Please sit comfortably. Of course, it's very nice for me to see all of you. Thank you for coming. I feel like I've I just left Crestone in the practice period a few minutes ago. And the 90-day practice period. And I feel I entered a tunnel. It went through a blizzard in the Rockies and I was driving through the snow like this.

[01:02]

Then they put me in a silver tunnel which took off across the Atlantic. And then they dumped me into the new terminal. You know, Ulrike dragged me here. Here he slipped. Is it one of your new German words? I just heard it. So I'd like to try to keep some continuity with, at least for some of you, where I left off last year.

[02:03]

And some of the things we talked about in the practice period. Because, at least for me anyway, it's sort of one continuous developing skein or fabric of teaching that I am doing around the year with you. And I have to back up and go forward and so forth. And I guess everyone knows we're going to be in a different room tomorrow. It seems like a nice thing for the village to do, to have the 80th birthday party of this woman here.

[03:21]

It'll be nice to try this room down in the bar, since Laura has always been so nice to us. The first thing I did after getting off the airplane is come here with Gertz and Monika. We didn't know where to have the meeting since we couldn't use this room. So Laura showed us this room in the place and it seemed quite big enough, I think. As soon as we'd come to an agreement, she insisted I have a schnapps. And I hadn't had any breakfast yet.

[04:35]

So she pours me a brimming, you know, full and herself a little bit. And Gert's some. And I sort of... God said, you close your eyes and just pray, don't you? So anyway, it was sealed, and now we'll use this room tomorrow. Now, I asked Ulrike to suggest what we talk about in the seminar. And she picked dropping body and mind. And this is one of the most controversial phrases in Zen Buddhism.

[05:35]

So I will, yeah, but anyway, I'll try to give you some feeling of what I understand it to mean. Controversial phrases, at least for academics, in Dogen's teaching are dropping body and mind and thinking non-thinking. And from the language of both Jujing, Dogen's teacher, and Dogen himself, it's difficult to actually know what these phrases mean. And I don't think you can know unless you're fairly deeply embedded in the practice of meditation.

[06:58]

So I want to give you some, I think I have to give you some background, foreground, background to to have this phrase make any sense as Dogen meant it. Now, even if you don't know what Dogen meant, such phrases have a certain power. And I think Ulrike told me that she picked this because at the time she was kind of working with various things in her life and this phrase seemed to be a help to her.

[08:22]

And I think Ulrike chose this sentence because at this point in her life she worked on various topics and processes and somehow this sentence stuck with her. And that's certainly characteristic of the practice of Zen, to bring your consciousness into a certain flavor or attitude through a phrase. Now, I have to think about what to practically, in talking about practice in general, and of course a phrase like this, what is useful to you. Now, Practice is not intrinsically difficult.

[09:45]

What's difficult, it's practically, in a practical sense, it's difficult. But I think it helps if you have a clear understanding of practice. I think that, I know that helps a lot to bring yourself with conviction into practice. There's a saying that zazen is important, but the view of zazen is more important. What mind and attitude you bring to your sitting is actually more important than the sitting itself.

[10:54]

Well, they go together. Well, the attitude, the mind, the spirit that one brings to sitting is really just as important as sitting itself. The two belong together. Now as part of this practice of bringing your attention to a phrase like dropping or sloughing off, sometimes translated as sloughing off body and mind like a snake sloughs off the skin. I'd like you to bring a question to this weekend from your own life. Und so möchte ich euch bitten, eine Frage zu diesem Wochenende mitzubringen, die aus eurem Leben kommt.

[12:05]

Now there's questions in the phrase itself, what could be dropping off body and mind? Es gibt Fragen in dem Satz selbst, Körper und Geist loslassen. Is it just an experience? Ist es nur eine Erfahrung? Or where do you drop it? And you pick it back up again. And is it just, again, something that happens in meditation? And if you really take the phrase seriously and you imagine dropping in body and mind, then what do you experience? And if you really take the phrase seriously and you imagine dropping in body and mind, then what do you experience? So, let's go back to a question. I think if you could come up with some basic question that's an existential question that you're wondering about your present situation, your life, etc.

