What interests me now is what use can you make of all that I said or some of what I said this morning and yesterday. I mean over the years and recent years too. I've immersed myself in the teachings of non-self in Buddhism. And I've You know, I would say that what I said this morning and yesterday was a pretty good version, entrance into these teachings.

[01:01]

And And if we can come to, I can come to, we can come to, a fairly concise practice of these teachings of self and non-self, And my feeling is if I say just a continuum of self, Now here I've introduced a new refinement, which is not just self or a process of self, but a continuum of self.

[02:21]

Maybe we could say there's a self-continuum, but not an objective self. Okay. But if we can come to a, and I will try... today and tomorrow to come to a definition of this practice. But we're in the process of coming to a definition now. Through your own experience as well as my experience.

[03:40]

Because if a definition is going to work, it's got to work for you and a lot of other people. Because the question in a society, in a culture, What constitutes a human being? What constitutes a self? Who in your society is voting? Wer in deiner Gesellschaft hat ein Wahlrecht? Who in your society is resisting? Entschuldigung, wer wählt und wer wählt nicht? Who in our society is destroying our planet? Wer in unserer Gesellschaft zerstört den Planeten? All of us, of course. Natürlich wir alle. But we know enough to know not to do it, but we don't.

[04:43]

We don't use what we know. And that has to do with what kind of person we are. How are we responsible for our actions? So if we, today and tomorrow, could introduce into our society a definition of self and non-self, which made our experience of ourself and our experience with others more subtle and our engagement with the world more subtle this would be you know might be very good No, I'm not saying we can do this great thing.

[06:00]

Well, I think it would be a great thing, but I'm not saying that it's great that we can do this, that we, that it's great that we might do this. Well, I mean, I am saying it's great if we could do this. But I'm saying it in the context not of something exceptional. I'm saying it in the context of all of Buddhism is motivated by the effort to do this. Because, I mean, the effort in Buddhism is to know things as they are. Yeah, and let's just keep it simple, to know things as they are. But behind the effort to practice is yourself as a typical human being. Maybe as a Buddha, but also as a typical human being.

[07:21]

And if you can understand what it might mean to be a Buddha, and you're a typical human being, then maybe the society can know what to do, how to live with things as they are. So an effort, even in a little seminar like this one weekend in Hannover, we're not just trying to discover how we can practice. Dass wir nicht nur versuchen zu entdecken, wie wir praktizieren, sondern wie wir alle praktizieren können. Indem wir die Welt nicht als eine sie-heit, eine außerhalb von uns-heit verstehen, sondern als eine uns-heit.

[08:25]

Es sind nicht die da draußen, sondern das sind wir. So when we, and I would like us after the break to break up into small groups to discuss among yourselves and we'll have to think about what the question could be but it's one could certainly be what is the most convincing question experience you have of the... of a substantial self, a self you're sure about. Yeah, and I'm not... I'm not... Again, I don't want to speak about just a self continuum, or a non-self non-continuum, but maybe to combine the two, a self-non-self process.

[09:52]

Now, I'm saying this not as fact, I'm not saying this as a fact. I'm saying this as a way we can feel our way into how we exist. And maybe to say a self-non-self process allows us to notice both the continuity and the discontinuity of self. And perhaps an experience of our existence as a process of both self and non-self We can come to a more subtle and engaged experience of our existence.

[11:07]

We could say all of Buddhism is about aliveness. What is aliveness? And what is most conducive to our aliveness? No, I go away to... The hotel I'm staying in, which is only one minute away, I discovered. Well, five. I arrived and there's some big conference and banquet meal going on. Yeah, and I don't even know how to pay for the meal because everybody's just eating out of pans.

[12:20]

I wasn't part of this conference. I didn't have a badge. but I ate their food. And I didn't know how to pay for it, so I'm going to have to tell the hotel desk that I ate this morning. Charge me something. But here in this situation, what's this have to do with the process of self and non-self? Not much with the other people with their badges on. I had no badge on, but it said non-self. And then I come back here.

[13:32]

And I can feel as soon as I'm in this room, we have some shared experience through practice. that allows us to look at the discontinuity itself and draw some conclusions about that in how we practice, how we exist. Okay, anyway. So, anybody want to say anything? That wasn't a very good introduction to encourage you to say something, but still.

