So the topic is vision in Buddhism. And I'll take that to mean the vision of Buddhism and the vision as a process within Buddhism. Sounds like two people just arrived. Come on in. Are there pillows? Leonard, Lenny, you can sit over here. There's plenty of space. So I first have to find out, as usual, does anybody here not have much experience with sitting?

[01:37]

Okay. If you want, almost anyone here, like Gerald or Gisela, Rika or myself even, can give you some It looks pretty good the way you sit here. I can give you some suggestions about sitting. So we'll have... As part of the regular schedule, sitting, we'll wake up at 6 and sit at 6.30 and we'll have one period, one 40-minute period. And those of you who are not used to sitting, 40 minutes can be pretty long.

[02:41]

But if you come in the morning you can sit for as long as you can and then put your legs up or something. We don't expect you to kill yourself in the first period. But it's not, you know, I would like it if you came to the sittings in the morning, but it's okay if you don't. But we'd like to have the seminars here, have some of the feeling of the regular schedule here. Because we're trying to discover how really, as usual, this practice can become part of your usual life.

[04:20]

And what's the difference between sitting practice and mindfulness practice? Now, when I was here in March, we talked about here-ness. Just discovering what's here. And to what degree that here-ness is interior and to what degree it's exterior. And this time I would like to emphasize the same, it's similar, but instead of here, each. How this here-ness is also an each.

[05:26]

And how you can open up that each. Now, if you have a dishwater mind, it's rather difficult. A dishwater mind is a mind that's always trying to wash your karma, but only gets dirty in the process. And your karma doesn't get any cleaner, just your mind gets more soiled. So most of us have quite a load of dishwater mind. And everything that comes into our mind and that we perceive gets colored by the mind.

[06:31]

Instead of the mind being colored by each moment. Now I notice when I come here to Johanneshof there's the presence of course of these rolling cultivated hills and the distant high mountains but there's especially the birds And the birds are quite different than at Crestone. And if my mind is at ease and at rest, the birds begin to give me a different mind than I have in Crestone.

[07:34]

So it's not like I have the same mind here as I have in Crestone. At least if my mind is quite open and undyed, shall we say, The image is sometimes used in Zen of a spool of white thread. And wherever you touch the spool of thread with dye, all the strands get dyed. But what we're trying to come to here is a mind that is like white thread or like white cloth with its resting or in its usual way of being.

[08:50]

And where we want to go, we are in a state of mind that is very comparable to this white garland, or simply a white cloth, a cloth that rests in itself. And a state of mind that is not always caught in our thoughts, feelings, moods, and so forth. So we have to study our mind and our way of perceiving. There's a very common and lazy idea in the West that perceiving is natural. That we see things and hear things and that's all there is to it. But to see and hear with attention and to see and hear without it being clouded by the thinking and moods we're in,

[10:08]

requires some work or attention. Buddhism is divided into wisdom, meditation and discipline usually. Meditation. And to bring wisdom into your meditation, to bring the teachings into how you look at things, is also to know how you look at things. And discipline just means to do it. You have to actually do it.

[11:16]

As I said, we talked a little bit about this when I was here in March. So if we have this theme of the vision of Buddhism, and the process of vision in Buddhism, then I should talk about the word vision, the roots, it means something like wise, to guide, knowledge, so forth. And in English, and I suppose in German too, it has both the sense of what you see, but also the sense of what you, the mystery that becomes a vision or you become aware of.

[12:24]

And Buddhist practice is always the awareness of the mystery of being. Again we have Friedrich Schelling's question, why is there anything at all? The mystery that anything at all appears. And we can't fully explain why everything appears. But we're usually not even present to what appears.

[13:26]

Because we're involved with the next moment or what we're missing or our addictive habits, our adhesive habits. So we can say that meditation is to discover a mind which is at ease, which allows everything to appear without any particular ideas, Then you can have some ideas, of course, what to do and what you want. But that's always balanced by a mind, by knowing your mind as knowing a mind that allows everything just to appear.

[14:39]

The birds here at Johanneshof in this area just to appear in your mind, in your hearing. And to transform your mind. Now we have to start somewhere, and as you know, I point out often to just study how you fall asleep. Or to study or observe how you wake from a dream. So, you know, most of you have... We've talked, most of you have come to seminars before.

