Not an ass. A donkey. When breaking earth, separating reeds, the grass that grows by a river. Shilf. How do you discern what's really going on or how do you discern the master? And breaking earth and separating the reeds means changing how you perceive. And it can really mean what we talked about in this last seminar, entering the four elements. Breaking the earth, seeing how things are really put together.

[01:01]

In the sense that if you put your hand in water, you feel the impermanence of the water. The impermanence or changeableness. But you also feel the coherence of the water. How water makes things come together. In this sense is how do you actually without generalizations feel how you work. Now down near the bottom of the first page there it says, conveying the matter along with the voice. To carry, to present.

[02:04]

A truck is a conveyance. And that's in reference to this question, what is the true man of no rank? So what would conveying the matter along with the voice mean? Something like, he's asking the question of what is the true man. But if you hear the voice separate from the words, that's the true man itself. Yes? Okay, that's enough, really. Maybe you can look over, I think this, in the poem, in the next page, the poem where it says, power, no, on page 168, power pulls back nine bulls.

[03:19]

Now, if you turn the paper over to the next page, without reading it, I'll just tell you there's a story about a king who was known for his strength. And what are kings? Kings are people who are strong in our ordinary reality. A king is someone who rules our ordinary reality. So he was so proud of his strength, he went to visit somebody who was known for being very strong. A man named Gong, G-O-N-G. So he went to see Mr. Gong and he found that Mr. Gong was a weakling. a 90-pound weakling.

[04:36]

So the king asked him, Well, how strong are you? Why are you famous for your strength? And he looked at the king and said, I can break the waist of a spring insect. He said, I can... I can destroy the waste of a spring insect I can carry the wing of an autumn cicada So at this point the king was a little embarrassed and he flushed. I can tear apart rhinoceros hide with my... Where the heck did he get any rhinoceros hide?

[05:40]

I can tear apart rhinoceros hide with my bare hands. Skin. And I can drag nine oxen by the tail. Yet I still feel weak. So Gong says, my fame is not for having strength, it is for using strength. So this koan is really about using strength. which here in this case clearly means the ability to change the way you perceive. So you see the world differently and function in the world differently. And it's as subtle as carrying the weight of a cicada, an insect's wing.

[06:50]

I'm not doing . I'm just hitting the bell for a moment, because I like the sound. So is there some aspect of this, before we go on, you'd like to discuss a little bit, or anything you want to bring up? Yeah. Before, I had the impression that you said evolution emphasized reality mind, not actuality mind. Because of efficiency. In my opinion, true efficiency is both minds. That's true. So why did evolution only develop the one mind?

[08:15]

What do you think I am, God? Do you want to say that in German? But when I look at animals like the cat, that falls down from somewhere high, I see that the instincts work. Because the cat doesn't think, oh, what am I going to do? I have to land on my feet. So for me, it's always like maybe evolution wasn't wrong at all. Maybe it did develop both sides. Only man starts thinking.

[09:21]

Yeah, OK, you want to say that in good old Deutsch? . What did you say? Oh, it's not a matter of right and wrong. Yeah. You know, they've studied dropping cats from tall buildings. Nice. Hey, you got an extra cat? Yeah. They've studied what happens when cats fall from high buildings.

[10:43]

The higher you drop them from, the more likely they are to survive. Yeah. I mean, maybe not from, you know, supersonic jet plane. Well, from... No, they may die, but from, I believe, three to five stories, they're more likely to die. But very high, they spread their body out and slow their speed down. So from the fourth, fifth floor, they can die very easily. But the theory is that if they fall from above, they unfold their body and then they don't die.

[11:47]

Third floor. Two. I think you better close your window. We're not going to experiment with your cats. Excuse me. I'd like to come back to this injection of there's no right and no wrong. In terms of what you said yesterday, or today probably, about the necessity of more people on this planet to shift into elevating attention as a matter of survival. Yeah. This might be right or wrong. Yeah. Planetary survival, as you put it. Yeah. To me, this is a matter of right or wrong. If it doesn't happen, if not enough people in good time shift to this other limitation of consciousness, we might, from our point of view, we might call this wrong.

