So how was your discussion? I expected you to meet on the first day in one group and find out how difficult it is to discuss in a large group and then switch to small groups, but here we are. Don't go so fast. Sorry. Yeah. So, Andreas? Okay. So, we don't need, you know, full reports on the discussion, but I'd like some idea or some feeling of what happened. So, we can start with you. You must have a good discussion. You're all wound up. So we first try to define the terms how we

[01:10]

think what mind and consciousness is. Just in our ordinary way of thinking, yeah. So the terms in Germany are mixed up. So if I, for example, say consciousness, I also mean mind. Yeah. So we used the five skandhas as a reference point. It was very helpful and very lively in terms of talking about parts.

[02:25]

Parts that mind is. And then, what came to my mind, was the question, is there a spirit outside of us? Is there something that is outside of us? And one question that comes to mind is, is there a mind that is outside ourself? And Suzuki Roshi said in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, the big mind is a mind that doesn't exclude anything. Yeah. And it was very helpful, the sentence, to take refuge into the breath, into one's own breath, instead of just being attentive towards the breath. And it seems to be more easy and it seems to have created a different mind.

[03:47]

For the whole group or just for you? The group always thought the same feeling. Good teacher. Yeah. I wonder how much the words for mind, ghost, spirit, etc., in German, influence or make it difficult for us to kind of get at first the very different way Buddhism thinks about mind. I wonder how much these different definitions of mind, in the sense of In English. which isn't as tightly constructed language as German.

[04:58]

The word can sort of fly off in various directions, not being tied to the grammar so much. And although most people use consciousness, awareness, mind, kind of interchangeably. It's quite easy to also see them as different. Yeah. Someone else? Our group first took care of the definitions. And they probably mean different things even in the translation from English to German.

[06:02]

Consciousness means Knowing together. Yeah, knowing together. Yeah. Probably something knowing about. And the consciousness knowing about. In German. We also refer to the five skandhas. I'm here, the other person is there, and it has to do with time and it has to do with space in terms of... The German words. No, the Vijnana is coming up.

[07:15]

Space causality is structuring it, means of cutting the reality into separations. That's how you understand Vijnana. Then we talked about the difference between mind and consciousness. And Gerald defined it as consciousness is adding something and mind is taking something away. You did. Okay. Quite a good point. Yeah. We had a discussion that if you

[08:19]

study mind, you more and more realize that you are connected and is connected to what? Connected to the world or with the world. So there is no difference between inside and outside or what you see. And so does that lead to do more positive or not harming things? That was one question to be discussed. We hope so. We hope it does. And the other part was part of the Japanese history. The Zen of killing in the tradition of the Samurais. bad. I think Herr Dr. Konze, you know who that is?

[09:45]

Edward Konze. Edward Herr Dr. Konze. Who is the famous German scholar who basically invented for modern scholarship Buddhist Sanskrit. Und er ist der berühmte Wissenschaftler. Er ist eigentlich derjenige, der das moderne I think he used to say. It might have been me, but I think he used to say. Zen and the art of machine gunning. What do you call a machine gun? A machine gun. Yes. And we also had the question whether the spirit is something that only exists in our brain, or whether it is something that is greater than the individual existence.

[11:00]

Once I had the question, is mind something that only exists in our brain, or is it bigger than the individual existence? In our brain? In our brain. Or is it bigger than our individual existence? You mean at present time or past to future? At the present time. At the present time. Also im Augenblick. Gegenwart. It's getting more difficult. Okay. Someone else? Frank? I'm teasing Frank. So we tried in our group to characterize mind and consciousness in terms of their relationship to each other.

[12:04]

One result was that mind is the more inclusive and consciousness is a part of mind. Consciousness was characterized as being active. controlled or steered towards, in a direction. Individual, more observing, No, dual. Dual. Dual. More dual. Dual, yes. Often thinking and conceptual.

