I was very touched by what you said. And what I found interesting especially is when you were talking about narratives, how we talk to ourselves, how we make up our own stories, how we define ourselves in relationship to other friends and society. What came to me is that if we do that we make ourselves quite unflexible and quite settled and this leads to the situation that we can't have visions, I think. And what Sangha does is it opens this Tight structure, more and more. And out of that, a new vision about how we want to live and how society can develop.

[01:05]

German, please. It touched me very much what Rashi said, and especially the point about this self-telling about his own story and who he is in relation to society. And another thing, yesterday you talked about when we sit and meditate together. When we sit and meditate together we are creating a situation that is not defined by social dimensions or self or ego.

[02:16]

It's more like an open situation. And for some people it feels like unreal or dreamlike. But my experience is that people talk about it that way that, and myself too, it's kind of not real, but they want to talk about it. And that's something I find really interesting because that also creates the kind of friendship you were talking about. The second aspect that I would like to address is, yesterday Roshi talked about it, when we sit together, we create a field that is little defined and little determined by society or ourselves, that is, this common sitting. And many people talk about this experience as something unreal or dreamlike, but they want to talk about it.

[03:19]

Okay, thank you. I hope so. Someone else. Yes, Gertz? Interesting was that the point of Sangha as a reference point about our being in the world. Coming into the world, yeah.

[04:23]

And I thought about what would be our normal reference points. Yeah, being better, being in comparisons, yeah. Yeah. authority and being subdued. Not to mention a lot of animal reflexes. and also what we call animalic reflexes. Instinct. What is it when you react?

[05:30]

What's that called? Knee jerk. A reflex. A reflex, you call it the same. A reflex, yeah. So from our animal ancestors, we still have a lot, God says. Yeah, I suppose so. And what interests me is like in this Sangha I'm living in and being at home in a way. How the other concepts work, if they are in balance, if they are in comparison with each other, and how this works here. And it reaches even into this situation like being a little authoritarian where the chief is sitting here and we are sitting here and sort of receiving.

[06:38]

Plenty coops. Plenty damas. And in my professional life and experience I find it highly vitalizing that the The basic idea, the basic conviction of Sangha, of friendship, of community that we actually are, the real carrying alternative is to all the hard work that we experience from Rome and that we do ourselves. The basic, the basis of Sangha as friendship is the alternative, really, against all this quarrel and strife and whatever we experience in our normal life. Mm-hmm. Okay. Gisela?

[07:58]

Where are you? Oh, there you are. Yes. I also experienced my orchestra life as a great singer, who, of course, in my small life, My private being starts with my group. I experience my orchestral life as a kind of singer, starting with a private little group and then a little larger group of eight to ten cellists, which I work together. Mm-hmm. The group getting larger, you could form a subgroup of string players and then the whole orchestra.

[09:20]

And in the ideal case, it forms a harmonizing whole And ideally this forms a harmonizing hole and this is called field harmonic. Ideally I can identify with that, but it's not always the case. It's not every evening, not in every concert, and this is difficult to chew and digest. Then the big public space where the audience is at it. It's a lasting experience and often also an inner struggle with myself.

[10:46]

Probably for most musicians, or maybe for all musicians, more or less. It's very impressive. This is a very possible sort of experience. It's a constant struggle with myself and sometimes with the other musicians. This is very impressive, so to say. Yeah, thank you. You know, I'm not very musical. I like music, but no one really wants me to sing except near the window. When I do sing by the window, they help me out. But my little daughter Sophia seems to be fairly musical. So we have a cello maker. who also plays the cello, and his parents were both music teachers.

[11:55]

I forget the English word for somebody who makes cellos, but anyway. Sophia really wants to play the cello, not the violin. I think she likes hugging it. So she keeps saying she wants a cello. So we've agreed that... At some point soon she can get a cello. We're looking into medium, you know, half size or small. So I come up to the house. in Crestone, in the center where we live. And the room is just full of ordinary air. As usual. Yeah, after the rain it smells pretty good, but still ordinary air.