[13:10]

Yeah, from a human point of view, it's right or wrong. Good enough coming in. Yeah, sure. I think you're human. But from a point of view of evolution... It's of not much importance. Evolution might look at us as the kind of troublesome species that has gotten rid of before. I think it is going back to Julio's comment I think it is remarkable enough that we can observe evolution.

[14:11]

To ask why evolution does something is beyond my ability. There must be, if we're talking about chaos and dischaos, there must be many imbalances. Because if there aren't imbalances, then there would be no development. So we might, as someone brought up to me, and as I think Michael Murphy would feel, is that we are in an evolutionary process toward more metanormal and supernormal abilities. Just as people seem to be able to run much faster nowadays than they could 100 years ago.

[15:13]

And whether this development is progress or not, I don't know. And whether it's not really a further development, but a development which includes more people and used to only include a tiny minority. These are questions that will be answered at a greater time span than the appearer who sits before you can appear to know. You've got two people behind the pillars here, you wouldn't find.

[16:31]

But certainly we can say that culture creates bias. Creates a bias which makes it more likely we emphasize one's the other. And I think the development of yoga is the result of Asian cultures, starting from India, of consciously deciding to develop ways of apprehending actuality in addition to reality. Apprehension to understand, to grasp hold of. I mean, because yoga is, at least mental yoga, is the effort to yoke together the minds of waking, dreaming and deep sleep. into a new kind of consciousness that is actually not given at birth, but an adult decision.

[17:48]

And what we're doing right here is exploring that decision. So luckily, Kat hasn't learned that it can't survive you know, 10-story building. Okay. Yeah. Evolution is something different than... which looks from a superior point of view more efficient. By hindsight, Jimmy?

[19:06]

Yes, by hindsight. By hindsight. Yes, yes, you mean by hindsight. Ah, okay. Evolution promotes some electron features that produce more and more quotation-worthy descendants. Evolution prefers the flower vases. I mean, it's not prettier than you. There are qualities that produce more, in a significant way, more children or offspring. So anything that doesn't produce more offspring is selected out. And that's actually what's meant by survival of the fittest. It not means more fitted muscles, but to produce more offspring.

[20:10]

So natural selection always goes this direction. Well, once we've created our culture, we've created somewhat a situation that we as a species can have an influence on. And it may be better for our species to have less children. Also, wenn wir mal eine Kultur geschaffen haben, dann könnte es sein, dass wir in eine Situation kommen, wo es besser ist, weniger Kinder zu haben. My situation is not so important whether it's delusion, which causes problems to me, or something else.

[21:14]

What I experience is that I have just some ways to live that I want, or I don't know where I got it from, but I guess it. If I want to experience other possibilities, for example, actuality in conflict with reality, I would find it helpful to come back to the body. I would ask you to give me some instruction from this side. And I didn't really understand the point of It means changing and not changing? Yeah. Okay. Do you want to say that in Deutsch? Yes, it is interesting, because I don't know why it is so important to me.

[22:28]

I see it like this, that due to certain circumstances, everyone has to learn here, I only use the example of evolution because I wanted to not only but mostly perhaps to make the point that some things that affect us are not able to be perceived.

[23:32]

We could say that evolution over time occurs in such vast stretches of time that we can't perceive it. We can't directly perceive it. We might also try to push this analogy a little further and say, but evolution in space is almost as difficult to perceive. We could call this field of potential being or co-arising being as evolution in space. In space. But of course space and time are generalizations because we're not able to see in finer gradations.

[24:51]

And we can't see how space and time are actually two functions of the same reality. Yeah, it's difficult to... grasp intellectually, let alone perceive directly. Although we are living examples. But since we are conscious cultural beings, we have to, through intuition or teaching, make a choice. And you make a choice whether you want to establish the two truths or not. In your body, in your mind, in your behavior. And if you make this choice or intuitively feel the need to make...

[26:02]

feel yourself moving toward this choice, then what I've been suggesting this week is the six attentions are very useful. Because the first two represent noticing how you give attention to the world. And by noticing how you give attention to the world, you notice that the world is shaping you. And by noticing how you give attention to the world, you notice that the world is shaping you. In other words, how the so-called objective world is shaping you subjectively. So to say it again, you can begin this practice by changing the way you give attention to the world.