[13:25]

And often thinking and conceptual. And in contrast to this, our discussion came very quickly to the part of the mind that is not conscious. Then we very quickly came into the discussion to that kind of mind that you can't grab consciously. So that was felt like something in between us in the group. You could feel in the group. something you'd call mind, or the group just agreed that there could be such a thing. Yes, the second one.

[14:32]

Someone brought up the example, there is a saying in German, or a kind of expression, you say, the mind between us or in the midst of us, and that means something like a blue feeling, and that he used to characterize what the mind may be outside of consciousness. And some person said that she felt the mind as something constantly changing. And to manifest itself quite suddenly. Mind was characterized more like an attitude or like a posture in contrast to the active being conscious.

[15:33]

Okay? It's more receptive and open. Yeah, OK. And the attitude or posture that leads to such kind of mind was characterized as stopping, to get in contact, to just be there and letting go, and the feeling of merging.

[16:40]

Okay. And when you say posture, do you mean physical posture or mental posture? But the difference between physical and mental is not so important. I think physical posture is a sort of expression of the mental posture. Which comes first? Which comes first? For a short moment, the mental question. For a short moment, okay. Okay. Someone else? Yeah. Yeah, we haven't We had difficulties.

[17:46]

Certain difficulties. But I could hear you from upstairs and you sounded quite lively out there. Sounded like you were having a good time with me. Okay, so go ahead. My feeling was that it's very difficult to talk about mind and consciousness if I don't add my actual experience If I don't look at why am I here, why am I practicing? And then two things came up.

[18:50]

One was continuity and the other was direction. For me, I defined consciousness. The movement, direction, to separate, to make things into parts. Is that in the etymology of the word? I had more the picture of a cake. This is an important image for the head cook. So mind is the whole cake, not cut.

[20:07]

And consciousness are the pieces of the cake with the Emphasis on cutting and... So if you want to eat, you better be conscious. Okay. One thing, you just jumped up, and two, into the group. And something came up by two participants of the group. And since that is not my experience, I don't know if I can talk about it. So one experience was mind in terms of losing ground, spreading out, widening.

[21:27]

And with the feeling of fear. I don't know if I described it right. That must be all the groups, isn't it? Does anybody want to add something to this? Or have some, anything? I'm happy about a remark about the anxiety that others have that same or similar feeling. We always had this feeling, it's so great and beautiful. And I forgot about the anxiety and fear, but that's there too. What is great and beautiful?

[22:40]

These examples. Oh. So the feeling of the mind always has the tendency to be good, but it also has this fear and anxiety. The fear and anxiety comes up when? When you notice your mind? That's the question. Is it my mind? If I feel or realize that there's more. Yeah, more than just your conscious, what your conscious offers him. In English we say, if you go crazy, you lose your mind. And... I suppose if we notice our mind, we might think we might lose it too.

[23:54]

At least my experience with people practicing for a long time now, is when you really start noticing mind, But not just in a general sense. But how mind is inseparable from you. And it feels... fragile sometimes. Anxiety can start spread through it and it's quite scary. Anxiety can start like pouring dye into a liquid and it just fills the liquid and you can Where do you go if your whole mind is anxious?

[24:57]

And people will have the feeling of So I said this morning, a nervous breakdown or something like that. That's how we put it in English. They can't keep the unity of their mind anymore. And... They feel like they're going to lose any center or something like that. I think most people have the experience to some extent, sometimes, but usually it doesn't make them... lose their job or can't function or something.

[25:59]

But it is a question. If your mind is various parts and one part is put under pressure, everything can start to fall apart. And then could we imagine a basic mind which can't fall apart? Can we imagine coming to a place where it feels, may not be impossible to go crazy, but it feels to ourselves impossible to go crazy? Even in English, if we say, to go crazy, where are you going to go to?

[27:01]

Because wherever you go, there's mind. You can't escape from mind. Even if you're out of your mind, you're not out of your mind. Now, I don't know how much, you know, these things, these kind of phrases in English... Tell us something about how we think about mind. But I don't know what the same phrases are in German. Of course I do. And it might make a difference. I had a funny experience the other day in a German restaurant. In Forest Hat, which is near here. Isn't that Raskolnikov, Forest Hat? Yeah, I knew I was involved in it.

