. But to use the second one to dissolve the subject-object distinction, the third one, you begin to notice how you establish dualities all the time, not just between two people. So it also, to use a phrase like that, becomes a way of teaching yourself how we see reality. And I think I have the feeling that quite a lot of people can't believe that it's that simple.

[56:26]

that you just take a simple phrase and you interject it interject it put it into the situation but if you say to somebody something very simple I love you That's pretty simple. But it can change a lot of things. Or, I will take that job you've offered me. Yes, I'll take this job. Changes a lot of things. It's a very simple statement. It's a telegraphic kind of mantra. But really, if you can find a phrase that you can feel, you interject it into the situation and it's transforming.

[57:42]

Yeah. Now, I think one of the reasons we have trouble with the idea that such a simple phrase can be so powerful is we tend to think of our life as this long thing, which one little phrase is so teeny. Wir stellen uns unser Leben als so eine riesen Sache vor und daran gemessen ist natürlich ein Satz ganz winzig. But actually our life is many short things. Aber eigentlich ist unser Leben nur eine Menge solcher kleiner Dinge. And whatever actuality is, it's actually momentary. So if at each moment or any moment you bring in a phrase, you can change that moment.

[58:53]

And that moment immediately conditions the following moment. So practice is very powerful and works in very small doses. So ist die Praxis sehr mächtig und sie funktioniert in geringen Dosen. And some people, you know, you know, I'm talking about all these things and most of you probably, or many of you anyway, won't practice, won't have the opportunity to practice sufficiently to fulfill the potential of practice. Of course, I hope you will. But I'm not going to make all of you promise to do so. And only after you promise will I give you the teachings. It might be a good idea.

[60:09]

I might get a few promises out of you. But really, your promises or commitment make a difference more to how you understand the practice than how I teach. And a big part of practice is what I'm calling, could call this mental yoga. How you work with your views. Now, if you practice mindfulness and do zazen, such phrases like already connected work better. Vasubandhu points out, the real founder of the Yogacara school, which is the basis of zen practice, says to concentrate on your toes is just exactly as much a concentration as to be concentrated in the formless realms.

[61:19]

So a person who's very busy or a person who has physical disabilities and can't practice zazen, et cetera, can still find ways to develop a concentration even within their disabilities. And can even make better use probably of these practices of Zen which are essentially a mental yoga. In a simple way, we can say yoga is to take a posture, a mental or physical posture, which then changes and creates an upward movement in the next posture, an improved movement in the next posture, mental or physical.

[62:33]

Okay, so that's enough. Okay, so that's enough. I have also been asked to say a positive thing, but that did not help me at all. I did not trust him and did not give him any strength. But I think it has an effect on the connection. You have the primordial source or the instinct or the Buddha-nature to collect these positive things. I have a question about working with these sentences.

[63:34]

I often try out to work with a positive sentence and then I practice with a positive sentence and just all the negative and all the suffering is just coming up and sort of covering the positive sentence. So I don't have the skill yet to sort of trust this positive instinct or intuition to really carry me further. As I said, it's a craft, a practice. And the initial mental application, this is again a kind of technical phrase in Buddhism, which means the first kind of attention you bring to any situation affects everything that follows.

[64:35]

It's the same idea as if you bring in already connected, it affects the next moments. So in practice we pay attention to this initial mental application. Now, in general, or always, the first attitude to bring to any situation is one of acceptance. And not a positive attitude. But just what's there, what's here. And to develop the kind of composure to just be present to what's there. And we never know.

[65:51]

There's a poem of Rumi's. He says, I reach for a piece of wood and it becomes a flute. I do some meanness and it turns out to be helpful. I do some meanness and it turns out to be helpful. And then he says, I say, don't travel during holy month. Then I start out and some wonderful things happen. So we actually never quite know And acceptance allows something deeper to function.