[13:07]

So Jack is there with his cello he's made. And Sophia is there with her violin. And she learns things right away. I mean, she's introduced to a piece and she's kind of fussing. Next time, she just plays it. She gets it done real quickly. And she can read music now. Anyway, so, and then Alan Yulstis is there with his, and he teaches recorder and he's got his recorder. My wife's recorder, but she never plays it. Yeah, I don't know what you call it. Queer flute? Queer flute? Yeah. Queer flute? I don't know. A little wooden one. Flute. Yeah, no, not a flute. A recorder. It's wooden. A recorder is like that. Yeah. Yeah, it's a recorder. Say it in German, please.

[14:07]

Block flute. Block flute. Ah, yeah. A block flute. Block flute. A wooden one. So, yeah, then Allen is there with his block flute. So... They have this piece of music and the three of them are there. And suddenly this ordinary air is transformed into music. And I can't do it. And I look and I say, how did this ordinary air turn into music? And the three of them are there. And it's really like a miracle for me. This air can become music. And somehow sangha feels something like that to me. There's some way in which people can be together and something like music appears.

[15:12]

No, I, of course, obviously I've never been in an orchestra, but I imagine that on the one hand the idea of an orchestra is that everyone plays together and And it feels good. But I'm sure underneath that there's like, who's first violin and why did this person, you know, there's all kinds of antagonisms and competition within the group, I imagine. But still the... The point is, and why everyone's there, is to make music together. And when does that happen and when does it not happen? And I said that I started, really, my investigation and exploration of Sangha begins with friendship.

[16:16]

How really could I create a situation with others that really supported friendship? And what I discovered is those who practice together or sit in the zendo together create a kind of friendship. And it's often not people not necessarily people you'd be friends with in an ordinary sense. And at least in my life, I've found that the friendships of practicing together To me, the most satisfying relationships are equal to being a father or being a husband, etc.

[17:20]

And when I was younger, my priority was practice friendships more than being a husband or a father. But now I try to have them equal. And strangely, starting on this Sangha path through friendship, I found that usual social friendships and practice friendships don't work very well together. And I noticed with Sukhiroshi that only when I'd been practicing with him ten years Did he start, and were it really all the time, did he start having a kind of social friendship with me as well as a practice friendship?

[18:44]

So I've anyway discovered over the years, it's almost always true. A social friendship and a practice friendship don't necessarily mix. I've always wanted them to, but somehow the territory is different. So again, I think of an orchestra. and the levels of the interactions that make music and the level of the interactions that are social relationships are different. Maybe different, I would guess.

[19:45]

And the question is, how can we transfer that music to all our relationships? Let me just say one more thing. At least at this moment. The question, I think, the dynamic within Sangha is to continually ask yourself the question, What kind of person do I want to exist in this world? What kind of person do I hope exists in this world? Can I be that person? Anyway, that's enough.

[20:58]

Evelyn? I learned and still learn or get to know Sangha mainly through the Sangha body effect. And I love to explore this in Zazen what this actually is. And there are people I don't know with whom I feel quite connected. And thanks to Zazen I have also learned the difference between a social body and really the same body also in a group of people. And thanks to Sashin I got to know the difference between a social body and a Zen body.

[22:00]

The longer I practice and the longer I succeed in being here and now, The more happy I am that I don't necessarily define myself, but stories out of my usual life. Was früher einen recht großen Stellenwert hatte, immer irgendwelche Anekdoten zu erzählen, vielleicht auch interessant zu machen mit irgendetwas. Which had more meaning in my former life to tell anecdotes, make myself interesting and so forth. And I'm very happy to experience this, being more here and now, that I just can live this away.

[23:06]

And now I was quite surprised how you emphasized the meaning of the narrative. In my experience, the whole thing, what I have tinkered with in my biography, I was quite astonished that this was so important about the narrative, because I did so much with my narrative and added so much to it. To define myself through the narrative of your previous, in your former life or the present life? No, in the past it was so strong, and now you have emphasized the importance of the narrative, and I was astonished, because in my life and in my practice I now notice rather a liberation from it, that it should have such a weight, or?