[27:35]

So the first step is to notice how you give attention to the world. And the... Very first is that we don't give attention to the world. What I call passive attention. And so then the world is just shaping us. We're living in a container. We have no sense of the way we participate in the world. And the second thing to notice is that we're living in our ancestors' skulls. Or even more so, we're living in our ancestors' ladles. Because we're letting the received culture shape how we form ourselves.

[28:50]

And you can't notice, you can't do anything about that till you notice that you're doing it. Okay. And one of the ways to notice it is to have a Dharma friend. And that's why a Dharma friend is so important. Because it helps you build a consensual attention that can be an antidote to the cultural consensual attention. And if you study history, You very often see, and maybe it's a case that you often see, you always see, change in society develops from small groups of people who decide to do something together.

[29:59]

There are seldom isolated geniuses. They're usually very culturally dependent, but they have a group of people who they may be head and shoulders above, but they have a group of people who they're interacting with. And this is particularly true when the cultural influence is widely accepted fairly quickly. So you could say these first three attentions pretty much shape our everyday world. And they're not yogic attentions. We're either passive through our culture or a few of us get together and change our culture slightly.

[31:10]

We are either passive or cultural or a few of us get together and change our culture. Okay, now the fourth attention is, again, we're playing with subject-object relationships here. The fourth attention is accepting An accepting attention. What should be like who is who and what is what? Not bringing culture or... something or other to the way you attend to something, but just paying attention to it as simply as you can. And the key here is the practice of bare attention. Just paying attention to it as much as possible without thinking about it. And then more and more you begin to have a field between the subject and object.

[32:47]

And that developing whether direct perception or one-pointedness or a field perception are all ways in which you have started to change your attention to the world. Bear attention. One pointedness. Creating a field of attention. Did I say something else? Are all ways of beginning to change the way you bring attention to the world. These are all mindfulness practices. And when you begin to change how you bring attention to the world, and let the world give you attention, you begin to have the possibility of seeing evolution in space rather than in time.

[34:06]

You are breaking earth and separating the reeds. Okay, so I would like, I think it's time after lunch to take a break. And so maybe, usually to have tea and use the toilets and all takes half an hour, so maybe we come back at 4.15? Okay. Dogen says something like life passes through death into freedom. This is about the same as Walter meant the other day.

[35:17]

And I could also say life passes through life into freedom. And I think Dogen says something I can't remember now, something like life. Through life and death we enter the physical world. Now that's not exactly what he says, I can't remember, but that's good enough. There's also a koan, I think it's 61, The blue cliff record. The emerald green record. The emerald green record.

[36:17]

It said that if a single atom is set up the nation flourishes. If a single atom is not set up, the nation perishes. And this is a little bit like saying the strength to break the waste of a spring insect. Or Giulio and Yasmin saying that maybe we and others saying maybe we need or have this ability to see non-dualistically. To set up a single atom means also to establish the two truths.

[37:36]

It's not yanking nine oxen by the tail backwards. Now, I think it might be useful if I put these six attentions on the writing board here. And although we, again, as you know, discussed them to some extent in the midweek seminar, I think it's useful to look at them again, and I hope it is with you who are here. that it is very useful to discuss them again.

[38:37]

The first is passive attention. The second is communal attention. Communal or cultural. And part of the reason I'm emphasizing, and you may think of some more, we might make eight attentions or something like that. I'm not trying to make an exhaustive list. A complete list. Third is consensual. And I think that, as I just said before the break, that this mostly describes the kinds of attention that exist in conventional reality.

[40:11]

And the fourth one is accepting. And the fifth? The fifth is interior. And the The sixth is what I call pedestal, but I like it. Ulrike says it sounds funny in German, but it could also be foundation. In English, we have the word fundament. I don't know if you... Ah. I think the stars in their place are sometimes called the fundament, I think.

[41:32]

Again, part of the reason I am emphasizing these six is that there is a kind of wavelength frequency or wave change between these six. And your body will be engaged in these in a little different way, each of these. So, for instance, if you notice the difference in your body then you can begin to use your body to modulate these modalities. I suppose since several of you are actors, if you were attempting to create a kind of feeling of a kind of cultural identity, you could feel that in your body.