[66:55]

And then within acceptance, you can bring an attitude like already connected. And then you have to see how it works. Maybe try it a little different. I've already connected occasionally. You have to practice with it. Maybe I should tell the story of the brown telephone. Every now and then I'm reminded of this. I developed a practice of asking myself questions. Trying with a question to penetrate into a situation. like why do I not want to complete things almost like a psychological thing you might ask and I was kind of concentrating on this question

[68:09]

And the question will change somewhat. And I repeat it. And I got the ability to keep it going as a presence in my background mind. One day I was starting to sit. And in the beginning of sitting this question was present. But I kept being distracted by a telephone that was ringing somewhere in my mind. So I tried to ignore it. You try to concentrate and ignore the distractions. But out of the corner of my eye in this mental space, I could see that the phone was brown. And in those days all phones were black.

[69:30]

There were no designer phones. I thought, why is this phone brown? So I stopped concentrating on the question. Went over in the mental space and lifted up the phone. And it told me the answer. So you'll never know when the distraction is actually the way an answer is trying to get attention. I've been looking for that brown phone ever since. That's called, in Buddhism, waiting by the stump. Because there's a story about a farmer on the way home. And he'd been pretty unsuccessful.

[70:56]

There weren't many crops, anything to gather. And he saw a rabbit run out from the brush where he was walking and run into a tree stump and break its neck and die. So he brought it home to his wife and said, oh, let's have this for dinner. She was very pleased and cooked it up. And the next day he didn't come home from the fields. So she went out looking for him. And he was waiting by the stump. So what else do we have here? I have another question. I come from a I am still very irritated in the meantime and would like to personalize these two thinking directions.

[72:19]

There is an idea there, I think, that works well. I come from a Catholic tradition and I really dealt with it, what that means and how that could work for me. But on and off I'm quite irritated about it. My question is, is there a way to sort of reconcile these two traditions, Zen and Catholicism? That's a big question. Well, I have a friend who's very Catholic. And he feels, when I'm with him, I feel the presence of Christ with him.

[73:25]

And I have no problem with We have no problem between us on my being Buddhist and his being Catholic. In fact, at his 70th birthday, I was asked to say something, and I said, if I had met him earlier, I might have been a Catholic today instead of a Buddhist. And on his 70th birthday, I said, if I had met him earlier, I might have been a Catholic instead of a Buddhist. But he's often in a lot of trouble with the Catholic Church. Because although he was pretty high up in the Catholic Church, he feels quite free to select what from Catholicism is his actual experience. And so that's what we have to do in Buddhism, too.

[74:44]

In the end, I only speak about not what books say or some institution of Buddhism says, but what I find through my actual experience. So if you... begin to try to unite the teachings in your actual experience, maybe you'll have some success. But there are certainly conflicting views sometimes. But if you can put that to the past, it's more like a feeling of being at home. In Buddhism or in Catholicism or in kind of, yeah, that's good. Trust when you feel at home. That's what I do.

[76:02]

I always say, if I trusted, it's Buddhism. Okay, yes. I want to know if there is still something easy to practice with it, or accept it, because that's what I often get. When we talked yesterday about these three things, greed, hate, and delusion, and my question now is, is there something easier to work with, maybe also other than acceptance, because that's a hard one for me to do.

[77:14]

Maybe it's because I'm passionate, too. I think you have to start with acceptance. If we don't start there, we're in some delusion, we're lost. Let me come back to this already connected, okay? What you saw when you said already connected is that you first had to feel unconnected before you could use the phrase already connected.

[78:18]

And again Vasubandhu says you have to establish ordinary reality before you can know emptiness. You have to establish form to know formlessness. So there's always a dynamic. There's no sort of place called emptiness where you can be and there's no form. There's no place where there's only connectedness. There's already always non-connectedness. So non-connectedness and connectedness are mutual realizations. If there wasn't non-connectedness, there couldn't be connectedness. So you need non-connectedness to realize connectedness. So you need the lack of acceptance to realize acceptance.

[79:38]

It's the very problem that creates the possibility of the solution. If there were no suffering, there would be no freedom from suffering. Und wenn es kein Leiden geben würde, gäbe es auch keine Freiheit vom Leiden. Now, how important that is and how profoundly that functions in our life, probably can't make clear to you, but I can say that much about it. Und wie unglaublich tiefgründig das ist in unserem Leben und wie wichtig es ist, das wirklich anzuerkennen. Ich glaube, das werde ich nicht schaffen, heute euch klarzumachen. Now I think it's getting time for a break.