[13:06]

And sometimes it's good to have the dynamic of a second question because of the relationship between two questions. Something more particular. Usually, at least my experience is, the question is not something you think of right away, but rather you feel yourself toward. And feeling yourself toward it and locating it kind of sticks in you, sticks with you. Bringing some kind of big existential question and some practical question together is also a kind of inner posture.

[14:26]

You have the outer posture of sitting. It's a kind of inner posture to bring your mind to something that you can keep present with you during this weekend and for longer, I hope. No, Rika's coming here after four months said, maybe I've forgotten how to translate. Are you doing all right? Should I make longer or shorter sentences? Shorter is always better. But you're doing all right. Thank you. You're doing all right, too, it seems like. Sounds good. Well, I said this because when you haven't worked with a translator for so long, you're used to just talk away.

[15:43]

So I asked him to try and do shorter units. It's actually easier just to transition this direction because it's not so difficult to make shorter sentences, I think. Ja, der Übergang ist eigentlich leichter, also wenn ich hierher komme, weil es nicht so schwierig ist, kürzere Sätze zu machen. But after being here for a while and going back to the States. Aber wenn ich hier eine Zeit lang bin und dann in die Staaten zurückkehre. Even in ordinary conversation I keep pausing and waiting for a translation. Ja, selbst in ganz normalen Unterhaltungen, also mache ich dann immer eine Pause und warte auf die Übersetzung. And I feel I kind of wake up in this little silence all the time and no one's happening.

[16:50]

Now, this question actually of what is dropping body and mind asks us also, what is the continuity of self? What do you drop and what do you continue? And since I feel that what we're doing here is actually studying together consciousness and identity, If you're of the mind to study yourself, and when you come to the conclusion, when you decide to practice, The initial intuition or decision is a recognition that your life is your own possession.

[18:04]

And it's good to notice that and make that clearer. Because the sense and the deeper it is, okay, I'm going to practice. Because the sense that you can take some possession of or creative interaction with your life In a very basic way, you're not just adjusting a few things. In a very basic way, you can settle into your own life in a creative way. So what continues and what can be dropped and then what continues?

[19:16]

And this is a question you can ask yourself that's beyond Buddhism. It's very basic. What continues? How do I establish, or consciously, or how is established just automatically, a sense of continuity in my life? Nun, wie baue ich in meinem Leben solch ein Gefühl von Kontinuität auf, von Fortsetzen? What do you experience right now as continuity? Und was erfahrt ihr jetzt in diesem Moment als Kontinuität? Now let me say something a little bit about the Western self. Lass mich ein wenig über das westliche Selbst sprechen. Because I don't believe, certainly in my experience, that self is a given, it's actually a social construct. You are always establishing it and sustaining it.

[20:43]

And it's different in different cultures and it's different in different historical periods in the West, in my opinion. Now I feel that the Western self is essentially what I would call, excuse the word, a dialogical self. Like in dialogue. It's developed and matured through a dialogue with oneself. With parents. And inner parents. And your children. And this is extended in a larger sense to friends, generation of your children and so forth.

[21:59]

And that dialogue can be sick or healthy or stunted or whole making. But I feel that the that we have too much of a kind of reductionist humanism in the way we think of things. And I think, you know, since we're sitting here in a church, a western church, I think the Western self is posited on a dialogue with a meta-identity.

[23:06]

Unless you develop some dialogue with a larger identity than yourself, the Western self tends to implode or collapse. or struggles along in some anxiety. So my own feeling is the way the Western self is constructed, it almost needs some relationship to Jesus or the Christ dimension of Jesus. Or a God figure of some kind, or nature in a big sense, maybe. Or the Virgin Mary. There's a new book on Buddhism.