[28:33]

And we were in this... Quite a good restaurant. It has a good example of German food, if you want to show a tourist German food. And... And... So Sophia was kind of acting up. And we had to leave soon. But Sophia was getting one scoop of ice cream. You know, Charlie's at least curious. What's that? Oh, yeah. Let's wait until Charlie's done. I had a martyr in my room upstairs one day.

[29:35]

Good work, Akash. Do we have him for dinner? Bee sting soup. Anyway, this martyr came in. I heard this thing crashing around my... got up and here was this martyr, you know. I don't know how dangerous martyrs are, but weasels are fairly dangerous in the States. They can really bite you. And I tried to scare him a little bit, see if he could go back out the window, but he couldn't jump high enough to get out. He could jump low enough to get in, but he couldn't jump high enough to get out. So I got him to stay in a corner while I got out of the room, went down and got Charlie. I brought Charlie up. Our feisty cat who broke the Buddha. I brought him in the room, retreated to my little perch,

[30:58]

And Charlie looked around and fell asleep. I guess they'd worked out a relationship a long time ago. But finally I got the martyr out, you know. Anyway, so I'm in the restaurant. And I said to the waiter, you know, we have to leave. And so let's, you know, if the ice cream can't come right away, we're going to have to skip it. He said, it'll be five minutes. I said, five minutes? Five minutes? It better come now or we're leaving.

[32:01]

And Marie-Louise got me to the table and says, five minutes in German means now. In America, five minutes means 20. Because in America, they want to make you feel good when they tell you. In Germany, they want to make you feel good when the ice cream comes early. So it's considered at a different point. Yeah, yeah. I like it better. When five minutes means one minute, this is good. Or means it's soon, you know.

[33:01]

But just a minute means five minutes in English. But these little differences in how you locate mind, how you locate a relationship, are actually quite big differences. How do you locate mind? how you look at these relationships, which are aspects of mind. I'll give you another little example. When I first came to Germany, I liked it, I mean, I find Germany very exotic because I can't understand anything.

[34:16]

If I go into an apotheke, I don't know what I'd come back out with the wrong medicine. It's so that nothing else can happen. I'd be told to go buy a can of coffee and I'd come back with decaffeinated. I don't know. But I'd rather like this. It's interesting. But I was often treated rather badly. I couldn't quite figure it out. I'd come back and I'd say, well, I went to buy rolls, but everyone was so mean to me. I don't know. I don't want to go buy rolls. So, one day I figured it out. Because I lived for many years in Japan. In Japan, the ideal human being is a baby. So if you go out... He loves your flower arrangements.

[35:36]

Sometimes they look so delicious, I could, you know... Um... So I was going out in these bagels and acting helpless, like a baby. And I finally one day realized in Germany the ideal human being is an adult. If you act helpless, they don't know what to do with you. And when you look like a big person, So one day I went out and I just, okay, I walked right up the counter and I said, I want in English this and this and three of that.

[36:49]

And I got everything and everybody was happy and they kind of dealt somehow with this weird person and accomplished something. They felt great. So anyway, it worked much better to just act confidently, and then people felt they have treated me very well. Yeah, and most people in Germany don't speak English, contrary to rumor. Im Gegensatz zu den Gerüchten sprechen die meisten Deutschen kein Englisch.

[37:53]

If they're young, they may remember a little bit from school. Wenn sie jung sind, kann es sein, dass sie ein wenig aus der Schule erinnern. But people like using their little English they remember if you give them a chance. Aber wenn ich diesen Leuten eine Chance gebe, dann machen sie es sehr gerne, dieses Wenige zu erinnern. And if I occasionally say zwei instead of two, they sort of think, oh, well, this isn't hopeless. Anyway. So this is a real difference between Germany and Japan. And... So I would, you know, it'd be nice, I don't know, Dieter, you'd have time if you could take the words, the main words you use for consciousness and so forth in German, and write them out for me and a little bit of their etymology.