[80:40]

But is there anybody else want to bring something up from their group yesterday or anything you'd like to bring up? Does anyone else want to talk about the group guests or anything else? I don't know if I dare to talk about the topic of separation, but I have already perceived it for myself. I actually have a strong hand in this community and I always notice a situation where something important is there, which says to me, no, you have to distinguish it. Yes. Yeah, it's a little hard for me.

[81:50]

I'm quite shy about it to bring that up. It has to do with separation. And I feel very drawn to be really in a community and to be connected with other people. And yet then I feel the separation, and that separation is painful. It's like it's really hard. So I don't know how to work with that and how to deal with that. I don't want to say something philosophical.

[83:37]

Although the problem is actually a kind of way we view the world. And how things accumulate. And while things accumulate good feelings and bad feelings and so forth I suppose what I would do myself is at the same time as I would take as a priority accepting whatever is present, I would also take a simple... but trying at each moment to let go. I just keep saying to myself, let go. And use this telegram. And I think, I hope that maybe when I try to speak about what I've been promising to speak about since Friday, I could make some sense of, it might make some helpful sense.

[85:04]

What I'm struck with in my own practice is how much I am still in the midst of practicing the same way I was when I was a beginner and as each of you are in your various stages of practice. But what is also true is many things have become much easier. And they could get better, but they're not too bad compared to the way I used to be.

[86:07]

So if I can accomplish a little bit in practice, I'm sure all of you can. Because my main talent is persistence. I can't sing, draw, or do anything, but I am fairly persistent. So all of you can be persistent. Okay. Okay. Is half an hour enough time? Too much time? Okay, we'll come back at 10.02. So that's 24 minutes. We'll see, I'll ring up the hours.

[87:10]

It's my watch, right? I don't know. My neighbor is... It's interesting that she's still... Is she? Never knew she was. Yeah, she started the... She's on? She started the name. Thank you. Each of you for coming. And for the Lebensschule, finding this nice room. Your yoga teacher's practice place. Yeah. Yeah. And for these flowers.

[88:28]

And for a nice hotel room that was arranged for me in walking distance. And which has a wonderful big garden. Which has accumulated most of the birds in northern Germany. Who at first light, at first light they begin in singing away. So I've been putting off in a way trying to speak about this dharmic pause because we have to develop together the ability to understand it or make sense of it.

[89:32]

At least. And also because it's, you know, I've never spoken about this exactly before. So I, you know, need to find a way to speak about it. So I'm... Because there's no, what I'm speaking about, there's no exactly description anywhere in Buddhist literature. Because I'm trying to make sense of this from our, an entry into it from our experience. Mm-hmm. Okay. Reality, actuality is understood to be knowable in Buddhism.

[91:03]

I'll use the word reality, although there's no fundamental realness to reality. Reality is always something we're constructing. But I'll use the word reality. Now, it's assumed that it's knowable. Why is it knowable? It's knowable because we are aspects of reality. Not only are we a part of reality, we are... we include the whole of reality.

[92:17]

Everything is, the whole affects each part. So if we know the part, we can know the whole, or much about the whole. Now that's the assumption. Let me give you a line from Rumi. Rumi says, love sits beside me. Sits beside me like a private supply of itself. And we could say in Buddhism maybe, reality is all around us like a private supply of itself.

[93:21]

It's not a public supply of itself, it's a private supply of itself. In a sense, we can only know it privately or privately. more through ourselves. Okay. Now this is what I just said in the, that we can know reality because we are reality. is the real reason why God does not figure prominently in Buddhism. Why God does not figure prominently in Buddhism. Because if God is understood as something outside of our reality,

[94:23]

At least it's not important from the point of view of Buddhism. There may be gods, perhaps, or other realities outside this reality, but they have no importance from the point of view of Buddhism. Buddhism assumes that whatever reality is,

[94:52]

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