which means the more you're able to not interfere with yourself the more you move toward stillness or emptiness okay now that's one that's a sort of deeper level of uncorrected mind now another way of looking at it is deeply rooted states of mind are very relaxed. And one of the measures of practice is your internal ease. because the more deeply rooted your states of mind are the more energy they have And they have more energy because they're rooted in you, your whole body, the phenomenal world, and everything, etc.

[01:12]

So you begin to develop a taste, in a sense, a taste for deeply rooted states of mind. As long as you're releasing your mind so there's lots of thoughts and stuff. But you're in the background as ego saying, what use can I make of this? or you're paying attention to certain things, you're being released as long as a few things come up that you can use in your ego consciousness. Then you have a rather deep layer of ice. But the more you practice, you begin to skate on thin ice. You may fall through.

[02:21]

But in any case, there's a tendency in practice which guides uncorrected mind toward more deeply rooted states of mind. Now, let me give you an example because I brought it up in relationship to Herman's question this morning of the distinction between immediate, secondary, and borrowed. Now put this in the way I talked about it in Sashin recently at Creston. A kind of classic example. I can look at Gerald here. And if I don't think about Gerald and just see Gerald without any idea of Gerald, and if someone said to me, an emperor said to me, who is this?

[03:41]

I would say, I don't know. Now, if I make an effort and I say, that's Gerold. Well, that's not such a good example. If I make an effort and say, oh, that's a person with a black shirt on who's younger than me. When I make the shift to look at him enough to form conceptions, I've changed the energy level of the state of mind. It's a less deeply rooted state of mind. But it's still not so bad. Okay. And I can feel a little bump when I go over that state of mind, into the second state of mind.

[04:49]

I can feel a little contour, a little topography. I'm just looking at Gerald. I'm looking at this nameless person. When I'm feeling him in my hands, in my stomach, and so forth, this is immediate consciousness. And this is what you're trying to learn to know through the practice of bare attention. And bare attention means attention free of concepts. A friend of mine painted, he's quite a successful painter, but he just painted this painting of Marilyn Monroe naked on the sky.

[05:54]

It was a version of the famous Marilyn Monroe calendar, if some of you are old enough to remember. Marilyn Monroe, if you don't know, was an actress who... Come on. It's the seventh century. Who happened to be blonde? Now we need a little borrowed consciousness here. Anyway, there was this huge painting as big as this, almost as big as this wall, square, of Marilyn Monroe totally naked. And my whole family objected to being in the kitchen over the dining room table. Particularly my young daughter and her friends.

[07:10]

And I would always say, what's the problem? It's just pink and blue. Because for me, really, I never saw anything. I just saw pink and blue. And this was the standard joke in my household. Primary consciousness and it's just pink and blue wasn't needed. No matter what I said, that was a naked woman on the wall. So the painting came down. Secondary consciousness won out. Okay, so Now you also notice the same bump if you've had any experience chanting and you go from chanting from memory

[08:16]

or from your body to reading the text. You actually have to change your orientation a little bit to read Kanji, Zai, Bo, Satsu, Gyo, Jin, Han, Ra, Amita. And when you go over that bump, you've actually gone over an energy level difference in the way the mind is rooted in, in the way that mind is rooted. The mind that's reading is much thinner than the mind that's chanting from the body. Do you understand? Make sense? Okay. Now, if I know that now if I go to the third state of mind, borrowed consciousness, say that I know not just that Gural is younger than me and wearing a black shirt,

[09:21]

I know what Gerald's birthday is. Now, Gerald's birthday, I can't know from analysis or immediate consciousness. I can only know Gural's birthday from being told. And Gural can only know his birthday from being told. He might remember being born, but he doesn't remember what day. If you were as big as then as you are now, your mother remembers too, I'm sure. Okay, so borrowed consciousness is the thinnest state of mind and the one in which our entire educational system is built on. And our entire newspaper and magazine culture.

[10:44]

And we're taught to live in this state of mind which is essentially borrowed. And makes us very easily socially controlled. Not that I'm recommending that you all go out of control. It's just that we have access only to certain levels of experience. I think your experience in the store was because everybody was in borrowed consciousness. Another question, can you add me a magazine or a newspaper in a novel? Not really. Not really. But if you want to read a koan, you want to say that in German? Not really.