[38:56]

If you have an etymological dictionary. I think I have one. It's probably upstairs. Okay. Because, you know, consciousness, as you've mentioned, in the middle of the English word consciousness, S-C-I, is the same as scissors. So consciousness really in English very clearly means to cut into parts. People don't use it so precisely. They say mind, awareness, consciousness. They don't make no distinctions. Natürlich benutzen die Leute es nicht so präzise und sie machen keinen Unterschied zwischen Bewusstsein und Geist.

[40:00]

Aber wenn ihr euch selbst gut kennenlernen wollt durch die Meditation, ist wahrzunehmen, wie euer Geist und euer Körper funktionieren. And you first have to look in the categories or target areas that the words suggest. But you can't limit yourself to the areas You can't limit your noticing to what the words point at. Mind is bigger than the word mind.

[41:01]

Consciousness is not limited to just what you notice. think of when you say the word consciousness. And we can feel that just the way German and English don't quite translate back and forth to each other in terms of these words. Now awareness means to watch or be wakeful. And to guard. But that's not... So I define awareness... in contrast to consciousness.

[42:02]

But the etymology of awareness doesn't help me much. So I've arbitrarily chosen awareness to mean things that consciousness isn't. So I use awareness to mean... to mean as a technical term, that reflects our experience, particularly if you decide to meditate, and to just give it a definition.

[43:03]

But, you know, In the literature about mind in the United States, England, many people are separating consciousness and awareness, but some use it the reverse way that I do. That just shows how little we are actually culturally aware of mind. We can't even agree on such a simple distinction. Yeah, okay. When you go to sleep, you go over a bump. And if you can stay Stay a little bit consciousness.

[44:24]

A little bit consciousness. A little bit conscious when you fall asleep. You can feel yourself go over a mop. It's a kind of mop, but a kind of mop. Your breath suddenly changes. And your butt, something I can tell when Marie-Louise goes to sleep, or Sophia goes to sleep. And I can also stay Now, here was a problem. How do I stay awake or conscious while I go to sleep? But I do do it. So, what do you call that? Do you call it consciousness?

[45:27]

So you're no longer conscious, but you're aware while you're falling asleep. So I say to Marie-Louise, Oh dear, I've fallen asleep. Oh dear, it's not oh dear, it's oh dear, my goodness. I'd better turn over on my side because I'll start snoring. And Marie-Louise is a good idea. Okay, but I must sleep when I'm saying this. So what's going on? Is this consciousness? And holding that knowing, I can speak from that knowing And I don't call it consciousness. Do we have words for such things? We don't, actually.

[46:28]

And you go over a kind of bump when you... go into zazen too. When you stop thinking, stop looking around, inside or outside, suddenly there's another kind of body feeling or clearness. Now, there's some kind of awareness, but is it consciousness? What do you call it? If you're going to practice meditation, you have to have some sense of these differences.

[47:31]

I mean, you don't... Why do you have to have some sense of these differences? Why don't we just... practice and experience the differences. Why do we need to have a discussion like this? Well, we don't, actually. If you're happy with your meditation and you just don't want to think about all this stuff, yeah, please go and do it. But I'm about 95% sure. Maybe 100. Nothing's 100, so let's say 95. that your habits of thinking will control your meditation whether you like it or not.

[48:42]

The habits of thinking you have from language primarily If you don't become conscious of it, They will control your meditation. And your meditation won't go very far through practice alone. You'll have maybe well-being meditation, but not non-being meditation. Or I could put it more negatively, feel-good meditation versus going beyond feeling, likes and dislikes. Okay. So part of freeing yourself from cultural habits and ways of thinking

[50:02]

Und Teil dessen, sich von den kulturellen Gewohnheiten und dem kulturellen Denken zu befreien, ist wahrzunehmen, wie eure Gewohnheiten zu denken sind. Ihr müsst eine Art und Weise entwickeln, das wahrzunehmen. I haven't read Alice in Wonderland in a long time. Written by this mathematician. I don't know. Is it read in Germany commonly? Yeah.