[24:36]

I was astonished at the importance you lay to the narrative because I'm rather glad that I can be more and more free from my narrative. So I would ask you to please say something about it anymore, more to that. May I say something about the translational thing? We have different words in German for telling something. We have history, of course. We have the narrative and we have the story. And it is in German not so clear. You have to add some adjective to story in German to tell exactly what is meant. So narrative, please, perhaps you could explain this difference a little. We wouldn't have a special word for narrative. Okay.

[25:37]

Well, I think to respond to this with much... Accuracy, I'm going to have to do it in bits and pieces during the rest of the seminar. When I was talking about Chief Plenty Coops and the Crow Indians, the man who wrote this book about these Indians, this Native American tribe, was using narrative not in the sense of one's personal narrative, But more like the context of a world view. And when you lose the context of a world view, it's hard to make sense of anything. So how do we, and it's very interesting how it quite

[26:42]

Naturally and comfortably you talked about your former life and your present life. And I think often for those of us who commit ourselves to practice, strangely we can speak about the life before I practiced. But at the same time, we often feel we're more the person we're more fully the person we were before, but it's somehow also different. So I often, in a sense, I think you mean, say, through practice we get rather free of our self-narratives, our narrative self.

[28:13]

But even if we're free of a narrative self, I'm sorry, it's just about... I'm patient. Exactly, exactly. One of the virtues of being a practitioner. You mean narrative, self-noun, narrative as an adjective. Yeah. Yeah. Narrative. Yeah, not as a noun, yeah. Also, I'm... Still, you know, if a person has brain damage and can't put things in a self-referential context... He can't what? He cannot put anything in a self-referential context. They can function in the here and now, but they can't make sense of anything. So we still have to have some kind of self-referential context, but it's different if we practice than if we don't practice.

[29:36]

Now, whether we want to go further in that direction or not, I don't know, but that's enough for now. Okay. Someone else. Any other musicians? Valentin. I didn't, you know, it didn't have to be you, but it's nice. You talked yesterday about when the Buddha sat down and became pious and clear, that he changed the paradigm or there was a shift in the paradigm from the five elements to the four elements, if I understood.

[30:39]

I said Buddhism has emphasized the four elements and not the five elements. because they don't emphasize the pervasive space. And I can't remember how it's formulated, but he went into knowledge and vision? It said that sitting down, he bent and... His attention? Bent and applied, turned and applied his attention to knowledge and vision. And that's not different than my saying we investigate and cultivate the awareness of something.

[31:42]

It seems that we're talking also with chief Plantic groups about the change in paradigm. Yes, that's right. And I've been thinking about this since yesterday, what that has to do with Sangha, with the subtle aspect, you talked of Sangha, and the fact that when the Buddha did that, he didn't have a Sangha. I found that very interesting. Just to actually know what actually went on, what happened. We don't know what actually went on. Deutsche, bitte? Who's going to do the Deutsch here? The Irishman or the German with the Scottish name?

[33:05]

I found that interesting. I found that interesting. The Buddha didn't have any sangha at that time. He was deep in bending his attention to his need. I think I understood yesterday what he took away. We were talking about Gita and Hinduism, the paradigm shift. And the collective unconscious. Yes, and the self. It has to do with ether and the self. It took actually something away and something else happened to it. And this is what happens also here. I just want to understand.

[34:07]

Yeah, no, it's good. Let's make it clear. So the question, what happened with the Buddha? What I would guess, what I would say, is he had an enlightenment experience. He had a paradigm shift. But very quickly afterwards, people began to want to practice with him. Forty people from one town and several of his former companions in practice and so forth. And I would say it's then practicing with those people through which the teaching developed.

[35:13]

It's innocent to think it all appeared in the Enlightenment experience. Then we have some sort of revelation. That's not the case. His enlightenment experience was the basis for then practicing with others and developing a teaching. And that's what we're doing here. Some version of that. It's wonderful that we can. If you took away what I understand in Hinduism that ether is the force that combines all the four elements and vitalizes them. Well, I mean, that kind of idea is more like the early ideas of homeopathy and so forth, other things.

[36:35]

But I think it's more conceptually similar to this somehow that there's one mind. Everything is a big mind, and we're little parts of it. And that's not Buddhism. Yeah, so he took that away. Well, he decided that wasn't needed. And in effect, in his teaching, took that away. Yes. And when you look at the development of Buddhism through the centuries, often it's been developed through a dialogue with the culture in which one paradigm supplants another paradigm.

