And anything you want to bring up about what we discussed this morning. Yes. So I have a question with regards to what you said this morning, which is for depth of birth, duration, dissolution, disappearance. So what is the... No. No. So what about the continuity in a couple?

[01:03]

Well, it will probably last longer if at each moment it's reborn. I should think we'd look forward to this answer. You keep falling in love over and over again. And we're the same person. But I think also... I think falling in love is the closest experience most people have to enlightenment. When there's a mutual enfoldment with another and with the world.

[02:31]

Because it's interesting when you fall in love that you don't just fall in love with the person, you fall in love with the world. The world you inhabit now seems a lot better than it used to. So this mutual involvement with each other and with the world in a trust which unfortunately often gets betrayed. And you're a lot safer. If that relationship keeps being reborn, then you start catching to it in a way that it can't change. Okay.

[03:36]

But I hear redheads are dangerous. Excellent. I'm just kidding. My hair is actually red and curly. That wasn't a report. That was... Yes.

[04:40]

Thank you. So when I first heard that we have to give a report, my memory stopped and failed completely. And then I remembered the inspiration I had during the group. And when I remembered that, many things came up again. So the first thing which amazed me was that all of us have chosen the number two, so we were united in group number two. And that's true. And people were different in this group, but still there was something like a mutual spirit.

[05:55]

And it started quite unusual with a report about a wall injury which touched me very much. And then we talked about different state of minds different people had. For instance, like employee's mind or sports mind or stand mind. Yeah. The discussion also touched upon breathing techniques.

[07:20]

In the context of natural breathing, we also talked about awareness. And then a certain curiosity developed with regards to the practice of Sijin. Well, because some people had experience of Sijin and others didn't. A little discussion about Samadhi and driving the car. Hmm. Well, and it's turned out that there are quite different ways of practicing that, and all of them were described quite successfully.

[08:35]

Different ways of practicing samadhi while driving a car? Yes, it was a kind of kundalini. It's very slowly shifting. No, you're right. He didn't listen without, you know... He didn't blow the next car? Yeah. Can't relax even. I never thought that I was clean here, but yeah, okay. And that was really very inspiring to me. I think it was very inspiring, and I enjoyed very much being in the group. And, Maite, please close the gaps of my memory, what I can't really make. You're saying my memory is broken, yeah? Myself, I have memory gaps. A lot. And... I mean the emphasis was much more on consciousness and awareness as opposed to different states of mind.

[09:52]

We only touched it briefly in the beginning, the states of mind. Okay. Good. Thank you very much. That was good. And there's one more. Okay. We tried to relate that into the epic. Yes. So what we tried in our group was that we tried to relate our everyday experiences to the concepts you've presented.

[11:08]

And most of the experiences were related to this concept of awareness. and for me it was very nice to see that in my group that people in my group were quite familiar with with awareness so that this was something they were it was very familiar to them and and also and it was quite natural natural for me so it was So it was natural that there is something like awareness exists and that there are different circumstances where this awareness appears in our, or can be experienced in our life.

[12:25]

So, for instance, in your professional life, for instance, as a counsellor, as a consultant, where you try to help without being too much eager to know too much. Or if you have a child, if it's your own child, you are used to treating your own child less judging or not judging at all. Some parents are treated unchallenged. More judging, but yes. Yeah. You sometimes wish you were someone else's child.

[13:39]

I believe that's the way I'm raised enough. Yeah. For me, it was very important in this seminar. I'm very nice to experience in this seminar because I have to use consciousness in my job very much as an instrument. So for me it was important in this seminar and very beautiful to experience in this seminar that although I use consciousness very instrumental and have to use it in my job, that at the basis of my work, which is very much team work, there is a mutual and shared awareness.

[14:53]

And also, the people I'm working with don't know about something like awareness. And if they would be confronted with the concept, they would probably say that there is not something like awareness. And whether this work is successful or not, and whether this teamwork is successful or not, whether this feeling of being a team can be realized is very much dependent on whether there is this kind of awareness or not. So for me it is very important that I realized in this seminar that although there is consciousness underneath there is awareness and that it's very important that consciousness is possible.

[16:19]

I learned it's possible to trust. Yeah, yeah. But there was a lot more going on in the group than what I said, and I would invite all the other group members also to add to my report. Thank you. See what happens. He may tell you now. So what was very important for me, and it was also very obvious, the most obvious for me in the group was that awareness is there when it spreads out through the body.

[17:45]

So it's in the body. Yeah, right. That's right. What I realized is that there is a connection between awareness and consciousness. So if I want to amplify awareness, I have to use consciousness. It's like a feedback loop. So without awareness there is no perception of the world in the sense that the holographic world is not perceivable only by consciousness.