[43:03]

And if you tried to create a consensual attention with the audience or a consensual attention with the other actors, that would be a different feeling. So in a way, I mean in fact... All of our body postures here help us create a consensual attention. And it's very clear to me that some of you move your bodies out of the consensual attention or back into it, withdraw a little bit, etc. Some of you are passively within this consensual attention and some of you are actively within this consensual attention. So the accepting is the first level, as I said, of mindfulness.

[44:38]

And you're mindful, really, of the exterior world. And this mindfulness is expressed by just noticing, just noticing is a kind of accepting, noticing what your body is doing, what your feet are doing, how you're sitting, etc. Yes? If I practice this accepting, how do I know when I have to accept something and when I have to act? Do you want to say it in German? Now this kind of what I consider a kind of craft, the question about the craft of practice, the more subtle and realistic the questions are, the less there is an answer.

[45:57]

Because beginning to view your life at a non-dualistic level of craft is is like being an artist in your own life. And how to be an artist in your own life, you have to practice your art. It's like asking a painter how you paint a certain thing. While you pick up the brush, You're mindful. And then... And then... But I remember Picasso saying, sometimes you start a painting.

[47:17]

And you paint this thing, and then you paint that thing, and then you paint that thing. And finally, almost the last thing you put in the painting, you realize that's what you were trying to paint. And you didn't know it, but you had to paint all those other things to get to it. and that's the kind of thing you can't teach well you have to paint all these other things and then you can paint that I mean something that comes out of the craft so now ask your question again in English is fine could you ask your question again Well accepting is a kind of acting. In other words, say that I notice you.

[48:28]

If I decide to actively accept you and it can be like with a generous feeling toward you with practice of friendliness or empathetic joy so accepting can be Through the six parameters or the four unlimiteds and so forth. Four unlimiteds or immeasurables. Or I can just let you direct me. Or I can attempt to make no decision at all. But just to make no decision at all is a kind of decision. So it's all a kind of acting.

[49:43]

Now, at this level, when do you decide to act? When do I run across the room and give you a hug? Well, when I've lost control. I don't know. These things happen. But I think the more... The more you're in a kind of field consciousness, the more that directs you. Like they say, writing writes writing. So you start writing, you don't know quite what to write, but the act of writing begins to tell you.

[50:43]

So you start writing, you don't know quite what to write, So you start out, I mean it's like writing a dream down, you start out and pretty soon things come out of the writing that you didn't remember in the dream. And being more and more sensitive to that is part of the craft of this kind of practice. I would say two of the main guides are a feeling of being nourished. Maybe three. One is not leaking. And the positive side of that is feeling nourished.

[51:51]

Wait, I have to find a word for leaking. What would you use? Leaking is also for licking. Licking. Licking is also licking. Ah, if you're leaking, licking is the same. Well, leaking in English means taking a piss. To take a leak is to go to the toilet. So in the positive side of that is feeling nourished. And the more holistic side of that is feeling intact. And if you become very sensitive to when you're leaking, when you feel nourished, when you feel intact, you almost always know what to do.

[53:02]

Suzuki Roshi always used to say, we almost always know what to do, we just don't listen to ourselves. Now, Ruth, you had a question at the break. Could you bring it up about karma? I think this brings up, Ulrike, something you noticed the other day that I had a kind of oversight or didn't mention at least about how reviewing your karma affects your karma.

[54:23]

Maybe you could say, bring that up in that context. I have a question for you. My question is that in meditation there is a lot of content that can be understood. Instead of the body being alive, Now, Someone also brought up, is this two truths a kind of dualism?

[55:34]

Dualism applies here in the sense that the conventional world is the world that's defined by, or created by, seeing dualistically. The conventional world is the world created by dualistic perception. And the absolute or actuality is realized through non-dual perception. And karma comes in here in the sense that if you're perceiving dualistically, you'll lay down dualistically karma, dualistic karma. If you're perceiving non-dualistically, then your karma will start to be stored differently. So, and Ruth brought this up when I was talking about Yasmin and myself, So, if I'm perceiving Yasmin dualistically, I have one kind of memory.