[15:57]

But since we have this topic, vision and Buddhism, let me come back to this. The fact and activity of dreaming. To just notice again this change in viscosity between waking mind and between dreaming mind and waking mind. And if you begin to notice that difference and be able to feel that difference in your body, you're closer to this mind which thinks in images, which has more of a spatial quality.

[17:09]

You know, in China, as some of you know, maybe the present is considered to be space. The past is time. Time is what leads from this moment back into the past, and you notice or think about something, you remember something, and bring it into the future. And the present is not time, but a space, and a space you can open up. And it can be quite a wide space. And if you think of the present as space rather than as time, your mind will become quite different just by having this different image. And a kind of imagistic thinking is quite characteristic of mind in Buddhism.

[18:27]

And the most imagistic thinking most of us do is with our dreaming mind. So you can notice the difference in feeling between dreaming mind and waking mind. Developing an awareness that can be present in both ordinary consciousness and dreaming awareness, dreaming consciousness. Again, this is pretty obvious. Here we are, we exist, we've been born. What's here?

[19:56]

There's waking mind, dreaming mind, and so forth. But usually we don't study these most basic things. We're so future-oriented and caught up in our story. That we notice that we dream, of course. But we don't study it as a capacity, as a power. And not the contents of dream, but just the fact of dreaming. The mind that dreams. What kind of mind dreams in contrast to what kind of mind is conscious?

[20:58]

This kind of physical knowledge is necessary if you're going to discover this imagistic spatial thinking. I say thinking, but it's more a kind of knowing than thinking, our usual sense of thinking. So there's this change in viscosity, the mind that supports images, And then when you wake up, it will support thoughts but not images. And the dream disappears. And you try to remember a bit of the dream. but even remembering a bit of the dream won't bring the dream back usually anyway unless you bring back the mind of dreaming and if you can jiggle back or feel back into the mind of dreaming

[22:21]

Not only will the dream reappear, it will often continue. Okay, now, excuse me for going over that again, but it's really useful to know that. This has nothing to do with Buddhism or anything. It's just studying yourself. And again, it's that all this basic Yogacara assumption that all mental activity has a physical dimension. And all physical activity has a mental dimension. So it means you can feel, physically feel your states of mind. And you can begin to feel the physical rootedness of a state of mind in your body.

[23:46]

And you can begin to work with your states of mind through the physicality of each state of mind. You can have a kind of... A memory of each state of mind. A physical memory. It's technically called dharani memory. You can have a little library of physical minds. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the second aspect of dreaming that's useful to notice is to become aware of the particular viscosity of the mind of dreaming within your daily mind, within your conscious mind.

[25:01]

Like a flow of a different temperature of water in a stream or the ocean. And you can do this, you can work on this by when you have a dream, It's not to analyze it again, but to stay with the feeling of it during the day. And just learn to keep the feeling of a dream alive during the day without analyzing it. Anyway, again, this kind of practice is basic to discovering a state of mind in the daytime that has deep unconscious and subconscious content to it. It's like you just don't see into your conscious mind in the day.

[26:31]

You can see into this clear mind that contains the mind of night time and sleeping. And when you try to analyze a dream, or do as perfectly fine to analyze a dream, but when you do that, you're changing the aspects of dreaming mind that you can notice into conscious mind. And that can be useful and interesting. But you have taken this content out of dreaming mind and you've lost dreaming mind. It's like you've taken a plant and pulled it out of the earth or out of a pot by its roots.

[27:49]

And you try to plant it in the air and it won't plant. But the leaves and the petals scatter around, and they're very pretty, but pretty soon they dry up. So again, this is quite obvious. Here we're 30 or 40 or... Nobody's 50. Anyway, years old... And we don't really know these basic things about how waking mind, dreaming mind and non-dreaming deep sleep work. Buddhism is a teaching that's been developed to answer these questions, which are more basic than Buddhism.

[28:53]

So meditation is a time where you can begin to see the different viscosities of mind. And I'm keeping it simple here. I'm talking about just two minds now, dreaming and waking. But the inventory and flow of minds is much more numerous than that. But these are two very basic categories that control much of our experience. So if you don't analyze the contents of a dream, you're in a sense leaving it planted.

[30:13]

You're leaving the dream planted. Because you're not trying to bring it as content into waking mind. You're letting it stay as it's rooted in dreaming mind. And instead of bringing the plant into your waking mind, you're bringing the mind in which the dream is rooted into your waking mind. You're bringing like two rivers or two flows together. And this becomes a deeper and more satisfying mind and one in which you can have more participation.