[24:23]

This is quite interesting, called Meeting the Bliss Queen. It's a quite, it's an extremely intelligent book, but it's part of half feminism and half Buddhism. Anyway, so maybe we have to meet the Bliss Queen, whatever that means. So I'm bringing this up again to just complicate the question of how do we establish continuity and what's the missing link? I mean, there's a missing link in the way the Western self is constructed unless we discover a larger identity. So, does Buddhism offer us Westerners this missing link, this larger identity? Well, I think so, but in a practical sense, is it available to the ordinary practitioner?

[25:56]

I'm wondering, and I'm trying to explore with you. Because that's part of what comes up with this question of dropping body and mind. Okay, I feel I should stop around nine o'clock. So you can get settled wherever you're sleeping and so forth. Let me say something a little more for a few minutes. Buddhism assumes a microcosm-macrocosm relationship. And it goes back into India for Buddhism that whatever is there is also here.

[27:10]

And how do you experience that? And I'd like to give you some sense of that if I can this weekend, because the yogic view and Buddhist view of health is based on this idea. And I will try to give you a feeling of it this weekend, because the yogic, Buddhist view of what health is, is based on it. And again, the yogic idea of health is to establish some balance, experiential balance, with the physical environment.

[28:24]

The question is, how do you do this? And if you can come to do it, you can actually feel it and you can adjust it. Well, I think the most accessible gate for us to this is the four or five elements, depending how we want to look at it. Now I've talked about practice. I feel with the Vishjanas, the Skandhas and a few other things, the five or four elements are bases we should understand for Western practice. So this means you want to get to know the stuff of you.

[29:41]

There's one koan that starts, I think it goes, when you wake up, you open your eyes. Or when you go to sleep, you close your eyes. When you wash your face, you find your nose. When you take off your shoes, you find your feet. And it says, if you don't understand, take a torch, flashlight or something. Take a torch and search deep in the night. Mm-hmm. And this means that part of this exploration or this scientific study of consciousness and self is to, as I said, to study your continuity, but also to study the stuff of you.

[31:27]

No matter how you feel about it or what your persuasion is, you are living the stuff of you. What is it? I don't know. You don't know. We don't know. Yeah. And if actually we do feel to it or believe that the phenomenal world and we are the same stuff, how do we experience that? Perhaps the most basic way is to study the elements of the body in relationship to the elements of the phenomenal world.

[32:32]

But this starts with exploring the body. And you can't explore the body with generalizations and thoughts. And the main tool for this exploration is your breath. And joining your mind with your breath. So again, this weekend, if you can get a feel for something, even in a short period of time, it's much easier to know that feel and carry it into your daily life. So the main tool of this inner laboratory or inner study is joining your mind and your breath.

[34:12]

No, this isn't so difficult to do. And this difficulty is mainly, I think there's two difficulties. One is the practicality of it when you're in a daily life which doesn't let you have that kind of attention to your breath. And then I also feel there's a certain fear, because when you bring your breath and mind together or you see that, for some reason it can be quite scary. Maybe we think, is this all there is? Or it reminds us of the fragility of there we are with our heart pumping and breath going and that's all that's between us and death. Anyway, there's a certain fear.

[35:26]

And a certain, again, ability to really recognize this and say, okay, I'm going to, I'm living this body and phenomenal life and I'm going to spend some time studying it or observing it. So it's up to you. You just find ways in which to join your breath and your mind. This is first of all the torch or flashlight that this koan means. So your breath has, of course, again, everything, and I'm emphasizing more the way in Buddhism

[36:27]

The basic practice is everything changes and analysis. Analysis isn't intellectuality, but it's an observation of things in their parts. So the practice of counting your breath is really, more developed sense, a practice of analyzing your breath or noticing your breath in its parts. And what are the parts? There's an inhale. And there's an exhale. And there's a pause at the bottom of the exhale. And a pause at the top of the inhale.

[38:01]

And there's a right nostril and a left nostril. And there's a right lung and a left lung. And there's a movement, sometimes if you want to notice, you're breathing through your left nostril, sometimes through the right, sometimes there's a crossover between which lung is emphasized. And you can pause in different ways at the top and bottom of the breath. And then beginning to feel those different parts, you can feel how when you bring your mind to it, those different parts are different with the mind at it. And there's a certain loving feeling or blissful feeling or satisfying feeling that can be in your breath and in your chest through bringing your mind to your breath.