[11:48]

Ulrike just asked me why I read so many magazines. You're supposed to be helping me. Because I'm a borrowed mind junkie. But I know I'm taking junk. But a koan needs to be read as much as possible in immediate consciousness. So it's a kind of reading that's not done in a deeply rooted, energetically state of mind. Okay. Now, one thing again, we've just done a little teaching here about these three states of mind. What you can do when you're practicing I think you're going to have to first do it in zazen but you can do it in ordinary standing, sitting and lying postures is to notice when you go across that bump

[13:35]

from borrowed consciousness to secondary consciousness to primary or immediate consciousness. Now, this is another distinction I've made, labels I've made, which actually are pointing out quite real differences. It all looks the same here, but actually one goes like this, one goes like this, and one goes like that. How to translate? Yeah. You could make the same gestures. Let's do it together. One goes like this. One goes like this. One goes like this. And we can work that as a routine with Michael Jackson. While he's singing, we could go... We must be getting near a break.

[14:45]

Yeah, let me stay with something. So when you are practicing, borrowed consciousness is shared consciousness. When you go into zazen, mostly you're moving out of borrowed consciousness. And in secondary consciousness, you can sort of count. But in immediate consciousness, it's very difficult to count. But as you have a taste for more deeply rooted states of mind, you feel more complete. Literally more rooted. You feel refreshed in your sitting.

[16:09]

Then you're moving toward one-pointedness. So this move toward one-pointedness has to happen out of an effort, but it also happens sort of naturally in the process of sitting. And you don't want to force it and you also don't want to delay it. So that brings us to following. The breath, the second of them. So when you begin to count the breath, you're developing skills in zazen mind. But zazen mind in which you count remains in secondary consciousness.

[17:22]

But you're learning to count in secondary consciousness and not in borrowed consciousness. Then when you start just following your breath, you're moving from secondary consciousness into immediate consciousness. So the shift from borrowed consciousness, the shift from counting to following is a shift into a more deeply rooted zazen mind. So we sat for 30 minutes and we've been talking for an hour. And I'd like to come back to your question after the break. So it's 4.20.

[18:29]

Let's see if we can have 20 or 25 minutes if it's enough time to use the toilets. Then we'll have a short meeting and end for the day. Thank you for staying with me so far. Well, I'll see you guys later. There are so many things I'd like to share with you but I can't be explicit about.

[20:01]

So I guess I can only be implicit about, and so I hope you sense some of the things I'd like to say but can't. Now sometimes meeting your breath is like meeting an animal in the shadows of the forest. Or even a caged animal. Or sometimes meeting your breath is like the calmest of new spring days. Now, this meeting of your breath like an animal in the shadows of the forest can't be taught in how you count your breaths.

[21:12]

But, you know, counting gives us a kind of anchor. Don't think of it as the whole, but a kind of anchor. And a kind of articulation of unshared, usually unshared consciousness. Almost like you're creating a kind of ladder made of air down into space, into an interior space. And it's good to make an effort sometimes to count the rungs of this ladder. And sometimes you get to ten and you just let go. David, you had a question?

[22:35]

Yes, if I can drag it up out of the murkiness of my jet lag here. Is it possible to exist in inner and outer consciousness at the same time? For example, times in my zazen where there seem to be two parts of me where one part of me can count to ten and I can put the other side and another part be completely involved in all kinds of thoughts, fantasies, images and so on and the two can run along tracks at the same time. And if that's the case, there's something which is aware of these two, which is actually present in both but separate from both. So what is that particular state of consciousness that's present in both but isn't?

[23:41]

You've just asked the hardest of all questions. Do you want to translate it? I don't know if there are any English people here. I have experienced that this external and internal consciousness, that I can perceive it at the same time. For example, when I sit down, I can sometimes count to ten and at the same time be involved in all kinds of thoughts on a track that runs parallel. And when it becomes clear to me that I can be in both at the same time, then these two kinds of consciousness must have something in common that is also separated from it. A tree is growing right here, say. And the tree as it gets bigger starts putting out branches. And this branch goes over and finally it hits this wall or gets very close to this wall.

