You don't get along with them or you don't spend much time with them. You'd really rather have dinner with someone else. And yet usually at the same time there's a tremendous commitment. So it's interesting, then we have a kind of friendship that we could say where commitment is predominant but not liking necessarily. There is a kind of friendship where this obligation sounds like it would be imposed. Where you feel that you take care of the person is more in the foreground than that you like someone, for example, that you feel obligated towards them.

[01:11]

This word in German sounds like a rule which you apply commitment. It doesn't feel like something which comes from inside so much. How would you say you make a commitment to being a painter, say? you make a commitment to Zen practice. I mean, how do you... Verschreiben? Verschreiben. Sich widmen. Sich widmen. Ja. Verschreiben oder sich widmen, also sich dahin geben, mehr als dass man sich jetzt... Because verpflichten is like a duty. It sounds like a duty. Well, then you have to use the word that has... Because commitment might be a duty in English, but that's not the emphasis. Obligation is duty, but commitment is something from inside. We call that an inner promise. Okay, let's have some inner promises. It's all different. Okay.

[02:36]

Yeah. I made the experience this year that friendship can change. I live with two women and one of them was always my friend. The other one is the sister of the friend. We sat together in February and we said to each other that we would do this every morning. It just more friendship and love kind of arose out of that. It fascinates me. Just through sitting together. We should have you do an advertising testimonial for Zen practice.

[03:49]

Families that sit together, stay together. You know, when you're a kid in English, you say... One child said, one kid said to the other, did you do that? And you say, no, I didn't do it. And you say, really? You say, cross my heart and hope to die. It means you really promise, you cross your heart and hope to die, if you're wrong. So I make a kind of bad joke sometimes when people ask me, what is Zen practice? I say it's to cross your legs and hope to die. So that's what you found out.

[04:58]

Thank you. Yes. I've got six children. Whoa! Congratulations. I'm surprised you have time to be here. Yes. Last year I separated from my husband. And yesterday morning I saw him first after seven months. One of our discussions was always the education of the children. Yesterday morning he told me, he as a parent cannot be friend of his children.

[06:01]

And I always felt it differently and I always practised it differently. I went there with my heart and my intuition doing it. How can I bring this closer to him? He really just doesn't get what I mean. He doesn't understand me. And you still have to make decisions together about the children? That's fine for me. It's just my feeling towards him.

[07:04]

Because he kind of completely reclused himself from the churras. It's not good for him and it's also not good for the churras. Well, I think if one wants to do something in a circumstance like that, you have to really spend quite a bit of time coming up with a strategy. But over time might change the circumstances. But such an attitude is, I think, usually so deeply embedded it's very difficult to find a way to nudge it into a different direction.

[08:05]

We do defend ourselves against intimacy. Yeah. Anyway, thank you for bringing that up. Maybe during our time some good idea will come up. In you. In you. Okay, someone else. Yes. My closest friends that I looked at and noticed that they're very different to each other. Some of them, especially one friend, I'm connected through the same things. The contrary things connect me.

[09:28]

Or in one person I also have both aspects. How the friendship came together is very different from one to the other. I got to know him 15 years ago and after half an hour it was a really kind of intimate relationship. I also noticed the relationship grows so slowly that I actually don't want anymore when this started to become fragile. It's interesting. And I think my own experience in life is that there are so many, as you say, different kinds of friendship. But if you value friendship, if friendship is really important in your life, and then you make an effort to make that friendship possible, discover ways to, she has trouble with the word, but to enact friendship.

[10:46]

I think friendship becomes one of the great treasures in one's life. And maybe for many of us, Sangha is an entry to friendship. Or practice is an entry. But I do want to speak about what Buddhism... I want to see if we can feel what Buddhism means by friendship. But first we have to start with what we ourselves mean by friendship. I don't know what the situation is in Germany in regards to friendship. The main thing I notice here is that people are much closer to their families than in the United States.

[12:06]

You live often near your family. And even if you live on the other side of Germany, by American standards, it's real near your family. It's common in America to have like, you live in the equivalent of Lisbon and your parents live in St. Petersburg. It's pretty hard to actually just physically see each other. And people tend to know in Europe, and it's also true in Germany, and it's also true in Japan, people tend to know people they grew up with very often.

[13:11]

I would say in Japan the main friendships are the network of people you grew up with. But in general in America people do not know the people they grew up with and they don't have much connection with family. But women seem to have friends, and particularly middle-aged women develop friendships, strong friendships. At least in the part of America that I know, America is a complicated place. But in general in America, in both America I know and it's also been quite written about, It's men don't usually have friends in America.

[14:31]

It's hard for men to be really friends with each other and trusting and open. Yeah. So anyway, I'm just saying we have to start with the actual... I think to think about anything, we have to start with what our own experience in our own life and our own culture is of friendship in this case. Okay. Someone else? What does Buddhism say to friendship and to expectations, expectations in a friendship?