[14:34]

I always have this thought in my head, and I always ask myself, do I only have one self, or maybe two or three? There is a lot of practice in the dojo, that's why we left each other, and someone asked, who are you? And I answered him, and he said, who are you? And we just found out. And that's a terrible story. But we found out after years that it was about this thing, that I had never been there. It was just a touch, a touch. And then it was gone very quickly. Then I was like, I can drive around, I'm a cook, I'm a teacher, I'm like that. Thank you. So I'm thinking about the self and what I'm wondering about is whether there's one self or two or three or many of them and I felt reminded of an exercise that I did a while back in which I was facing another person and the question for the exercise was, who are you?

[16:11]

So we kept going back and forth, who are you, who are you, many times and it was actually a kind of terrible experience, but I felt reminded of it in this context and then eventually I realized, well, there was some feeling of, well, this is me and I know how to ride a bicycle and I'm a teacher and I am this and that and so forth. Yeah, it's like that. But I don't know myself. Maybe you know some of yourselves. Well, Montaigne, the French essayist who lived in the 1500s, He said, it's a fool's errand or it's foolish to look for the self or to try to know the self because the self is always changing.

[17:34]

And the definition is always ahead of you. So you're chasing the definition as you're changing. Yeah. Maybe we in literature can accept that that's probably the case. But when someone insults us and we're hurt We think, oh, Montaigne, that guy, you know, with the definition of self is running ahead of me, and this guy doesn't know. No, we're hurt. But when we're hurt, we don't think, yes, Montaigne has already said that the definition of self is always a step ahead of us, but no, what we learn is that we're hurt. Yes. Someone else. Yes. I was sitting across from you for almost a whole weekend with different partners and you asked us the question, tell me who you are, and you just had to answer.

[19:00]

And if you didn't answer, you were asked again, tell me who you are. So what she just said reminded me of a seminar that I once participated in in which we did the same exercise where we sat across from a partner and we were asked, who are you? Tell me who you are. And every time one would stop speaking, they were asked again, tell me who you are. And I thought at that time, On this question, one should find a really complicated answer. One can determine that it is a song, where the answer to the song is from Kate. That means, I am. And I used to think that one has to find a really complicated answer to a question, but today I realized that there's a really simple song that that reminds me of, and that song is by Keite, and the name is I Am.

[20:15]

Okay. I Am. All right. And now, I would just like to say, if I have any questions, first of all, I am Fiete. So if now I was asked who I am, I would say I am many, and then that manyness one would have to further define. Okay. Yes? He did that same exercise a little while ago. for a week. A week? Yeah. The seminar was called Intensive Enlightenment. Did it work? [...]

[21:16]

I had an interesting dream. I saw a priest in a dark room. He was written in children's writing. And there were sentences like, I am this, I am that, I am that. Like such beliefs sentences. But I had an interesting kind of dream, half-awake, half-asleep dream, in which I saw like a board and in children's writing, or you mean a cube, and in children's writing there was written, I am such and such, and I am such and such, several beliefs. When I saw that, I thought it was so ridiculous, it made me laugh hard, because it was so arbitrary, so that I could see the meaning of that. Yeah. Thank you. Yes.

[22:41]

Oh, the same people always. What about somebody who hasn't spoken? Yes. I had a similar experience, but in the exercise that I participated in, it wasn't with the question, who are you? But we were just facing each other in silence. And that was in the midst of a bodily therapy training, and we knew each other quite well. And what happened was that as we were facing each other, the faces seemed to change shape and you kept seeing a new kind of face.

[23:50]

And at the time, I wasn't that familiar with Buddhism, yet I interpreted that as many different incarnations of the person I was facing. Today, of course, I would see that differently. I went to see a movie called Mr. Hulot's Holiday, Jacques Tati. Maybe some of you have seen it. Well, yes, it's an old one, 1953. He's dead, so there's no remake. Fifty-three it was me. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, when are this holiday?

[25:05]

And I happened to see it when I was, let's say, depressed. Or deeply discouraged about life. Yeah, in 53, I was actually younger. How old was I? I don't know. In my... 20s or 19 or something. Anyway, when I saw it, when I was in this discouraged mood, it made me so sad, I wept through the whole movie. Because everything goes wrong for this guy. He goes on his vacation and everything's a disaster. And then two or three years later I was somewhere and the movie was being shown. In those days you had to wait until they were in the theater Yeah, so I wasn't sure I wanted to see such a discouraging, unhappy movie again.