[31:19]

Then just the thinner mind of consciousness which soon collapses into thinking and then collapses into language. And then when your desires and feelings flow into language, language can't hold our desires and feelings. And then we're pushed around. It's like pouring fire into a very fragile kind of framework made of matchsticks. Because our deep feelings are so much more powerful than language can contain, the language of thinking. So we're trying to develop a more complex, layered, absorbent mind.

[32:26]

You're literally making your mind deeper. Okay, now the third aspect of dreaming I want to mention this evening. And I'm trying to discover... To be continued. I'm trying to discover this is something I've never spoken about before.

[33:34]

And I'm trying to discover a way to talk about it. And it's related to This idea of roots or a potted plant, perhaps. And I don't know if this is something you can notice until you've developed a pretty stable, clear meditative mind. And a stable, clear, meditative mind that's present in your sleeping as well as your waking. But I think you're more likely to notice it if I tell you something about it. Now, one of the givens of what I've been speaking about while imagistic mentality is more common to dreams

[34:46]

And language-based conceptual thinking is more common to consciousness. Feeling is common to both. Not necessarily emotions, although emotions are also common to both. But feeling more subtle or non-graspable feeling than the more specific emotions. My experience and understanding is that every dream is rooted in a feeling. As if, again, let's try to stick with this plant and roots thing as a connecting image.

[36:23]

If you have a potted plant, say, there's a kind of unit of dirt. And the plant comes out of that unit of dirt. Well, a dream, I find the roots of a dream are a kind of unit of feeling. Which is, when you are asleep, dreaming mind draws out of that unit of feeling Various images that try to express, manifest that unitive feeling. Now that unitive feeling could be the same in several different nights and produce different dreams, but they're all versions of this similar unitive feeling.

[37:42]

So what if you can come to know this unit of feeling from which the dream is arising? This is also the unit of feeling from which often your conscious mind is also arising and which this process of vision in Buddhism arises. And the more you know this, what I'm calling for lack of a better way to express it now, this unit of feeling that is the root of the mind,

[39:07]

The more you become in contact with that, the more you have a deep feeling of knowing yourself and being present to yourself. And feeling the soil in which everything arises. So that's probably enough about that for now. I just wanted to start with something this evening that gave us entry into this mind and body in which we live, in which we live and which lives us. And ideally it would be nice if from Friday night now, Friday evening now until Sunday afternoon,

[40:12]

We could find a way to develop the presence of each. Not of every, but each. and an openness to each, an acceptance of each, which would allow the confidence of the various levels of mind and feeling, could come to the surface in us or could come into feeling in us with a protected sense of this weekend taking care of us.

[41:37]

And then I would like to, but I think I won't start now, Speak about the vision of sentience, the wide vision of sentience, all sentience, on which Mahayana Buddhism is based. Because Mahayana Buddhism is the shift from monk's Buddhism to lay Buddhism. Although the main streams are still carried by monk lineages, it's a lay vision of Buddhism. And because it's for lay people, can't put in the kind of, you know, every day, all day long practice that monastics can.

[43:00]

The vision of what we're doing has to be bigger. Because we need the power from everything all at once. So there's a very wide vision of sentience. Okay, that's enough. So let's sit for one or two minutes. Thank you very much.

[47:07]

Of course I'm very grateful to be here with you. And, you know, I'm going to be here now pretty much continuously until November, mid-November or so. So I feel it feels good to be welcomed, sort of. I don't know if you intended to welcome me, but I feel welcome. I mean, if you can. I'm very glad to be here with you again this morning.

[48:19]

With all of you, each and all of you. You know, I always feel like, and I probably am, venturing upon the unknown every time I do a seminar. And I give a talk, or I talk about practice, as I did last night. And I think I can speak about something and about various things. And I find that each time it's not so easy. That really I have to build a picture with you of what we're talking about.

[49:22]

And I have to build a picture which includes those of you who are new. And I want to continue the work we're doing together, those of us who have practiced together for some time now. So I'm trying to find out how to speak about this. For me, I have to do it in English. And then Ulrike has to do it in German. And you have to do it in your own speak. Now it would be impossible to speak about these things to you unless I was speaking about something fundamental to all of us.

[50:44]

And I'm not trying to teach you how to be a Japanese or a Chinese. It might be interesting, but I couldn't do it anyway. You know, of course, that in China and Japan, Buddhism is a foreign religion. And in fact, Buddhism is a choice of a fundamental way of being. It's not being Chinese or Japanese or German or American. So if you're happy, quite happy to know yourself through being German or European or American, Then in a deep sense, Buddhism is not for you.