[25:03]

Yeah. And this branch goes over and goes only about so far because it runs into Uli-balm. I was so proud of myself using a little German. Okay. So, now this branch is over there and this branch is here. Okay. Now, the tree begins growing additional branches here to balance this long branch. And we could develop that image further in the way this tree relates to this tree, but that's another now. Okay.

[26:11]

Now, in a sense, the left branch of the tree knows what the right branch of the tree is doing because they compensate for each other. But they don't have a... consciousness as we understand it of the two different branches. Now, we, as I say, the present is a dharma. If you look, I mean, the present has no dimension, though. Okay, because if it's 5 minutes to 12, and then it's 2 1⁄2 minutes to 12, and then 1 minute to 12, and then a millisecond before 12, and then it's a millisecond after 12.

[27:20]

So there's no dimension to the present. It's like that. But in our sense field, we create an extension within our own senses of the present. And within that sense field that we create, which extends past and future into an experiential present, We create, and I think most animals, I think almost all animals do, of any complexity, create an observing consciousness. So in a sense, you can say the very nature of a dharma is this observing consciousness that's created.

[28:40]

Now, this observing consciousness from the point of view of Buddhism, in my experience, does not have a permanent or inherent identity. And this observing consciousness can be very concentrated and very small. It can be quite wide and inclusive. And it can be located in different mediums, different parts of the body. And different territories within consciousness. So I think you're right, David, that you actually are experiencing three consciousnesses. However, the observing consciousness is never independent of some other consciousness.

[29:54]

It's rooted in some consciousness. So if you have two consciousnesses like A and B, you can have A appearing like a cartoon eye looking at B. Or you can have B appearing as a cartoon eye looking at A. But it's very difficult to have B as a cartoon eye looking back at B. And you can't take this cartoon eye and remove it from A and B and have it float independent. It'll disappear. That's impossible.

[30:55]

But you can have this eye disappear so that everything becomes a kind of observer without an observer. And in the fullest sense, that would be what a Buddha is. An observer that doesn't observe. In which everything is the observer, the whole, everything is the I. Now, whether this is exactly right or not, in the sense that does anyone achieve this all-knowing, all-seeing, unobserving observer? A kind of intelligence and beingness that's described in something like the Lotus Sutra is not so important from the point of view of Zen. What is important is that we have a tendency in that direction, whether it's fully realizable or not.

[32:16]

So what I'm trying to get you to see again in this fairly simple conversation about counting Wo ich euch jetzt hinführen möchte in dieser sehr einfachen Unterweisung über das Zählen. Is to let you see where you're counting, not just that you're counting. Ist eben, dass ihr jetzt seht, wo ihr zählt und nicht einfach nur das ihr zählt. It's a little bit like, I can say, hold your breath above water or hold your breath underwater. So ein bisschen wie jetzt euren Atem über dem Wasser anzuhalten oder unter dem Wasser. And it's two different experiences. As you know, holding your breath underwater is rather different than holding it above water. Now, if I tell you to count your breath above water and then count your breath underwater, hmm. It's very difficult to count your breath underwater. You will not get much past one.

[33:35]

And it may be the last. You're down for the count. Do you have the expression down for the count? Maybe. That's like a boxer who goes down for the 10 that's down for the count. You know when you get knocked out? Sorry, I can't resist my little jokes in English. Okay. So. Yeah. Did anybody else have a question I forgot? Yeah. You've asked several, so let me ask, see if somebody else has something. Yes, Mike?

[34:39]

You're in the timeless realm, I know. You spoke about the... And also observing the pauses in between. And you also mentioned there was a third kind of space. around this whole problem of freedom. And I had experience of doing that and feeling some sort of freedom. Is that what you mean by space? Yeah, even you can feel a kind of euphoria. You can feel a kind of euphoria. Okay, so let me, tonight, this afternoon, see if we can get to stopping, and then we'll stop.

[35:52]

Which means you have to hold your breath till tomorrow morning. Okay, so we've talked about counting and the context, the fluid of mind in which you count. And how counting is a kind of air ladder that lets you down into another kind of consciousness. And learning to count lets you move around inside this other kind of consciousness. And begins the process of educating or structuring in a different way than exterior consciousness is structured. for instance, to be able to notice the bumps.