[19:05]

Yeah, you couldn't douse by consciousness. You douse for water or something like that. Not that that's whole biography, but you douse for water, you douse with awareness. With even awareness suspended with your body. And the sticks or the whatever are ways to make it physical and take it out of consciousness. I suddenly had an image of a sender where the teacher is not carrying a stick, but he's carrying a Gaussian rod. But we do douse each other all the time, if we can read the feeling.

[20:44]

So I really want to say something about this bodily component of awareness. Because last time I really made a very telling experience for me. A very telling experience for me. so the other day I participated in a sitting group who were then one day sitting and there was a woman who was the leader of the group and she yeah And she also declared herself somehow as the teacher of the group.

[22:06]

And we sat together in the morning and after lunch there was a group where we sat in a circle and we shared our experience of what so ever. And before we started to share experiences, the teacher also made a short introduction and also teached a little bit. And I was quite attentive and also very interested. And after a while, I realized that I was almost not able to sit upright anymore.

[23:24]

And I realized that my energy almost completely collapsed. And today I would say from Heinz-Hein that she tried to explain the practice of Zen. And it's really not my intention now to talk about somebody else in putting it on. For me, it came clear that nothing was really conveyed, but the only thing that was conveyed was... well done, and in myself, annoyance formed inside of me.

[24:43]

Yeah, yeah. This teaching was hard to follow and it was somehow beautiful in the sense that she used beautiful potention and so on. And therefore, how good it is and how I can sit here and how I also notice how we are all immersed in a kind of bar style. And I realized how good it is or how joyful it is that all of us we could somehow dive into a kind of awareness together here in the cell. And I had the feeling that somehow you and your presence and what you conveyed somehow enables that, this process.

[26:06]

I hope so. You didn't say anything, had you? No. No. I know, but you're in the smallest of all groups. So I didn't participate in Angkor, but I decided to be with my family. Yeah, it was a small group. I noticed it. So I'm very much dealing with this question of awareness and consciousness, not only in my own sitting or practice, but also in my profession and in the therapeutic practice.

[27:19]

And the other day I participated in a seminar on healing of trauma with Peter Levine. And what I'm really thinking about is that we entered this, or got access to, by entering awareness. How do you discover your past time? Why do you raise your hands up? And by this bodily awareness we brought new pictures, images into our bewuszen consciousness and we connected them also again with our bodily awareness.

[28:30]

uh and i i'm questioning myself whether i i'm posing this question to myself whenever is the connection with your teaching and uh also the connection with uh healing of trauma Because I was able to experience something new, extraordinary, special in this process. And this is a kind of healing I don't, I'm lacking really words for. And on the other hand, since this seminar feels somehow more complete, since the seminar with Mr. Levine, or this seminar, since this seminar with the student of Mr. Levine, I think,

[29:51]

So my question is, is there some here, a connection somewhere where your teaching and these teachings are somehow crossing up? Yeah, a couple of the data, is there a meeting point between? Yeah. Because there was much, in what you said, there was much discrimination in trying to separate different concepts and I couldn't feel an enfoldedness. You couldn't feel an enfoldedness in what I was saying. So for me, I can feel now the separation and I didn't experience much, or not enough, the enfoldedness.

[31:01]

I'm sorry. It took me a while. And I don't know if there's a, I couldn't tell if there's a connection between what you, this seminar you went to and what we're doing because I wasn't there. And I can't say whether there was a connection or not. I can't say that because I participated in this seminar and I think that you are the one who has to say whether there is a connection or not. And in order to be able to talk about that, I did not feel enough this enfoldedness in your teaching. What do you mean by unfoldedness? It's a word I've been using, but I don't know if you mean it the same way I do. What do you mean by unfoldedness? So at the moment I have the feeling that there are two things.

[32:25]

One is awareness, and the other thing is consciousness. And listening to the critical calls, I have heard that there are different minds and state of minds and mode of minds. which developed. And it's hard for me to describe but I have a feeling that they are somehow mutually conditioned by one another. Or we are mutually creating each other.

[33:25]

And I have the feeling that I somehow... I have a feeling for it and I somehow... I have a feeling for it, but the feeling is not strong enough yet. Okay. Vielen Dank. Ja. Yeah, my question is a bit in direction. It will be a bit clearer anyway. I'm concerned with it since this morning. I wasn't here yesterday afternoon when you had these groups. But what I realized this morning by the reports and also by your teaching, by all these different... aspects and one and the other, I mean one stages, which one comes after the other.