[51:58]

Buddhism is about knowing yourself in a fundamental way, independent of a particular culture. That makes it both hard to teach and easy to teach. Hard to teach because we all have all of this built-in quality of who we are. And easy because, again, this is something that's fundamental to each of us. So some of you who are new, like coming to Zazen in service in the morning, may think, oh my gosh, brocade pillows, Japanese chanting.

[53:06]

I'm in some non-European Japanese cult. Well, yeah, maybe so. But really service is about, as I very often said, dislocating you. The chanting in Japanese is kept in a kind of, much of it in a kind of Sanskritized Chinese. And it's, you know... The schedule and the service are all about dislocating you somewhat, whether it's in Japan or here.

[54:15]

And then can you do something in which you feel dislocated? Or do you feel you're doing something against your nature? What nature? When Nanyue, the person who became the disciple of Wei Neng, first met him, Wei Neng said, where are you from? He could have said Germany or the Black Forest or something. Yeah, he said Mount Sung.

[55:15]

And Wei-Ning said, what is it that comes whence? What kind of thing is it that comes from Mount Sung? Mm-hmm. So we're asking ourselves this kind of question. And Buddhism developed out of the yogic culture of India. And yogic culture is a non-language-based culture. So we're going to have to fiddle with language a bit and take language out of the context of sentences and grammar and use it as gates or as ways to direct our attention.

[56:21]

Okay, so this weekend we've decided somehow or other to speak about the vision of Buddhism and the process of visionary thinking. Mm-hmm. Now, you may think that you tend to be... Perhaps you think you tend to be a visionary thinker.

[57:53]

Or some people may feel they're not, or they may have had some kind of vision in their life. But Buddhism is not about... some special person who might be creative or a genius or a visionary or something. But about our human gift of being, of aliveness. So we don't look at visionary thinking as, let's take that as a topic, as something that you wait around and maybe you're lucky and you have a vision. But rather from what mind does this thinking we call visionary arise?

[58:56]

And how are we already in touch with that or know that to some extent? And how can we cultivate it? The word cultivate is very important in Zen practice and in Buddhist yogic culture. Our human life and human nature is something that we cultivate. It's not something given. Again, there's no idea of natural, a kind of natural kind of way to be in this yogic culture.

[60:23]

What we call naturalness is something that's cultivated, developed through experience. Until we do something naturally. So instead of naturalness, we could say, till we do something with fluency. Now, last evening I spoke about, I used the words here-ness and each. Ichness maybe. And I don't know if each and every are distinguished in German. Every in English means one and all.

[61:28]

Every apple is one apple and all apples. And each means each of one. Okay, so then... So I'm trying to find words, and Ulrike and you will try to find them in German, that allow you to make some kind of subtle distinctions. Like I'd like to make a distinction between oneness and unity. Now you've heard me say many times Buddhism has nothing to do with oneness. Perhaps an experience of oneness, but no philosophical idea of oneness.

[62:46]

So if you are practicing with the idea of seeking for one, you have an obstructing idea. And if you are seeking or assume that things are two or separated, you have an obstructing idea. For example, mind and body are not one. And mind and body are not two. They're a relationship. And that relationship can be cultivated. And you are going to make a decision to cultivate that relationship or you're not going to. Und ihr trefft jetzt diese Entscheidung, diese Beziehung zu kultivieren oder ihr lasst es? And there's a very big difference between cultivating it and just allowing it to be or happen the way it happens.

[64:17]

Und es ist ein sehr großer Unterschied zwischen einer Entscheidung, diese Beziehung zu kultivieren oder sie einfach so zu lassen, wie sie ist. If you practice zazen with Theravadan tenets or teachings, if you hold Theravadan or Hinayana ideas in your practice, you'll end up to be a Theravadan Buddhist who practices zazen. If you practice Zazen with Mahayana and Zen ideas, tenets, you'll maybe end up to be a Zen Buddhist.

[65:19]

So the views you hold shape the outcome. The views you hold as a European or American shape the outcome of your practice. So wisdom in Buddhism is a process. Usually divided into three aspects, this process. one is a willingness an openness an agreeability a kind of positive openness a willingness to accept what's true even if it goes against your habits and desires and so forth

[66:22]

This is not so easy to come to. But this willingness is necessary if wisdom is to arise. And the second aspect usually is to establish this wisdom, this knowledge. To firmly establish understanding. Dogen says somewhere, you should dye your mind with his teaching. When you smell a rose, you know it's a rose. It's established in your senses. There's a Greek idea of beauty, which is to install beauty in your senses.