[57:02]

If I perceive her more with a field perception or non-dualistically, I have another kind of memory. Now, we could even say there's a critical mass in non-dualistic perceptions. In other words, if you start practicing And doing zazen. And doing zazen. It just goes on, and as I've said, the learning curve has a lot of boring flats to it. But you're beginning to change the way your storehouse consciousness is put together. Aber man fängt an, die Art und Weise zu ändern, wie das Lagerbewusstsein zusammengesetzt ist.

[58:13]

And as Ulrike and Ruth's questions or statements reminded me, is that when you, during the first years of Sazen, so many memories come up, Again, you're released more into the fourth and second skandhas. Released into more. The skanda of associative thinking and the skanda of feeling consciousness. And When you do that, you begin reviewing your history in a different way. You begin seeing it from different perspectives. In a way, you can say that this reviewing of past lives is a traditional thing in Buddhism. In these first few years of Zen practice you're reviewing

[59:21]

probably the majority of your past history. And the more you review, the more you can begin to see there's some blank spots that you somehow don't remember. And seeing the blank spots, you can begin to kind of try to break through into those. Sometimes it's almost like breaking into a boil or a pimple that erupts into your memory, stuff that you'd repressed. A boil? The acne of personal history. squeezing the past sorry um But when enough of your history has kind of passed through zazen mind, and there's been enough of your experience has begun to be stored more subtly in terms of non-dualistic way of seeing,

[60:58]

you create the grounds for a critical mass for a turning around at the deep layers of consciousness. And this is actually tried, this is actually sort of mapped out in looking at the two truths in terms of the three natures. It sounds like I know a lot, doesn't it? But actually... I don't really know much at all. I just know a few things that I keep kind of working with. I might say then there's the six attentions and the two truths and the three natures and then there's the 14th seminar. The next seminar will be on the 14 obfuscations.

[62:06]

The 14 obfuscations, things that interfere with understanding. I just made that up. Okay. But I think many of you, we've gone through this study of three natures. We did it in Japan and so forth. I don't think it's necessary to go through it again, but yes. Because you count three natures and yourself as a fourth. Yes. In the past days, you often mentioned it's necessary to work out to arrange with that there is an absolute and related where it goes.

[63:25]

So I feel it's also some kind of . Yeah, see, that's where the three natures come in, right there. Does everybody understand? So maybe this gives me... From what... Christina said I could show you quite quickly what's meant by the three natures, okay? Vielleicht kann ich von dem, was Christine gesagt hat, euch kurz zeigen, was mit den drei naturen gemeint ist. When I'm speaking to you here, I started out talking about the Madhyamaka school. I started out speaking about the Madhyamaka school. The Madhyamaka school and the Yogacara school which have created Zen practice. And the overall understanding of reality as a practice comes from the Avanthasaka or Huayen teachings.

[64:40]

From the Avanthasaka or Huayen teachings. Okay. I haven't thought about this for a long time, so I may get this a little mixed up, but we have... So now I'd like to talk to you about the three natures. I'm really talking about the Yogacara school. And if you're looking carefully at what I'm saying, all of what I'm saying is the Mahajanaka teaching, it implies the Yogacara kind of fulfillment of it or development of it. So we have what's called the imaginary world. And then you have what we can call the And then we have the world of illusions.

[66:08]

And then we have the absolute. And we can also call this relative. Now, these two together make the conventional world. Okay? Does that make sense? Yeah. So, what you have is, this is the imaginary world or conventional world perceived dualistically.

[67:23]

This is the conventional world perceived non-dualistically. So, in answer to Christina's question, Yes, there's a difference between whether you perceive the conventional world realistically or non-realistically. So if you bring this kind of attention into this kind of activity, you begin to change your culture. This part doesn't know this part.

[68:29]

You know this part. So. But I don't see any. You don't see? I don't see anything. That's the trouble Rick has. I'm always pointing at the board. And wait till you listen to the tapes. This part means that part. Yeah. That's when you go from 120 to 180 on the Autobahn. And of course, this is also the world perceived non-dualistically. I have a question. I'm almost frightened because it seems clear to everybody. and I thought was .