[34:40]

Which was, in a way, fascinating to listen to the reports. And then the question came, but is it part of Buddhist teaching Is that part of Buddhist teaching, or is it for us Westerners to get it into our consciousness, actually? Because anyway, I think if we just practice, actually this is what appears. The awareness, certainly, by just practicing. And to understand it, I mean, to get it into consciousness, we have to make our brain working, this is what happens, and this is what happens, and then this is what happens. Anyway, it makes me happy because I feel, yeah, that's exactly how it happens. But what is the necessary part of it? Because it then gets stronger, or because I feel, well, I'm right in doing what I'm doing.

[35:49]

Is it a Western tradition, just in which we are, and that's why it's important to know all this, but actually it is, again, taking it in our brain, taking it in our consciousness. And to my feeling, consciousness is very important, because if I get something conscious, if I become conscious of something, well, then it's right, then it's there. But is it indispensable? I mean, is it necessary? Or is actually practice what is necessary? Because then it evolves anyway. It's a bit complicated with many words, but the question that came to me when I heard these reports and also the teachings of Roshi this morning, where I noticed all these differentiations and processes of mental states or different mind aspects. And is this now part of Buddhist teaching?

[37:01]

Does this also happen effectively in Japan or in East Asia? Or is this a confession to us, Western civilization, that we simply want to understand things? And to understand means to bring us into consciousness. And there I am again, that I say, for me, consciousness is wahnsinnig wichtig, weil wenn ich etwas ans Bewusstsein gebe, dann ist es mir klar, dann ist es plötzlich aus dem Unbewussten hochgekommen. Oder genügt es im Grunde einfach nur zu praktizieren, weil es dann sich sowieso entwickelt, um was es geht, nämlich Gewahrsein sowohl als auch Bewusstsein und Well, these are English words. That would be slightly different words in the traditional way of doing it, but not much different.

[38:30]

and many more words, that if I went into more detail in a traditional way, what is your feeling tone in the act of allowing a perception to gather? That's the usual word that's translated, the feeling tone. What is the feeling but the tone of the feeling? So can you tell us what degree of conceptualization is in the mind at the time of the gathering? And what is the directionality of the mind that we also observe? Is the directionality, as in the Five Standards, toward consciousness or toward awareness? Or is the directionality toward negative factors or positive factors?

[39:55]

What degree of self-referential thinking is there? This process of allowing the perception together, traditionally analyzed much more minutely than I have done. So I'm trying to balance what degree of detail do I bring into it. And I decided to bring more detail than I usually do, but much less than is traditional. You know, I started out with talking about this tuning to generosity. For example, if this acceptance is characterized by...

[41:19]

generosity, you find a somewhat different gathering. And the six parameters, which are the lay and bodhisattva practice, are really in a way rooted or based in this kind of understanding. Now, I would bring uniqueness in in the way I've done it. Because any teaching at this level would assume the practitioner already always experiences uniqueness and not repetition. But since we so often experience entities and our language supports the perception of entities,

[42:49]

For most of us, that's not taken for granted. So, appearance, we have the word appearance, but also it would be assumed that Already you develop a mind where your initial mind is always acceptance without thinking. But I think most of us don't have a simple habit. of when you see a person, you feel without thinking, or you walk in a room, you open the door, you feel the room before you think. Those who have this, take them for granted when they teach you like this. But I think I have to point them out because we have habits of generalizing or thinking at an initial state of mind.

[44:16]

And you've practiced a long time, so this may all be clear to you. But I've found over the years for sure that just practicing doesn't work. Then we can just take my simple example of the space separator connect. If you think space separates, which is a cultural view, this view is prior to perception. So as prior to perception, your senses will confirm that space separates.

[45:29]

But if you take a gate phrase like already connected, You can shift this view. And you will find that you feel like you're in a liquid. Space is connected. And you also find out to sustain that, you have to be in awareness and not thinking. But at that simple level of how views affect us, Simply doing zazen a lot and the usual things one does when one practices, you never reach at the level of the views that are behind perception.

[46:45]

So my experience is not that you're saying just practice, but my experience is that in the West or in Asia, if people just practice, they confirm their cultural views. And in Japan, for instance, The majority of people are called Zen masters. The biggest majority are called temple Roshis.

[47:47]

They're only called Roshis in their temple. But the ones that you would call enlightened are enlightened within their culture, not free of their culture. I asked Suzuki Roshi a question once about how many really enlightened Zen masters there would be in Japan. He meant three of their culture. I meant, and he understood that. He said, certainly less than ten. And I said, when Buddhism was at its height and strong, how many would there be? He said, maybe twenty. And he said, So this effort to get under the skin of your culture and your views is what this teaching is aimed at.