[67:42]

Not symbols or ideas, but just to install beauty in your senses. This installing beauty is like establishing wisdom. And the third aspect is to the investigation of views. Sekiroshi, he has the funniest way of talking about things sometimes. And his teacher gave him a scroll, and it said, stones in the air. And Sekiroshi said, well, there's no stones in the air. He said, there may be bubbles, but there's no stones.

[69:02]

But what his teacher meant, and what Sukhirishi meant in using this example, was there are many cultural ideas, many cultural assumptions we take for granted. that are like stones in the air. And he says, we get very skillful at walking through a room and not bumping into them. That's being German, is to walk through a room and not bump into the German stones in the air. And being an American is to be able to walk through a room full of huge stones and not bump into them. And we don't notice we're avoiding the stones in the air. But when you start to practice zazen with the right craft of zazen you will start bumping into these stones in the air.

[70:18]

And this is the investigatory side of wisdom. to so cultivate awareness that it bumps into the stones in the air and then through willingness to see things as they are develop accurate and accurately assuming consciousness To develop a consciousness that's embedded in accurate assumptions about how the world exists. And that are present before thought arises. and that accurately guide and shape the arising of perception.

[71:33]

And the word vision, again, comes from to guide, wisdom, and so forth. They're the same word. So to have an accurate vision would be to have a mind that doesn't interfere with perception and consciousness. In which you suddenly find yourself and sometimes it's suddenly in some kind of fresh, clear air in which the stones are gone. Whether they're Japanese stones or Chinese or German or American, whatever.

[72:35]

I think what I should do at this point is go back to this basic, start out with refreshing us, or this basic thing of the three functions of self, that are true in any culture. Separation. Trennung. Connectedness. Verbundenheit. And continuity. Und Kontinuität. And again, separation is obvious that I, self in any culture has to function to

[74:16]

Let me know that I'm, oh, I don't want to be separate from Peter. I want to be separate from Peter. When Peter is speaking, I know that's his voice. He knows this is my voice. And if you can't make that kind of distinction, you may end up in a hospital. And again, your immune system is a kind of ego in that sense, or self. It determines what belongs to you and what belongs to not you. Now, connectedness is I have to also know how I'm connected to Peter and Ruth. And third, I have to be able to establish a continuity from moment to moment. Now, we generally establish, as you know, our continuity through a thought stream self-story.

[75:38]

And a continuity of... emotions and so forth. And when that continuity is too disturbed, we often think we're crazy. Now the continuity can be disturbed by craziness. But continuity can also be disturbed by enlightenment. by an experience of timelessness, by falling in love, and our continuity to it, and then we're lost. Now, in general, our culture emphasizes separation.

[76:39]

And we don't have really much experience of connection. We're polite to each other and we try to be friendly and sometimes we're in love with somebody. But in general, we don't emphasize connectedness. We emphasize a polite version of separation we call connectedness. The interesting thing about taking something like dividing and seeing how self functions in three ways, You can begin to see that there is different emphases possible. And even alternatives.

[78:02]

Yoga culture emphasizes connectedness. The point of yoga culture is to come to a point, a place where separation is known through connectedness rather than vice versa. Where you begin to discover an organic membrane of connectedness that you can feel. and again we probably only feel this if we do it all when we're in love and then sometimes it connects us to trees and birds as well as another person and This is springtime.

[79:05]

So let's fall in love with Buddha. This may be quite a bit more successful. I sometimes call Buddha the pin-up that doesn't let you down. So we pin Buddha up on the altar. my point is that this experience of connectedness does not have to be left to the chance of falling in love this organic membrane of intimacy the startling intimacy of the physical world says William James Okay, now let's look at continuity. We can have, let's call it, successive moments.

[80:09]

Successive moment continuity. Now I'm just trying to use language here. And let's contrast that to what we could maybe say each moment. Continuity. Now if I say successive moment continuity and you could look at your own thinking your own view your own vision of how things exist, and you may see that perhaps you do think in terms of every moment continuity.