[51:03]

If I remember correctly from a long time ago, reading it to my children, older children. Alice does things which she doesn't know what's going to, she'll do something that looks innocuous and then it opens up a whole world. Yeah. And things like that happen in meditation. I remember for many years, actually, when I sat, sometimes I would feel rather good. Yeah, I thought, yeah. It's like usual feeling good. Our cooks are leaving. Thank you very much for taking care of our stomachs in the future.

[52:09]

And One day, I don't know, one day, it began to occur to me occasionally. I don't know if... I really don't know how to explain something like this, but I'm trying. One day I thought, maybe this... Feeling good I have sometimes when I sit. It's not just the frosting on the cake.

[53:13]

Perhaps it's the cake. Perhaps the frosting is what it is. It's not... just something added to a situation. When that occurred to me, I began to notice it not as just something added, but as something in itself. And I, from that point on, after it took me several times of maybe some months of that possibility occurring to me, before I found that this feeling good opened up to a whole huge world of feeling blissful.

[54:20]

Do you ever have the feeling of bliss? You're somewhere at night and working or something and you hear a whistle, a boat whistle or something like that, a train whistle. And there might be some good feeling accompanying it, is that it? Does it ring a dull train bell in anybody's mind? Yeah, I suppose in a poem you might da-da-da-da, and a distant train whistle or something, and people would say, oh.

[55:24]

Yeah, when I was a kid, there was a train. They were off in Trains, not diesels, trains with real whistles and steam and things like that. Sorry to mention it. Movies were black and white. Somebody once got very mad at me and said I couldn't be a good Zen teacher because I had a color television set. I found this out because Allen Ginsberg, they told Allen Ginsberg, the poet, and Allen Ginsberg told me, this guy told me, you're not a good scientist because you have a colored telephone set.

[56:30]

But when we came back from Japan, colored telephone sets were just coming in and I don't know, we had to buy a new television set, because we'd been living in Japan for years, so we bought a color television set, and it was quite unusual in those days. And when we came back from Japan, and we lived there for quite a long time, we wanted to buy a television, and they were just on the market, and we just bought one, and it was very unusual. Now I don't think you could buy a black and white telephone set, could you? It probably cost a fortune as an antique. Anyway, there were a lot of train whistles. When I lived in San Francisco, there was a lot of tugboat whistles and stuff. And I used to sometimes stop and wonder.

[57:30]

Why do I have this feeling when I hear the train whistle or the boat whistle? And I just used to, for a long time, just brush it off. It's a good feeling. It's unimportant. I've got things to do, not worry about train whistles. But then occasionally I would say to myself, you know, I could die. I would be happy to die hearing such a sound. And then I'd think, maybe this is more important than I think the feeling you have when this sound occurs. But I had no access, even when I realized it might be more important, I had no access to its experience.

[58:58]

Until I started practicing meditation. Until I started recognizing a similarity between that feeling and the feeling good in meditation sometimes. Now I realize the whole world of Buddhism is in that sound. What I'm calling basic mind or imperturbable mind, or the joy of imperturbable mind, or when the Buddha held up a flower, He supposedly said, I have the eye of the treasury of the true teaching.

[60:18]

I have the eye of the treasury of the true teaching. The eye. The ineffable, formless mind of nirvana. The ineffable means you can't grasp it, the non-graspable. The ineffable, formless mind of nirvana. And in Zen, like nirvana can mean death, nirvana also means the mind that doesn't change. And the subtle teaching outside the scriptures, the subtle teaching that doesn't depend on words and letters, This is also attributed to Bodhidharma, or a version of it attributed to Bodhidharma, as I said this weekend.

[61:41]

But it was something made up by Zen school long after Bodhidharma and long after the Buddha. But it's what the Zen school wanted the Buddha to say. What we're talking about here in this focus of the Zen school is the ineffable formless mind. Now, how I would understand this now is that when I heard this train whistle, Or the horns of the boats in the San Francisco harbor all around San Francisco.