[49:08]

And really, current acceptance are pretty much the same. Really, it pretty much the same word, it's just I'm trying to open it up a bit. In our own philosophical tradition, Heidegger sends two or three volumes on just gathering. So the letting... the world gather, letting perception gather.

[50:16]

Or to find some word like to pause within the particular. It's a phrase I'm trying to get which will stop you or help you stop in the midst of the world appearing. Okay, I don't know if that helps at all. Yeah, I didn't doubt it for a second that this was most revealing, but what I want to say is actually it's putting it into consciousness. It's getting conscious about it.

[51:18]

Yes, of course. Consciousness is really very important. I never said it wasn't. Yeah, well, it just happened. It appears to me that it is so important because by experiencing it, it's a second and very important step to... Well, I mean, for instance, Dogen says... He clearly was talking primarily about the mind of grasses and trees. Which is a kind of Zen technical term for the mind of enfolded. Yeah. And then, But he lists several minds in this little passage. And one of the minds he lists is discriminating consciousness.

[52:21]

Now, a surrogate statement is that discriminating consciousness is necessary for most of the work we do in the world. But from the point of view of practice, The main point of it is to point toward practice. It's through discriminating consciousness, he says, that you decide to practice. So, of course, I'm using discriminating consciousness to help you decide how you want to practice. But if you identify with discriminating consciousness or consciousness as reality, then it's very hard to practice this.

[53:44]

Now, Going back to Christine's, what she said. Gary Snyder, the poet and one of the pioneers of Zen in America. I may have mentioned this earlier, I don't remember. He went to see his teacher just before he died, his Japanese Zen teacher. And his teacher said, Only two important aspects of Zen.

[54:45]

For him. Zazen. And sweeping the temple. And he said, and no one knows how big the temple is. So from that point of view, your office is the temple. And what I didn't, what I started thinking earlier more about enfoldment, what I'm calling enfoldment, though there's no such word, I decided it was too deep because I was going to speak about suffering gate and other such gates, and I decided I can't do it in such a short time. But from the point of view of We don't know how big the temple is.

[55:59]

But this practice of enfoldment with others and with the world It's exactly the same at the office as at the sender. Maybe easier or more difficult, but basically it's the same. And as I think you implied, your group, even if they don't know or would be startled by the idea of awareness, are actually functioning in awareness. Und ich glaube, was du impliziert hast, ist, dass diese Gruppe, obwohl sie es ablehnen würde oder ziemlich verwundert werden, wenn sie von diesen Ideen hören würden, dass sie trotzdem im Gewahrsein funktionieren.

[57:06]

Okay. Möchte noch irgendjemand etwas fragen? So a question you touched upon rather briefly. The difference between shamatha and vipassama. You don't put questions with what? I don't want to put the question and not to make a call for it. But in Zen, one of the things that differs, in which sometimes people get said that within Mahayana, Zen is the school which is closest to Theravada Buddhism.

[58:13]

No, partly simply because it emphasizes meditation more than any other Mahayana school, and in that it's similar to Theravada. And that is also the case because most of the Mahayana schools emphasize meditation, and therefore are very close to the Theravada. But in one way, different. It merges shamatha and vipassana. They're not seen as separate practices. Although, in fact, the initial development of your practice could be called shamatha. So the distinction I made when I held this up is more a distinction just in the context of Buddhism, not of Zen practice.

[59:18]

And Zen doesn't... Zen assumes That consciousness evolves. And that Buddha is the beginning of our practice, but not the end of our practice. And most Buddhist schools assume Buddha is the end of the practice, but then assumes more fundamentally that Buddha is the beginning. So we have sayings like, we are born in the same lineage, but we die in a different lineage. So that understanding is why there's no maps or guided notations. These are not stages or phases.

[60:54]

So when you sit, we always say something like uncorrected mind. Or Sukhya Rishi would say, each of you will have your own enlightenment. That's very different than assuming there's one enlightenment I can or someone can lead you all to. So Zen assumes that you may experience things that the Buddha never experienced and no one has ever experienced. So in ways like that, Zen differs from Theravada and the idea of the past. So we don't really make those distinctions. The feeling in Zen practice is to get you started, but then let you find out for yourself.

[62:26]

Also give you some help in what to notice. Okay, let's do something else that we can, yeah? I think one of the most important things for this world is the rest, the rest of the world. When I get into it and feel it, feelings like aggression, separation, etc., and I can deal with it myself, because I think I am part of it, these feelings are also part of me, to let them flow, Well, when we start to practice so often again,

[63:29]

our sense of our boundaries change and may get more permeable. And practice is also a way to make our boundaries clear. are feeling centered clearer. And the words I always use is you want to find a way to seal yourself, but not armor yourself. And quite often people feel when they start to practice, after a while, a vulnerability or openness that they don't know how to, an intimacy they don't know how to work with.