[81:39]

Or successive moment continuity. But maybe let's see if you may also already feel or sometimes feel or we could emphasize each moment continuity. And let's emphasize each. Each of one. So maybe if you feel each moment continuity, you will stop for a moment. I say all of you, I say all of you. And there is a quality of all of you I can feel.

[82:41]

Some of what I'm saying now comes from the contours of what I said last night coming back to me and realizing I have to say some of this. But within that, all of you, which has a particular presence, there's also each of you. This is quite wonderful. So each moment of continuity. So each moment of continuity allows you to open up that each. Or contract.

[83:43]

We have some choice. Paracelsus says time runs in thousands of ways, not just one. There's a time of falling in love, there's a time of marrying, there's a time of begetting. There's a time begetting means to make babies. Like Pauline. And there's a time of being present here in the seminar. There's the time of the installation of a rainy spring day at Johanneshof. So now the more we look at each of one moment continuity,

[84:49]

We can talk about a unity of experience. And that unity of experience is in some contrast to a continuity of experience. And again, a unity of experience is not oneness. There's a unity of experience right now. We may not be open to it.

[85:53]

You may be thinking about yourself and what's happening next and about some particular person. That's not a unity of experience. That's being involved in culturally shaped desire. Yogic culture is based on samadhi. Each moment samadhi. It's as simple as not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But rather 1, 0, 2, 0. 3, 0. or one, zero, one, zero, one. Each one sometimes might be a three.

[86:54]

If you don't know this mind, you are really not practicing Buddhism. Or rather, if you don't know that this is the fruit of practice, you're not practicing Buddhism. If you don't understand the taste of this mind or the possibility of this mind, you're not practicing Buddhism. It's okay, you're practicing your culture and I hope you're happy. If you want to know this fundamental way of being, you need this fresh undyed mind, which then you 100% go to the next moment. But let's not talk about this as in some philosophical terms like zero or emptiness or something or samadhi.

[88:15]

But let's talk about it as willingness or readiness or the poise of this moment of a dancer or someone ready for what's next. Or the poise that arises from a unity of experience. A unity present just now. Possibly present just now. And when we go out in the hall, another unity of experience is possible. And there's a craft to discovering this unity of experience moment after moment.

[89:15]

We have technical phrases for this in Buddhism. Like ocean seal samadhi. Sounds good, doesn't it? Wet, maybe. Rick had a dream recently. She was in a desert under the water. Maybe ocean, seal, samadhi, desert. Ocean, seal, samadhi just means each moment sealed by samadhi. Each moment sealed in samadhi and hence open to the unity of experience. I think that's enough for now. Peter agrees, I can see. So let's sit for one minute and then take a break.

[90:58]

Well, I'd like to start out with any questions any of you may have about this or any ways this makes sense to you or doesn't make sense to you. Because, of course, we have to develop this understanding, these views together. Natürlich müssen wir ein Verständnis von all diesen Dingen gemeinsam entwickeln. I was just going to say it's all completely understandable. Yes? As I told you, I just read this little Hillman piece in the most recent Psychology Today on visions and how important visions are in our life.

[93:01]

And Hillman talks about, you know, we don't have to grow up, but we have to grow down. really to some kind of what he calls the acorn or some kind of core we have which we sort of have lost. And of course it's very controversial and it's not very Buddhist at all, but it somehow for me resonates with what His Holiness the Dalai Lama says, that he really repeatedly warns people to change religion, that it's really a very big task we take on to kind of become sort of Buddhists as Western people. And for me, the life I've been living these last two or three years, I've developed a growing awareness how little I understand my own culture and how I have this kind of almost need or longing to really grow down into my culture and understand it better. And for me it's not a contradiction to what you say to sort of free ourselves from our culture, but often I know for myself I've...

[94:02]

try to throw out the baby with the bathwater. It's an interesting koan-type situation I found myself on. It's like a vision in itself or a vision quest. Sorry, I'm sorry that's so long. I recently read an article in Psychologie Heute about vision and how to find your vision. And there is this book by James Hillman, which is being discussed there. In English it is called the Core of the Self. And Hillman speaks in it that we don't have to grow up, but actually grow down. in something like a core essence of ourselves and only when we can make contact with it that we really find our own vision or our own way of life. And now it is precisely what Buddhism somehow deeply denies, that there would be something like a core self or something solid in us.

[95:11]

But what my life experience is, so the last few years, It is a growing longing to get to know my cultural roots, where I come from, and to be able to feel at home. The Dalai Lama always speaks or warns us to become Buddhist as Westerners.

[95:30]

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