[39:17]

And once you have developed the ability to weave mind and breath together through the various ways we breathe, the various parts You can begin to, and this again is not so difficult to do, you just have to decide to do it. You can begin to use that mind-breath now, a kind of light, to explore the organs of your body and the insides of the stuff of you. And this is already then another way of establishing continuity in your life. in your psychic life and daily life.

[40:57]

The more you can rest in your breath, you begin to develop a place of continuity outside of or separate from the continuity of thoughts. And when you do that, you've done something remarkable because the Western self-continuity is primarily in the story discovered through thoughts. So you've begun to establish another kind of continuity than in thoughts. And you've begun to establish a way that you can study the self, yourself, by being somewhat, having another continuity than self, than the self story itself.

[42:25]

You can see how deeply identified we are with self because I can say something like the breath itself. But I should be able to say the breath it breath. Or maybe I should say the self it breath instead of the breath itself. But even the word it, you know, in English at least, it is always raining.

[43:35]

No one knows what it is, but it spends a lot of time raining. Because we always have to imagine something doing something. Of course, it doesn't rain. Rain rains. So the question in Buddhism is, when are you going to you-you? Or something like that. When are you doing? So... Anyway, that's enough for this evening. We'll look at the elements tomorrow. Thanks very much for being here. Well, we all fit in here pretty well, actually. I'm surprised. This morning we had a little anthropology lesson, at least some of us did.

[44:39]

Yeah. Ulrike said to me, it sounds like a war zone. Where is CNN? And I said, these are your people. Thank you. I should have said these are our people. So we have to... And this afternoon, I believe, when they slaughter pigs, then they have music from twelve to six. So this afternoon downstairs I believe we will be entertained.

[45:51]

So we left the other room for an 80-year-old's birthday party. And tomorrow, with these two candles, maybe there'll be a funeral here. And tomorrow, with these two candles, maybe there'll be a funeral here. Anyway, Laura, this place was very nice to offer us this room for this weekend. Anyway, it's really nice of Lore that she took us here during this weekend. Is Ralf Zwiebel here? Yes. Ah, yes, good. So you found us. Maybe we should open these windows and close this one so it's less traffic noise.

[47:06]

This question, dropping body and mind. And I started with it to some extent last night. And so I don't want to repeat what I said last night, but such a question is useful to me and I think to us. It gives me an excuse to try to teach you something about Buddhism that I know a little about. And it lets me continue an overall teaching I seem to be developing over some years with you.

[48:33]

At the same time, I want to be quite open to anything you'd like to bring up or anything you'd like to talk about. Now I'd like to say something about, you know, so many of you are practicing regularly or more or less regularly. And I want to say it's... How do I put it? If you want to practice, you have to make a... Seriously, you have to make a physical commitment to it.

[49:36]

You can't say, well, I'll do zazen. I mean, you can, but it doesn't work so well. I'll do zazen now for a while and then maybe later I'll do it again, etc. It's not always available. Unless you keep yourself in a certain kind of physical shape, you won't be able to sit. And you have to, and as we get older, you have to keep what I call the two hinges, the shoulders, neck area, and the hip area. You have to keep fairly flexible and open. And if you don't, as you get older, it will actually get more difficult to sit, not easier. And there's a way in which energy flows in your body, which requires these two hinges to be fairly flexible and open.

[51:03]

Now the image I used in the Sashenic Crestone December was practices like discovering a window that you're looking in or looking out of. Can you hear in the back okay? Good enough? Okay, thanks. Anyway, when you sit, at first you, I think we sense, I hope we sense some kind of window that we're looking into or out of.

[52:08]

But usually in the first months or years actually of practice, we don't see through the window very clearly. But I think you'd probably stop practicing if you didn't feel something through the window, but you don't know quite what it is. And then I would say to really begin to see clearly what's in this window takes about 10 years. Is that discouraging or encouraging? Ten years is not so long, I can assure you.