[37:42]

The great teachers are often, we know them as great teachers. Partly because they happened to historically exist when a paradigm shift was necessary. I got that. I could say that my former life before I started practicing has been different than is now. It was rather a slow process.

[38:47]

To say it otherwise would be not quite accurate. And I'm quite concerned at the moment with the question of friendship, to grasp it and to solve it more satisfying in my life. And I often investigate when I feel comfortable with whom and why. And now, as Valentin mentioned, with these five and four, And when Valentin mentioned these were the five and four elements, still this is in a way quite abstract for me, but I find a trace there.

[40:21]

And then I noticed that when I'm together with people who are capable of noticing that this being together sort of exists because of the being together, so to say, arises in the being together. I have very interesting experiences but I find it also exhausting and sometimes a little frightening. Because I question long existing friendship and find new meetings so interesting. experience of being together in the present moment, that I should be able to awaken this in the others with whom I am working together, for example.

[42:09]

And I feel I should be able to awaken this feeling of being together in the here and now and other people whom, for example, I work together. I should be able to do that. And I found investigating that the main obstacle is judging. The worst is that good friends, in fact, can't see because they all know it's this way and that way and that way.

[43:19]

Okay. How I respond will depend on what the Inosama tells me. When are we supposed to eat, Inosama? One. It's scheduled for one. Oh, I'm not so bad off then. Well, let's drop the judging. Let's drop the should. And say you hope you can. Discover this with your friends. And I think many of us find when we start to practice after a while, we actually don't have much in common with our former friends. Or our former friends find us a little odd. They don't know quite what to do with this. But if you continue practicing, often...

[44:25]

The former friends come back, or you come back to them, in new ways that it's refreshing for both of you. Let me say, first, then we'll break for lunch. In practice. our initial state of mind should, ought to, can be acceptance. But acceptance, let's look at it in a more accessible way, maybe. That means you begin from the inside of situations.

[45:51]

You don't begin from the way you want it to be. You begin from the way it is. If you begin from the way you want it to be, you're actually outside the situation. So if it's a kind of terrible or uncomfortable situation, you just accept that discomfort and enter into the discomfort. And then from there, from inside, you... Express yourself. This is good advice for doing zazen too.

[46:54]

Zazen instruction. Okay. You go into the zendo. You don't want to be there. You want to be back in bed. You feel lousy and your stomach's upset and you've got diarrhea and nausea. The diarrhea might be a problem. Maybe I should leave. But you just start with feeling lousy. Or your stomach's upset. You don't start with, I wish my stomach wasn't upset. Of course, there's part of you that wishes your stomach wasn't upset. But that's not where you bring your attention.

[47:58]

You bring your attention simply inside your upset stomach. Or your anxiety or your elation or whatever it is. And then you settle into that. And you might bring your attention to your breath, etc. too. But basically you accept whatever it is from inside as the way the world is at this moment for you. Anyway, this is a basic way to start Zazen. Maybe the most basic way. Okay, so let's sit for a moment and then we'll have lunch. Thank you.

[49:13]

Thank you. This also applies to how you approach the teaching. If you approach the teaching as if, oh, you know, you are outside it, I can't understand this, this is too difficult, too much for me. With that attitude, you won't understand the teaching. It's not likely. Maybe it's like the difference between being the owner of a business and the employee of a business. If you're the owner of the business, there may be some problem, financial or organizational problem.

[51:10]

And you don't know how to solve it. But you're the owner of the business. So you have to solve it from inside. So you don't say, I don't understand this teaching. You say, I'm the owner of this teaching. This teaching is made for me and I'm participating in it. And although I don't understand it yet, it's still my teaching and I understand it from inside, feeling I own this teaching. I'd like all of you to feel that you own this teaching. It belongs to you. You may not have fully realized it yet, You may not have fully realized the teaching yet.

[52:27]

But you feel you own it. It belongs to you. This is a productive way to be a member of the Sangha. A fruitful way. So the member of the Sangha feels he or she is inside the teaching, not outside looking in.

[52:59]

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