[26:49]

But I got up my courage and went to the movie. And it was hilarious. And I realized it was a comedy, but I didn't. I really hadn't got it that it was a comedy. And you were supposed to laugh at this poor guy's troubles. So, you know, there's these frames, one frame after another in a movie. And they're related visually. But still, the connection has to be made by an observer. It's when they're being run fast and there's an observer and they start to make sense.

[28:17]

So we can ask, is the self a series of movie frames? And there's really not a... There's not a... What word can I use? Substantial connection between them, but an implicit connection. So that would be the discontinuity of self. There's various units, and they connect, but they're not really necessarily connected. But the observer makes it feel connected.

[29:21]

The observer gives coherence to the separate frames. Der Beobachter verleiht diesen einzelnen Bildern eine Kohärenz, eine Zusammengehörigkeit. So maybe the self is not the separate frames, but is the observer. Vielleicht ist das selbst nicht diese unterschiedlichen Bilder, sondern der Beobachter. But the observer gives coherence to the movie frames. And the self is something like that.

[30:22]

It gives coherence to everything that keeps happening to us. But then we can ask, does that coherence given by the observing self have continuity in time? I think the answer has to be no. Yeah, I saw Mr. Hulot's holiday twice. I've seen it once or twice then. But there was not a coherent self seeing it each time. Okay, so there's a self which gives coherence. But not a self which is continuous in time or... Yeah. but not a self that lasts continuously over time.

[31:44]

I'll say it in German. In fact, if we look at a film, this image, one image after the other, which is so fast that it seems as if the individual figures that appear there are moving, in fact it is an exchange. In fact, when we see this frame after frame after frame, still frame in a rapid succession, it is in fact a delusion. Yeah. Or an illusion. Illusion, yeah. When I read Oda's teaching, there is a mentioning that he used supposedly the example of the firebrand. That is a circle, but in fact it's a dot. Is that something like the same? Yeah. If you try to grasp it, you can't grasp it, but you experience it as...

[32:48]

A circle. But if you try to hold it, it's not a circle. You'll burn your hands. And that's what you do in a funeral ceremony. You light the... And if you need a funeral, let me know. You light... You light a flame because we take responsibility, so we light the flame if the person is cremated. But when you do it in a ceremony, and not the actual cremation, it's traditional to make a paper flame like a little flag.

[33:50]

And then at the center of the ceremony, you make a big circle with it. Usually three times. And that both represents that you're lighting the flame. And it also represents, as Neil pointed out, the illusion of a circle. But life is like that. And now it's gone. Yes. Yes. Yes. But I have too much weight and that doesn't interest me anymore.

[35:12]

I then thought about what I mean by that. Too much weight. Very boring. When you talked about the movie, the way you watched it twice, and it was so different in your experience, that reminded me of a phrase that has come to me recently, which is, too much world. And I've been thinking what I mean by that, and it just keeps coming like that, too much world, too much world. And it's like, it's boring. It's superfluous. That much of it is superfluous and boring. And then I thought, well, now it's over with me. I'm totally gone. But I noticed that that which remains is actually more intense, it's intensified.

[36:19]

There's nothing special about them, but it's that they have a different quality. Yeah, okay, so you could practice with less world is good enough. It's also called getting older again. Yes, someone else, yeah. Ich habe den Film auch gesehen und ich habe ihn anders wahrgenommen. Ich fand nicht, dass er Schwierigkeiten hat. I also watched that movie and I... Mr. Hulot's Holiday? Oh, yeah.

[37:21]

And I perceived it differently. My sense was not that this guy was in difficulties. Ich empfand ihn mehr als verwundert über die Dinge, die passierten. It was more like I felt that he was in awe or surprised by the things that were happening, surprised. And he just did what needed to be done. For example, the honey bed dropped down and we picked it up again. That was just something that needed to be done. But he released the stress out. It's like you at the airport. This is so weird. Well, it's true. You know, the movie, he just does everything that's quite reasonable, but it causes chaos everywhere.

[38:22]

Okay. Now, let's stop and have a break. Okay. Maybe the questions we could look at What is our most convincing experience of the continuity or substantiality of self? And Question number one. Question number two, maybe, is if there's no substantial self,

[39:23]

Why can I still be hurt or offended? What is being hurt when you're hurt? Okay. Thanks.

[39:29]

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