[37:03]

Ulrike pointed out something interesting, that the bumps going from immediate to secondary to borrowed are bigger than going the other direction. As your practice develops, that's more true. Going from borrowed to immediate is like going downhill. You don't experience the bumps so much. So in the middle stage of practice, when they say a mountain is no longer a mountain, it's easier to stay in immediate consciousness than to go to borrowed consciousness. It can become an effort to return to borrowed consciousness.

[38:28]

But in the beginning, there's a lot of anxiety in moving into immediate or secondary consciousness. Although we do it all the time, but in a deep sense, there's some anxiety in doing it. To notice this kind of bump is an educated interior consciousness. It's not something exterior consciousness can notice much. Now, we could also call this interior consciousness something like medium consciousness. In a way, because it's a middle ground between awareness and conceptualized divided consciousness. And it's also a medium or access to awareness.

[39:38]

And awareness can't be educated. And awareness is also not an oceanic primordial consciousness, mother consciousness before the differentiation into patriarchal consciousness. That's what the fathers try to teach us. The differentiated patriarchal consciousness is somehow higher. than matriarchal, undifferentiated consciousness. Yes, she... Women's lib. Okay. So, from the point of view of yogic worldview... Undifferentiated consciousness is not an earlier stage, but an essential dimension of consciousness that's present in every stage.

[41:02]

It may also be, in some ways, in one's psychological development, an early stage. Or it may be more accessible in that earlier stage. But it's not a primitive form of consciousness, it's a primordial form of consciousness. And all Buddhist psychology is is based on realizing this underlying consciousness from which you enter every other consciousness. And the most fundamental underlying consciousness I call awareness. So here we have a picture of an egg. And this egg when you're first in your mother's womb and you start dividing in a sense there's a awareness egg which can be differentiated.

[42:12]

And it's divided into basically awareness which you can't change, interior consciousness or medium consciousness, and exterior consciousness. And each culture and each parents as agents of the culture try to educate a portion of this consciousness. Is that clear? We just revised Western psychology a little bit. But I hope it's clear. Okay, so when you, so now we've talked about counting your breath.

[43:38]

Now following, I would say, I would also like to add a fourth step, which is counting, a third step, which is touching. So following your breath is just to pay attention to your breath. And when it becomes more deeply, letting your breath pay attention to you. And in a sense, when There's you paying attention to your breath, which is this I-A. And when your breath starts paying attention to you, it's I-B. Now, the more you shift, I begin to wonder if she's giving her own lecture. I'm sure it's an improvement.

[44:52]

I'm sure it's an improvement, but still. So following your breath means more like riding your breath. And then letting your breath kind of lead you. So you follow it, you follow it where it goes. And sometimes you can kind of suggest that, you know, you can lead, just like they say about horses, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Yeah, that's an expression in German too. Okay, so you can lead your breath up to a point, but you can't really make your breath do much.

[45:55]

But there can be a kind of, again, a negotiation. So you can try to follow your breath throughout the process of breathing in the breathing apparatus. And then you can follow it more subtly as breath and vitality spread through your legs. and arms and fingertips and you can even follow your breath into your thoughts or fear as your thoughts need a lot of energy breath goes into them So following the breath or riding the breath or residing in the breath is a very, very fundamental practice.

[47:07]

And that's really in Buddhism where you want to be. You want to be residing in your breath. Du möchtest in deinem Atem verweilen. As that becomes more subtle, you're residing in your breath mind. Und wenn das subtiler wird, dann verweilst du in dem Atemmind. And then in your breath body. Und dann im Atemkörper. Now, stopping the breath, which is the third or fourth, that doesn't mean you stop it altogether or else you'd be dead.

[48:11]

Although some yogis seem to be able to, by report, stop your breath for even days and be buried and brought up again. They're not just stopping their breath, they're slowing down their entire body processes. Mm-hmm. But stopping the breath has a quality to it like counting your breath underwater. Your state of mind becomes so deep that it stops. And you almost can't count or think. And this is also could be described, as I said earlier, when you move into the space around your breath out of the pauses.