[53:11]

Yeah. But, you know, at some point you begin to feel your teacher or your Dharma friends looking through the same window with you and that helps. So practice, of course, you know, this window is... window, mirror, or whatever we call it, is you and is also not there. And this is this dropping of mind and body, too, that the window's there and not there.

[54:12]

So I So to practice also requires a kind of faith or patience, to just do it even though you sense it, you sense it makes sense, but it's not too clear. just a way of being alive, that you have the intuition or wisdom to commit yourself to. Now, This question, again, sloughing off or dropping body and mind.

[55:36]

The word sloughing off, actually, I think which is closest to the Chinese word, means like on a wound, you have dead skin that comes off from a wound, that's sloughing off, or like a snake loses its skin, that's sloughing off. I'm trying to wonder how to feel with you into this question. Because sometimes, of course, in zazen, I hope anyway, you have the experience of your boundaries being rather big or you don't know quite where you begin and end.

[56:41]

Or you're sitting and you don't know where your hands are. They must be down there somewhere. And your thumbs, are they touching or are they not touching? They don't seem to be touching. So you try to bring them together but you can't find them. And when you do find them, it seems like there's about a kilometer between them. That's a little bit like dropping body and mind. You've lost your usual sense of how you locate yourself physically.

[57:41]

But Dogen means in this phrase... What he means in this phrase includes many things as well as that. Now if I asked you to say that when you first arrived here you all had your suitcases or rucksacks or something with you, And I said, put down all your possessions. Drop your suitcases. You all drop it. But what have you dropped? Well, you've dropped a few things that happen to be in that package But you still have your clothes on And there's all that stuff back in your apartment or your house And there's the fillings in your teeth There's a great deal you haven't dropped

[59:13]

So how do you get to the point where you can actually drop everything? Now, you may have wondered, reading the Heart Sutra, no eyes, no ears, no nose, etc., They could say, no apartment, no world, no, you know, etc. But why do they say, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no object of mind, and so forth? Really, because if you use those suitcases, they're easier to drop. In other words, last night we spoke about weaving the mind into your breath.

[60:31]

And finding a place of, maybe we could say, breath rest. Where you can rest in your breath, independent or somewhat detached from your thoughts. Now, if I say put down your thoughts, it's almost impossible. If you're identified with your thoughts, if you're working out yourself through thinking about yourself and dialoguing with yourself and inner figures and so forth, And I'm not putting down that activity and that process. It's essential to us. And this window that appears, can appear, you can get a feeling for in Zazen,

[61:34]

And the first years of practice is more like a movie screen and all your stories are being projected on it. And it's very difficult to break our attached connection to the camera and the screen. And instead of trying to break your attachment to the camera and the screen, it's maybe it's easier to like develop this place that I'm calling a breath rest. And if I say to you after you've developed the ability to rest, to find your continuity in your breath, if I say drop that, that's a lot easier.

[63:02]

Do you understand the image I'm using? You're repacking yourself in different suitcases which are easier to put down. Now one of the elements here is, I often talk about, I say that something like Buddhism is a mindology not a psychology. Now, that's fairly easy to understand the difference. And by analogy, well, we know something about psychology, so we can say, oh yes, mindology, and of course, psychology is also the study of the mind. But if I say Buddhism is not only a mindology, it's also a worldology.

[64:29]

That's much more difficult to understand. And we don't have much language to say something about it. We could use Husserl's phenomenology, but that's a little bit too related to his philosophy. But the word phenomena is a good one because it means the world as it appears to us. So there are You know, we chant sometimes, all Buddhas, ten directions, three times, and so forth.