[69:29]

The difference of what you mean between perceiving something dualistically and non-dualistically. Can you give me an example? Yes, that is the last three attentions. And we'll try to talk about that. But when I gave you the example of you withdraw the mosquito, the definition mosquito, into the, in other words, Here we have A, here we have B. The object and the subject. But between A and B you create a field. Now, the creation of that field is not actually easy. It's easy to draw that line. But the creation of a field perception is not easy. And in fact the emphasis on a field perception is a development in later Buddhism.

[70:32]

Not in fact, but in articulation. Now to give you a simple example again, is if I lift this up and look at it, it creates the field of consciousness, it creates a... First an object of consciousness, right? So we call this a marking pen. We'll call this a marking pen consciousness. Now early Buddhism said that Only when there's an object of consciousness does consciousness arise. What? Only when there's an object of consciousness does consciousness arise. Okay. However, in a way that's true. But you can shift the object of consciousness to the field of consciousness.

[71:53]

Now, we experience that most directly in satsang. Say you develop one-pointedness. then you become very concentrated and basically you've created a samadhi state. You've eliminated all objects of consciousness except one. Then you remove that one and you're still concentrated. So now the Now the field of concentration becomes the object of consciousness. What was the one object? Let's just say it's the number one.

[73:13]

Okay, it could be any object of consciousness. It could be this pen. And then you remove the visualization. Then you can use that field of consciousness to study things. The field of consciousness was made by this, but then I remove this and I bring this into it. And in a developed sense, that's the difference between shamatha and vipassana. Or when you examine, study the contents of your memory in zazen mind, you're using zazen mind to now re-look at your memories. Okay. So, in other words, again, you've... By doing this, by practicing zazen and shifting from the objects of consciousness to the field of consciousness, you begin to get the ability to create a field of consciousness.

[74:31]

When I can take this... field, and now I have this field, right? And the field is partly created by creating little flat A, which I've laid down, right? And a little flat B. Okay. So now, I have a non-dualistic consciousness. At the sound of Mosquito, it can pop back up into a dualistic consciousness. Now this is the first mechanical way of looking at it, but actually if you really get the picture of it, it actually helps in the subtlety of your own going forth in the world. Okay, now, the point here is, a lot of this has to do, a lot of these teachings have to do with how you exist at an energetic level.

[75:44]

And Ulrike, you had something earlier and I didn't mean to go by. What was it? You once called this bringing back memories in different categories. It's called reparenting. Reparenting, yeah. In a sense, you're reparenting yourself. I think it's so wonderful that you guys are willing to struggle with me. Okay, so the point here is why this promise work. It's not just that this is the case, but there's also a dynamic to it. Most of us are here. And you learn to practice Zazen.

[76:48]

When you learn to practice Zazen, sometimes you go over here. And you feel pretty good. Illusion. Illusion. And you feel, what is this guy? I think you feel pretty good. And there's various signs. You can actually get into the signs of softness in the body, a feeling of cotton, a feeling of, you know, soap. Okay, so you're over here, but as soon as you get out in zazen and you go back into your day, We all know that experience. But when you perceive the imaginary world, the conventional world, dualistically, you are using your energy differently.

[77:54]

In this world, more energy is involved in establishing conventional reality. You're only in passive attention or cultural attention. And your skanda of consciousness is highly defined and controlled by your perception. So your energy is quite tight here, and here you're still perceiving the conventional world, but your energy is more open, more fluid. If I perceive the imaginary world realistically, I don't realize that it's... Here you don't know about this.

[79:24]

The conventional world is realistic. So non-dualistic vision of the conventional world means I realize that it's realistic. So dualistic view of the conventional world means I look at it non-dualistically. I don't realize that it's realistic. Exactly. That's right. So when you're here, you don't realize it's dualist. Yes. You have to give me some time to translate. Okay. Well, you can say it in German. If I understand correctly, the metaphor, when I see it dualistically, It means that I don't realize that the conventional world is dualistic. And if I don't see the conventional world as dualistic, I don't see that it is dualistic.