[62:57]

The sound somehow, in Sound the Suram Gama Sutra says, sound is the main sense to open you to True mind. To true mind. Isn't it wonderful that these guys knew these things? Now I understand that the sound at night, when already your consciousness is different, Night-time consciousness is different than daytime consciousness. We can feel it. Sometimes late at night when I was a kid, I'd listen to the radio. In the morning, what seemed loud at night was so low I couldn't hear it in the morning, but at night it was pretty loud.

[64:11]

The same place the dial is set. I could barely hear it, or not hear it at all in the morning, but at night it was loud enough I was worried it was going to wake up my people. So night-time consciousness is more vulnerable than daytime consciousness. And somehow these sounds, unpredictable sounds, if I knew they were coming, you know why you can't tickle yourself, Because it's predictable.

[65:31]

You can only be tickled when it's not predictable. So the unpredictability of the sounds poked a hole in my consciousness. And the ineffable, formless mind of nirvana poked through the hole. What I'm calling basic mind or... imperturbable mind, potentially. It's everywhere. The thought covering, you say thought covers in Buddhism, It's covered by thought.

[66:37]

It's not covered by the thought in the sense that you're always thinking. It's covered by thought in the sense that thought has woven the mind which thinks. And even when you're not thinking, the same fabric of mind is there. Well, it's not about thinking. It's about that the mind has been manufactured by thinking. Well, something that's not thinking like this sound pokes a hole in it. And you hear, feel the mind that's your more fundamental nature.

[67:46]

And it was an act of wisdom on my part to notice, to feel, I could die on this. sound. Because it was the ineffable mind of nirvana. It's in fact the mind, I will likely die. I might even start looking forward to it. But I'm going to gladly remain alive. But in my thought, woven mind.

[69:03]

I thought, oh, what's that little feeling of pleasure? Well, I've got more important things to do. I've got to finish this thing I'm writing for the office tomorrow or the school tomorrow. And I didn't realize my consciousness was brushing off my fundamental nature. My consciousness was saying, to brush off is to say it's not important. And it took the noticing over years of developing meditation practice. Before I could even tell you this, I wouldn't have even had a way to tell you.

[70:09]

A way to have experienced it clearly enough that I can now talk about it. The birds are participating for us. Birds are also the non-industrial equivalent of horns and... Train whistles. The people around here were so poor in the Black Forest.

[71:20]

Within the old days, six, seven, eight months of winter, They could barely support themselves. I just found all this out recently. And metal clocks, which had been recently invented, were extremely expensive. And the folks around here figured out how to make wooden clocks. So even poor farmers could own a wooden clock. And black forest clocks, you all know this, went all over the world. And what was their great...

[72:24]

commercial selling device. I mean, in Buddhism it's form and emptiness. Somebody created this phrase, form is emptiness, emptiness is form, and people know it all over the world, even if they don't know much about Buddhism. Well, the people around here, they like the sound of the cuckoo. So they made many kinds of clocks, but it's the cuckoo clock that became famous. I just happened to have recently bought a cuckoo clock, so I know all this stuff.

[73:36]

Sophia required us to carry her to the window so often when she heard the cuckoo. Because there's a cuckoo who lives around here somewhere. And I guess the cuckoo is a very nondescript, ordinary-looking bird. I'd carry her to the window three times during breakfast. So finally I said, let's buy her a cuckoo clock. She can hear it every hour. And when I talked to this guy, he's got a distributor in Japan, a distributor in Moscow, and a distributor in Cincinnati, Ohio, and so forth. Where? Where are we?

[74:49]

Where? Moscow. Moscow, yeah. And they liked it. Each country likes different things painted on the trunks. And in every country there are different preferences of what is painted on it. Cuckoo. calls of birds. Yeah, they made a clock industry around here. But these birds also can reveal to us not the time, but perhaps our true nature. Now I'm being a little silly here. But I want to put all of this in the context of our ordinary experience. Because it's our ordinary experience often that meditation practice It's our ordinary experience.