[65:52]

Three times, ten directions. For you, there's eleven. Yeah. And, you know, you can understand that, well, there's all the Buddhas in ten directions, but that's not what it says. It says all Buddhas, ten directions. These are equalities. And can you open yourself up to the ten directions as if they were ten Buddhas, say? I think that a good Christian has a sense of the presence of God or Jesus or something,

[66:58]

in an immediacy embracing you. Now, since Buddhism doesn't have a deity in that sense, how do we feel really connected with this world? This is also the question that's being asked by dropping body and mind. Now ten directions, if you don't know, means of course north, south, east, west. And then northwest, southwest, east, west, etc. So that's eight. And then up and down make nine and ten. Now, one of the differences in the use of this in practice is these are not directions out there.

[68:36]

They're ten directions pointing at you. And that's a different feeling than it's out there, but it's rather in here. Now, one of the most universal things that I found from Tokyo to Moscow to Sinsheim is that people make toasts. And I understand it, and my experience of it too, is why you clink the glasses together.

[69:48]

Because you have the feel of the glass and the taste of the wine. And you have the look of the wine. And you have the smell of it. So all the senses are there except sound. And it's thought to be magical or completing to have all the senses so you clink the glasses to bring sound in. And you usually do it with alcohol, not milk. I haven't found anybody in either Tokyo, Moscow or Sinsheim who gets a glass of milk and, hey, grossed.

[70:59]

Yeah, so you want something, the alcohol of course represents... transformative experience or something. You can imagine when they first drank some old rotting grain juice, whoa, this is... And when you toast, at least I was taught to look the other person in the eyes when you toast. So if we look at it from Buddhist point of view, this is very much the heart sutra. And it's very much creating a Buddha field.

[72:09]

Because you bring all the senses together and you look at each other Because it's done together, it's not done by yourself. It's done with another person. So at that moment, what you've done, at least as I would understand this from the point of view of the way I look at things, is you've made a complete situation and you've made a decision together and you've made yourself the center at that moment. It's almost like the whole world disappears at that moment. You had a little toast together.

[73:09]

It's a way of saying we're here. And all the ten directions point at you. Do you think I'm getting a little incoherent here? I don't know. Incoherent. To not cohere. Well, I'm very much trying to cohere, actually. You don't have to translate that.

[74:10]

So I'm asking, and this question also asks, by seeming to be the opposite, how are you here? Or what is here? And really, what is your visceral experience of being here? Are you immovable? Do you feel immovable? If you don't feel immovable, probably you're not really here. Or the ten directions are still looking for you. Akshobhya is one of the five Buddhas and she's a Buddha that's immovable.

[75:29]

And this is a person who became a Buddha, as the story goes. through making a vow at some point in her life that she would never be disgusted by another person. would never feel revulsion for another person. Now, it doesn't mean that there aren't people around who deserve revulsion. It's not closing your eyes to the way the world is. But really rather a decision to say, at least for myself, I will find some other way to express my feelings than revulsion or rejection of another person.

[76:55]

And through trying to realize that vow, this person became one of the five Buddhas. And there's a slot open for a sixth if any of you want to apply. But this is quite an interesting idea, you know. Another Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's not a Buddha, but... He's the Terminator. But he said, one pump, you know. Really, I'm telling you the truth. He said, one pump with your mind in it is worth ten without your mind.

[78:09]

And he's not, it's not that I don't know him, but he doesn't seem, from what I've heard, to be a stupid person. I think he's Austrian, isn't he? So he's definitely not a stupid person. And he decided, I know people who used to train with him back in the 50s or 60s in Los Angeles. And he had a clear intuition, idea of what would happen if you really built your body and how that would communicate to people.

[79:12]

I mean, he had a vision of it and he's realized his vision. So he had this sense that one pump with your mind in it is worth ten without your mind in it. I think that's worth thinking about. You can shorten your exercise time by 90%. I notice when I'm typing, if for some reason my mind moves ahead of my fingers, Perhaps I'm thinking of the next word or something.

[80:22]

My fingers will type the letters from the next word and not the word I'm on. So my body is very closely aligned with my mind. I notice the same thing in chanting. If I know the chant totally by heart, by body, if my mind wanders ahead slightly in the chant, my lips will start going ahead. So there is a big difference when your mind and your body are simultaneously cohesive, co-extensive.