[80:27]

It seems to me that this non-dualistic way, seeing the conventional world, is almost speaking in a way of almost non-dualistic. Because if I'm really in predestined attention and I have really a direct perception, then it's still an illusion if there's no more object, no more structure, no more difference. That's why it's still an illusion. Well, we have to have all discussion translated. But if I am able to proceed non-dualistically, But you need to relate to your dualist. I just need to relate to your dualist. And in fact, that's what we do in our jobs all the time, because the whole... company or whatever it is, works on dualistic principles.

[81:41]

I'm sure Giorgio tries to work dualistically with his fellow architects and residents to build dualistic buildings. whose, if you look closely, true nature is trying to awaken non-dualism in the... Wouldn't that be more or less true? Yeah, by the way, Giorgio, after dinner, is going to, for those of you who want to, talk about how he thinks about design and still living in it. He insists on meeting after dinner rather than now, because he wants only those people to come who are interested.

[82:46]

Er hat darauf bestanden, dass das erst nach dem Abendessen sein stattfinden soll, damit nur diejenigen teilnehmen, die wirklich daran teilnehmen wollen. Yes, that's right. You know where you are. Do you want to say that, John? But the moment I realized that I'm in imaginary world.

[83:59]

I'm in illusion world. Yeah, quite. You don't have to know anything about the other world, just by feeling the separation. It's not just a matter of knowing. It's a matter of what your body is doing. Now, you can even be enlightened. Let's say enlightenment over here. It's why you still be listening. And living way over here. Would that mean that the body was evil? Well, it means that ego is very persistent. Underneath all these spiritual practices ego is alive and well. And it also means that enlightenment, you can be enlightened at a physical level and not at an ego level.

[85:18]

There are various ways you can be enlightened. Some people can be quite enlightened in one way and very convincing to a lot of people and in other ways their life is not enlightened. Because enlightenment is not really something you attain It's something that happens to you through how you settle into how the world exists, through how you settle into actuality. And this isn't some kind of mystical experience. Although it can feel like that, it's not a conversion experience where you go from disbelief to belief.

[86:33]

It's an experience which does happen suddenly, but it can happen to various degrees and to various parts of you, to various dimensions of your being. All right. Now, We said dinner is at 6.30, right? Okay. So, the point of this picture is and why they lay it out this way is it describes what happens energetically as you shift from a dualistic to a non-dualistic way of perception because it's clear to you that there's a different energy your energy is used differently isn't that true? so when you go there's a kind of little jump here And in fact, whenever you shift consciousness, there's an energy thing involved.

[87:54]

If you go back here, you know, you get scared and you go way back. That was too much. I never want to do sasen again. So, then you do zazen again, and you know, it's here. And then pretty soon your zazen gets deeper, right? But the habits catch you. You do zazen, you have some experience, it gets more and more kind of penetrating your body. But as soon as you're with your friends, they don't know what's happening to you. Your friends get together and try to stop you doing Zazen. This is really silly. Aren't there enough challenges in life without doing Zazen?

[88:57]

So you keep being captured by friends and by your culture. But actually by this going back and forth we're building an energy charge. Not just the energy you realize in this but the energy that's developed through going back and forth. So at present, this non-dualism at this level is a practice of mindfulness, Practice of zazen, bare attention, and so forth. And intellectually understanding non-dualism. but there has to be a real turning around in your life.

[90:31]

But by building this energy at some point suddenly... So, and this is called my mentor, Kensho Satori. And it's partly the result of going back and forth between being fooled by the imaginary world and then seeing it non-noticed. So if you just went and lived in the mountains, lived as non-dualistically as possible, controlling your environment, doing everything right, sitting next to a waterfall and only drinking espresso, You might be very calm and a little damp.

[91:39]

But from a Buddhist point of view, you probably never realize the matter. Because enlightenment is not realized through ideal circumstances. It's a good demonstrative, exactly trying to do that. I want a little order here. I want to finish my sentence. Enlightenment isn't realized through ideal circumstances. Enlightenment is realized through entering the world as it is. with other people and it includes the imaginary world seen dualistically and then the bodhisattva is someone defined as being born in the sixth bhumi here

[92:59]

And having the skills to live in both of these for you. Okay. Now your question was, does a monastery try to create the ideal circumstances? It's clear you've never lived in a monastery. Yes. that you have never lived in a monastery.

[93:30]

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