[76:00]

It's often our ordinary experience which meditation experience reveals as our extraordinary experience. I think we're supposed to stop, so let's sit for a moment. There are many aspects of mind.

[77:49]

Many aspects of being, being itself. That words don't reach into. Words don't even point at. But at least let's first understand what words do point at. Let's increase our ability to notice mind and body. And the mind that arises from thinking. And the mind that arises from body. And the mind that arises from each sense.

[79:10]

And the mind that arises from mind itself. This is the practice of meditation. Thank you for your discussion and sharing it with me.

[80:20]

And for helping each other in your practice. I'm sorry to keep you waiting.

[82:13]

I got kind of involved in those stones. Believe it or not, all those stones are from China. Glaubt es oder auch nicht, diese ganzen Steine sind aus China. Es sagt uns etwas, denke ich. Es gibt eine Menge Steinbrüche in dieser Gegend und dieser Mensch hat seinen Steinladen da. And you think, so it's from one of the quarries. No, everything's from China. Yeah, so Chinese rocks, you know, we have Chinese rocks here at the Zen Center. But somehow they're cheaper than quarrying them here. They have to go all the way across the Pacific, across the Atlantic.

[83:22]

Very easy. I don't know. They didn't come airmail. I know that. Yeah. So please share with me. You've made such a big circle here. I like it when you're nearer. So, the one brave one's going to come. This is okay, this guy. So please share with me what you spoke about. To some extent, at least.

[84:28]

Oh, Andres, it doesn't have to be you this time first. Let's see if somebody else is capable of being first. Okay, good. I need notes, she said. Well, me too. We have received We looked at what we wrote down in terms of the questions that were given to us. Some people had made notes. Then we went back to our personal experiences. Good. With the question, how do we come into our, what do you say, into our center? In center of gravity?

[85:56]

The plumb line? The plumb line, yeah. Okay. And I would like to share what everybody in the group experienced. Okay, please. Oh, yeah, that's good. Yeah, great. It started from the experience that you... It started with that one can find calmness in movement. Yeah. In Aikido or slow walking. Yeah. And as a kind of opposite pole, when you sit, the pain can become so strong that you kind of leave your body.

[87:04]

And then it's very difficult to come back. And the question came up, can you come back to this plumb line or center through movement? So can you come back into your body through moving or movement? I mean if pain has driven you out. Yoga. So the second participant had that experience that you can come into your body through sitting and through yoga into your plumb line.

[88:14]

Someone else talked about the anxiety and the fear while losing someone, the parent. But when the person then finally died, there was sadness, but basically it was a very quiet and very clear feeling, because the worst case had happened through dying. Someone else said that he tries to concentrate on everything that is around him.

[89:26]

To get away from his thoughts, for example, looking at the table in front of him. Then someone else described that now I can't lose it anymore. I can't become crazy. I can make everything into my practice. To take things as they are and in an active sense to no longer resist. Then that brought up our second part of the discussion, to wake up from deep sleep into a situation where you don't know where you are and who you are.

[90:59]

And while you wake up, first of all the fear and anxiety comes up. And then the consciousness about the location and the identity. And that brought us back to the question, if the anxiety would not be there, is that this undisturbable mind we were talking about? Perhaps. You can't promise, but perhaps. I think so. You know, Herr Dr. Konse, who I mentioned yesterday, his first book called, in English, something of Buddhist wisdom, I can't remember, published in the

[92:15]

fifties or sixties. He has what I'm sure is his central experience of meditation or some kind of realization. And it was just this. He woke up at night, and he describes it in the book, in the introduction. You wake up at night and find yourself sort of caught against the background of nothingness. What is it to be here? Without any idea of where you are or who you are. And it has the kind of, his describing it, has the kind of veracity or the sense of turning experience for him, true experience for him.

[93:45]

What's veracity? Truth. Yeah.

[93:48]

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