[65:07]

This is part of the crafter practice you have to discover. And that is a part of the craftsmanship that you discover. Part of the practice, the fundamental practice, is learning to stop leaking. And a part of it is to learn that you don't... I mean, it's a simple thing like you're writing a poem and somebody asks you about it and you tell them about it and then you can't write the poem. So whatever made you able to Find a tree, a poem, and not just a tree.

[66:24]

Well, I think people, when they first do a sashin, afterwards, if they talk about the sashin or something, you lose whatever happened in the sashin. And after a Sashin, for instance, if you do leak, you feel much worse than you did at any point in the Sashin. So during the sashing, there's rules like don't talk and things like that. But then after a sashing, you have to find ways to speak intimately. and at the same time not leaking.

[67:35]

So how can you find a way to speak which nourishes you and you don't leak? And we could say that means what speech means in the Eightfold Text. Now, I watched Sophia in... When we first pretty much came to the States, to Colorado last... When did we arrive? Last October, maybe, something like that. And she was still learning not only... I think a conceptualization process precedes the language process. She was clearly more in the process of conceptualizing the world and not yet languaging the world.

[68:47]

And she's dealing all the time with my expectations, her mother's expectations. And at this particular time when the incident I'm describing, And at this very special time, this little incident that I would like to describe. In Bound Igor. In Bound Igor. Der Hund Igor, ein großer pyreneescher Berghund. And when she left for Germany, he was about this big. And that's just a new puppy, but still that big. Also, als wir nach Deutschland gegangen sind, da war er noch eine kleine Welpe, nicht wirklich klein, aber eine Welpe.

[70:00]

But when she came back, she was this enormous dog with a head about twice as big as mine. And I'm simultaneously trying to say something to her, and Marie-Louise was talking to her from the kitchen. And I watched all this input. And I saw her do something very basic. I saw her find her composure. She literally lifted up through her backbone. She literally lifted up through her backbone. And there was this pause while she gathered herself. And this had reached about here. You could see it in her body. At that point, I saw the templates. Templates? cultural template from her mother and from me and how she's supposed to behave and how to deal with the dog

[71:22]

So you want to find out how to find this composure. That is one physical way to do it. And part of not leaking is to learn how not to sacrifice your state of mind. So maybe I'll end with a brief description of the paramita. Because as I mentioned earlier, it's also rooted in this kind of practice of hearing, practice of diamonds. The first parameter is generosity. It means that in each situation, particularly in situations with another person, You feel willing to give the person whatever they need.

[72:50]

That's the feeling you have. The second part is discipline, but it means discipline in the sense of willing to learn. Discipline at school so that you can learn. Discipline, no, training. So the first attitude is you're willing to give the person whatever they need. At the same time, you're willing to receive whatever they have to give. You're willing to learn from the other person, even put your feeling sense below them. And the third parameter is patience. And it literally means this. You wait for patience. the situation together.

[74:14]

And the fourth is vitality or vigilance or effort. I need several words because One word doesn't cover it. For instance, the word for concentration What we translate from Buddhist terms as concentration, zum Beispiel das buddhistische Wort, das wir als Konzentration übersetzen, actually means intentional one-pointedness that gathers. Bedeutet eigentlich absichtsvolle intention, one-pointedness, Einspitzigkeit, die sich versammelt, that gathers, die sich versammelt, oder die sich sammelt.

[75:20]

Okay, so vitality, vigilance. Vigilance means not to sacrifice your state of mind. Energy to be in that space of both generosity and receiving. And then the fifth and sixth are mindfulness or meditation. And the sixth is wisdom. And so it's actually a description of how you can be with each person. If you take as a practice to be with each person, with a feeling of giving them whatever they want, and certain things to learn from them, and have the patience to let that happen in the energy and to be there in a meditative or mindfulness state and to be there through appreciative awareness which is another translation of wisdom

[76:52]

That practice with each person is the womb of a bodhisattva. So let's sit for a minute. So sitzen wir für eine Minute und dann können wir Schluss machen. Das Gefühl für diese Pause in der Einzelheit It's also a feeling of, I don't have another word for it except softness. Das ist auch ein Gefühl für, und ich habe kein anderes Wort dafür, für diese Weichheit.

[78:08]

Or gratitude, joy that arises for no reason. Oder auch für diese Dankbarkeit und diese Freude, die aufsteigt ohne irgendeinen Grund. So this pause is not a length of time, but a kind of awakening in the softness of the world.

[78:29]

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