[81:32]

And that will not be the case when you're most of the time resting in your thoughts. Your energy will just work differently. And your thoughts are usually being drawn from previous thoughts. Like some sort of butterfly going from plant to plant. Or it's coming from anxieties or things you're worried about in the future start shaping your thoughts. So you're not rooted physically in yourself or in the world.

[82:44]

And it's thought in yogic culture that unless you're physically rooted, thought by thought in your body and in the phenomenal world, you're going to be to some degree sick. So in Tibetan and Chinese medicine and so forth, Buddhist way of looking at medicine, the medicine, the healing Buddha, And staying in touch with that rootedness and that balance is the initial basis of health. You could say maybe you're rooted in your immune system. Doesn't mean if there's a real bad flu going around, you won't get it.

[84:00]

But in general, you'll be in touch with your own health moment by moment. So again, I'm here I'm trying to talk a little bit about the sense of how we're viscerally here. Could you explain visceral no more? Visceral means your guts, your... So usually it's used to mean a physical, internal and external feeling for something. I have a visceral feel for something means your body feels it. Visceral, what do you say in medicine for... For the guts.

[85:02]

For the guts? For the guts. What's the German word? Eingeweide. But we use it in medicine. Viscera. Okay, thank you. Dr. Rosenberg. So we're talking about here When you drop body and mind, what are you dropping? And what is not just mindology, but a worldology or phenomenology or... There's no word for it. We think of, in our language and every way, of all this as being out there like some sort of house we live in. It's really separate from us and goes on without us.

[86:12]

And, I mean, we're so convinced of it, I don't know if I can convince you of anything else. And of course that is also true. But there are some other things that are also true. And maybe it's also true we should take a break. So let's have a I have a question about having to think of work.

[87:14]

Having to? My question is, we barely know how to bring together mind, breath and our body to some kind of physical activity or more physical activities and work. But a lot of us, we have to do a lot of mental activity to read, write, calculate. And this seems to automatically draw you out of breath right. So it seems to be, for me, some kind of contradiction between some work where you have to have a lot of mental activity and staying in your breath right. So, how can we deal with that? My question is, we know very well, I think we know very well in Mainz,

[88:17]

that brings the body and the breath together in a work or activity that is more physically threatened, that is, washing away. But many of us also have to think a lot. Many of us have to think, to read, to write, to read, to calculate, and so on. And it seems to me that these activities automatically bring us out of such a concentration on the breath, on the breathing spirit. Yeah. I've been thinking recently how we don't have much, you know, I seem to be talking about something else, but maybe it will relate to what you said.

[89:42]

I've been thinking recently about how we don't have much traditions of mentorship, at least mentorship as it's understood in Buddhism. Yeah, we don't have any word for it exactly. Maybe we could say life mentorship instead of, you know, to learn cooking, say. I would say that in Japan, which is an Asian country I know the best, it's more important to eat together than to study cooking together. In other words, there's more teaching, it would be thought, in eating together about cooking than cooking together.

[91:06]

You also might cook together, but you also eat together. Now, I know that I've talked with some chefs, very good chefs, and they said, how do you come up with it? They said, with what they make, they said, we have first an image of the meal appears to me, then I know how to cook it. It doesn't arise so much from the cooking process, but from the image, then the cooking, you know what to do. So what I'm saying here is, in practice in general, in relationship to your question about breath, is it really makes a huge difference

[92:18]

the extent to which you believe it's possible. In other words, if you have an image of mind, body and breath together, this will allow the cooking to happen. That image is more subtle than trying to count your breath or trying to bring your mind back to your breath and so forth. Both need to be there But the alchemy will start when you have the absolute knowledge that it's possible. Coming back to Tommy Dorsey's statement, which I've mentioned to you a number of times in the past,

[93:41]

He said, I've been telling him for years to reside in your breath body. And he said, it took me 10 years to realize it was possible. He said, I heard you all those years,

[94:24]

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