[49:21]

In other words, you can breathe so slowly in zazen that you're only breathing a few times a minute. Or even once or twice a minute. If you have any mental activity, though, you have to breathe more than once or twice a minute because it takes a lot of energy to think. So your breathing can slow way, way down. So what's happened is the pauses have become very big. And that pauses is a kind of stopped mind. Now, another way to understand it is these pauses aren't between breaths, but surround breath.

[50:26]

And in effect, what you've done then is you've shifted your sense of the observer from the breath to the pauses. And once you have stayed in the observer, in quotes, is in the pauses, it can move into the space around the breath and you can breathe without interfering with the sense of stopped. And at this point what you're doing is actually experiencing not the object of mind, but the field of mind itself. And so if someone is searching for mind, this is when you actually have a feeling of experiencing mind itself, not the object of mind.

[51:50]

And this is a very also purifying process. You will feel purified and refreshed by experiencing the mind free of objects of mind. Or you can say, which is an important shift in Buddhism, which somebody asked me about once, It's a certain kind of knowing consciousness, or consciousness only arises when there's an object of consciousness. But here we make mind itself the object of mind. So a kind of subtle observer consciousness arises by being in which the object of mind is mind itself or the field of mind.

[52:57]

Another example with Giulio's question, if you practice one, this is our views many times, you practice one-pointedness, First you're counting your breath, one, two, three. And then you begin to be able to just stay, three, three, three. You don't have to go to four or back to two. And there's many ways in which you can create this singular object of concentration. And when you can do that and stay with it and not stray from it, now an earlier stage is you reach that point occasionally and you fall away from it. The second stage is you stay there and fall away, but you can come back.

[54:08]

And you fall away and you can come back. That's the second stage. The third stage is you can stay with it and you fall away, but you're drawn back by itself. There's no effort to be drawn back to it. And then the most developed stage, you can just stay with it. Without any effort to stay with the object of one-pointedness or concentration. Now when you can do that, you can begin to draw the object of concentration away and you just stay concentrated in the field without the object. And that can also be called the stopped state of mind or when the breath is nearly stopped. Then you can start breathing again without disturbing the stopped state of mind.

[55:09]

And then you can bring an object of contemplation back into it. And from this stopped state of mind or objectless state of mind you can study an object. And this is the stage of contemplation. No, we'll go on from there tomorrow. To be continued. So I'd like us to sit for a few minutes before we end. Hmm.

[56:26]

Hmm. Basically, um... Oh, good morning. Basically... I don't know. I don't know. Oh, that's good.

[58:09]

Okay, basically, I yesterday went through the six, was it six, breathing practices. Six methods they talk about here, breathing in and out. And I should show you how I did that. And I should show you how I did it. Maybe I can do that by telling you a kind of story of practice through the breath.

[60:15]

First let me say I read something this morning glancing through one of Ivan Ilyich's books. Where he says, silence is the commons. Commons like a park. A park is called a commons. Or a city square. You don't have a similar word in German. The commons, a place common to everyone. I've been there. And what he means is that There used to be a commons where traffic wasn't allowed and just everybody walked around at the same pace.

[61:35]

And the physical commons has been removed by the automobile, is his point. There was also a sense of commons in that everyone spoke with the same level of voice. And he feels amplification has destroyed that. And now people who have access to amplification, radio, television, loudspeakers, their voice is heard and other people's voice is not heard.

[62:47]

So he feels the new commons is silence. And I had quite a heated, heated isn't the right word, but intense argument with him once or discussion. Because in the days when they installed the, I forget now, the nuclear weapons in Germany that could get to the Soviet Union in a very short time, That plus the great danger of nuclear accidents sort of galvanized the anti-nuclear scene in the United States.

[63:58]

And at that time, I made some tours around the United States to universities and conferences, speaking out particularly about the danger of nuclear accidents as well as this, you know. At that time, Illich felt the same way, but he felt that the best way to oppose what was happening was silence. And I accepted his point or understood his point philosophically, but I didn't agree that I should remain silent. Anyway, we had quite an intense discussion about it for two or three hours with a group of people involved. But I don't know quite how to make clear what I mean, but I feel that the Sangha is a kind of commons.

[66:08]

Ich weiß nicht, ob es mir gelingt, mich klar auszudrücken, was ich meine, aber ich glaube, die Sangha ist eine Art neue Öffentlichkeit. And the way we practice together, and one reason I, actually behind my reason for really disliking amplification, you know, of my voice through a microphone. Unter anderen Gründen ist wohl der Hauptgrund, warum ich wirklich nicht gerne möchte, dass meine Stimme verstärkt wird, mithilfe des Mikrofons. is I really want to speak in a situation where we can hear each other. And I feel developing this kind of practice, as this koan is pointing out, is a way of developing an interior commons or commons that I think would agree with Illich's idea of silence. So I actually feel there's a kind of social and political importance in developing

[67:11]

ways of being together and understanding each other which aren't based on borrowed consciousness. And even if we don't always get along among ourselves, still some kind of possibility is there among us and then introduced to our friends and so forth. So you start to practice zazen. And you begin to count your breaths. And we already know it takes some effort, usually, especially in the beginning, to stay with one's body.

[68:41]

And you also know that I feel, for us particularly, you shouldn't force it. But also you shouldn't indulge yourself. Too much. A little? Okay. So eventually, you spend a certain amount of time, the tonnage of each period of zazen, bringing your attention to your breath, counting or following your breath. And the practice of counting and following the breath are little different practices. And produce somewhat different results.

[69:45]

And also generate different states of mind. So you become familiar with the extensions of this practice just through doing it. I mean, you know, you count and you follow and And let your own intuition lead you. And at the point that you can really follow your breath, you can also count your breaths. They're very similar skills. But they're not just skills like learning to do a specific thing. They're skills that involve your whole body and mind. Now, these first three koans are teachings of emptiness.

[71:02]

In a sense, the first koan presents emptiness. The second koan shows the practice of emptiness. And this koan shows two accesses to emptiness. And shows an emptiness realized through breathing. And at the same time, shows an emptiness that you can pierce through directly by a phrase. Now, what is the sense of the emptiness in this koan? It's the sense of a place to rest, which is neither in body nor mind in the usual sense. Yeah, okay. So from this point of view, all right, I think I'd better stay with the six methods here.

[72:33]

So I went into enough detail on counting and following for sure yesterday. And I want you to, of course, remember that in your own practice, you just count, you just follow. And this bigger picture and presentation I made yesterday is just a kind of background that gives you permission. Permission to fulfill the possibilities of these practices. Mm-hmm. Okay, so the next is stopping.

[73:40]

And I spoke about that also. And the way I spoke about it yesterday, I really included stopping, returning, and purification as almost one event. Now, stopping doesn't just mean stopping or slowing down the breath. That would be a very mechanical sort of idea about it. It means moving into the space around the breath. Like getting the feeling of the pauses and then moving into the feeling of the pauses, even though you continue breathing. Does that make sense? Some people think it doesn't. Some people think it does, yes.

[74:41]

Is there space around the breath outside the pauses? The space around the breath includes the pauses and the in and out breath. Well, it's a little bit, for those of you who are laughing, because it's a little bit like the wave water phenomena. Are you paying attention to the waves or the water? And once you know really still water, can you go back to the waves and feel the still water in the waves? Do you understand? Because the water in the waves and the water in the still is the same water. So when you identify with the form of the water, you feel it is still and moving.

[76:03]

When you don't identify with the form of the water, the water is the same in both cases. I think I didn't quite understand. When you identify with the form, then stillness is not like the movement. Yeah. But when you identify with the water itself, it's the same whether it's moving or still. So in a way you could say, In that sense, silence and speaking are the same. Because in speaking, there's silence, and in silence, there's a potential of speaking. Now, this kind of practice depends on your understanding this shift.

[77:23]

If you don't get this shift, you won't get the koan or any of the second stages of Zen practice. This morning I had something similar coming up. the question of concentration and controlling. So when you say this, I feel what the concentration is and what the controlling is, in the sense that you mentioned. Because there was someone who is sitting, who is breathing, someone who is observing the breathing, and then all of a sudden I had this aspect of the concentration and controlling. Who is doing what? What is the difference? I kind of puzzled during my sitting. Is this what... Well, this is part of the negotiation over the territory you begin to find yourself in.

[78:48]

You want to say that in Deutsch? ...the aspect of control or the aspect of concentration. I was sitting next to the person who was breathing and I was observing her breathing. There were two bodies in front of me and then I asked myself, which one of them is the control, which one is the concentration? And it was basically not a question at all, but I just felt From your experience, Kural, the meditating of fraction of your breath, if you want to add something to the discussion, please do. Well, you can practice with this shift in various ways.

[79:58]

One way is to say that you're listening to someone speaking on the radio while you're driving. Telling the news or maybe someone singing. Shift from listening to the words to listening to the breath. Wechsle jetzt einfach vom Zuhören der Stimme auf das Zuhören des Atems. Yeah. And here's the breath length. Even the guy telling the news, he'll speak in breath lengths and you can feel him breathing. Now, actually, I'm just telling you this as an exercise. I'm not telling you it because it's a particularly valuable thing to do.

[81:00]

But there are some usefulnesses to it. For instance, if you listen to the person's breath instead of the words or as well as the words, You can tell much more immediately whether he or she is telling the truth or not. You can feel their anxieties and state of mind on their breath more immediately than their words. And the breath is much more immediately connected with the person's state of mind than the words.

[82:13]

And if you feel the person's state of mind, you can begin to feel what they're saying what they're saying around their words, which they're not putting into words. Sort of know what they're going to say next. And you actually can read the same way. so that you begin to feel the mind of the reader, of the author, not just the words he or she is writing down. Now, as I spoke to someone yesterday about it, this is exactly what poetry is meant to do, And that's why it's in breath lengths, to bring you into the mind of the poet, not the words of the poet.

[83:26]

But this poetry is present in all language and speaking. But that's a little aside. I'm really just speaking about practicing with the shift. Because if you get so you can feel that shift from hearing the breaths and then back to hearing the words and back to hearing the breath and then hearing both together and so forth. If you practice that shift, you begin to understand in many contexts this shift. And it's basically an object-field shift. I was just thinking about that, about trying to find some kind of metaphor or similar experience.

[84:58]

And often when I'm sunbathing, for example, if you're at the seaside and you're lying on the sand and you hear the surf, you hear the waves coming and going. And then all of a sudden, there's a foreground-background shift, where you're not so much in the sound of the waves coming and going, but then just in the sound of the sea behind the waves coming and going. And then you're just somehow in the present. And also, I thought of something which has always intrigued me is the fact that if you look at some puzzles, you have a foreground-background shift as well. You look at a picture. and then all of a sudden the background becomes the foreground, and the foreground becomes the background, and you shift backwards and forwards between the two, and that has a similar feeling sometimes. Ulrike, do you want to come? It's similar to me when I'm on the beach, in the sun, that I can suddenly make this change or that this change just happens.

[86:06]

Once when I hear the waves or the, how is it called today, the tides. And that I can suddenly hear the background outside these individual sounds of the waves. And similarly it works with a puzzle. There I can once see the individual parts of the puzzle in the foreground. Or when I focus on the background, the overall picture. And I was just thinking about it. So what metaphors could be used for this change and in this sense Yeah, you can find your own ways to practice this shift. And there are many, many instances of it. And they all are, or often they're different, but the shift is similar. Die sind oft sehr verschieden, aber dieser Wechsel ist ähnlich.

[87:21]

The ability to shift your level of attention or how your attention is organized. Also die Fähigkeit, wie ihr eure Aufmerksamkeit verlagert oder wie diese Aufmerksamkeit organisiert ist. So you could shift from the words to the tone of the voice. Und so könnt ihr jetzt wechseln von den Worten auf die Stimmlage. The stream of the voice that pops into words. Where you could shift to the breath from the words. Where you can shift from the breath to the air. Or the breath to your own breath. And it's just a kind of skill. You can move around in that territory and you feel and find out different things when you move in that territory. But here what this is suggesting is that you're moving from breath as an object to the field of breath.

[88:23]

And when I talk about the breath body or the breath mind, I'm talking about the field of the body and the field of the mind. So returning here means to return. return from the object to the mind itself. And it's again the basic pattern of creating a field of concentration by concentrating on something. And then maintaining the field even though the object is taken away. So you've returned the mind from the object to the mind itself.

[89:42]

That's what returning means. You've sent the mind out to an object, then you return the mind to itself. You can say your mind went to visit somebody and came back home. So that's where the host-guest idea as a technical term is.

[90:04]

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