[15:39]

Well, I'd like to leave how practice and Buddhism in general think about friendship till a little later. I'm interested in our experience of friendship. And maybe gender differences in friendship. Yes. Loyalty, yes. because that's for sure very strong.

[16:41]

You can hate them maybe, your sisters, but you're loyal to them. It's not noticed in myself now. It starts to sink in. Once it starts to really like, very good love, to see that as friendship, what's happening with us there. So I'm just changing this idea now. I think so. I think one can develop a friendship with a sibling, which is not the same as just being a brother or sister. And some, I mean, one of the great relationships in Buddhism is between Vasubandhu and Asanga. And Asanga. And they were brothers. And they basically founded the Yogacara school of Buddhism.

[17:51]

And they both, I don't know too much about it and it's a long time ago so it's hard to know historically. But they both studied lots of different things. And Asanga settled on Buddhism. And then he convinced his younger brother Vasubandhu to join him in practice. And Vasubandhu is actually, it looks like Vasubandhu was quite a lot smarter and more creative than his older brother. I mean, they were both, you know, sort of geniuses, but anyway. But this is a complicated relationship because they were brothers and then they became friends and then they became practitioners.

[18:59]

And then one became the disciple of the other. And the disciple then exceeded the brother of the teacher. But mastering these complexities of relationship produced a teaching that lasts until today. And I don't think you can separate their power of how they looked at the world Through, you can't separate that from their being brothers and friends. I know I said the other day in Johanneshof that my first sangha was Sukhiroshi. I had some feeling of practice in the world but I had no confirmation for it because everyone around me had a different view of the world.

[20:25]

So I when I met Sukhirashi there was a tremendous feeling of relief. I felt my world expand, not just to include him, but to include everything. Somehow one other person allowed my own world to expand. Yeah, my own world, my own personal world to expand. And then in that expanded sense of a personal world, he was able to teach me And then my world expanded through him.

[21:33]

But then also contracted back into myself. This is another complex event. It's part of my sitting here now. Which is an act of friendship. Because we were basically, in Zen, your teacher is your friend, primarily. And the relationship you establish is the teacher. But it's a not... It's friendship, but it's also not the usual friendship. I didn't go to the movies with him. Yeah, okay. Though I went to movies and I found out he liked... Yes, I met her, in fact.

[22:48]

And she's also my friend. Mm-hmm. And we have a common practice. And we've got a common practice. And actually, I'm all right. You can speak English, right? No, I don't understand English at all. And she is the model for, I think, an open relationship. My capability of having an open relationship to somebody else. The feeling that you've been seen.

[23:52]

And to share a whole life. And at one point in our life, when we were 15 or 16, both sides, I think, but the right side very strongly, this recognition or insight that we have to separate in order to be able to And it's then when I noticed the necessity that I have to open myself towards other people. Because before I didn't need that, this relationship to the system was already totally sufficient.

[25:09]

Strangely enough, this closeness was already there and given, but there's no way that you can just rest or relax, but this experience searches for more or has to be directed to other people. And that this also between us, we have this feeling, the accompanied feeling, that we always have to also separate again. Okay. Thank you. Yeah, I think also even without a close sibling or twin-sibling relationship, often people have one good friend for years as a child and then another long-time good friend.

[26:39]

And at some point you have to move out of one good friend into having a number of friends. And finding in each friendship a way to be friendly with others. I think at each stage in life, friendship requires different kinds of skills and maturity. I know two twin friends identical twin women.

[27:48]

And when they are very close and often as identical twins especially do, they develop their own language and everything. They often knew what each other felt, I mean completely virtually. even at a distance and one time this one of the sisters I know much better than the other she was she had a dream that she had to get away from her sister and it was so strong she dreamed she murdered her sister So she woke up a few moments before her sister, who was in the same room, And she was thinking, oh, God, what a terrible dream to murder my sister.

[29:02]

And then her sister woke up and said, oh, I just had a dream I murdered you. So here, I mean, they had the same dream, and the dream was... But they're now in their 50s, and they... I've learned to have a long friendship together. But they did have to separate for a while. What time should we have lunch? One o'clock. So, something else? Yes. Oh, when Roshi said he doesn't go in the cinema with Suzuki Roshi. I remember my astonishment in May. Maybe astonishment isn't strong enough, but it is a happy surprise what all my friends, in difference to my friends from before, have shown me.

[30:15]

I left Johannesburg yesterday and we were all in the kitchen preparing breakfast. There were seven or eight people and they were people I would not have chosen in that sense, as a friend. And it was really the most different professions. And it was still, we cut vegetables together, we cooked water and made tea, we rested and prepared breakfast. And in this situation it is an intensity for me, I think for the others too, it has become tangible. which I can rarely reach with good friends. Usually I don't prepare breakfast or cut vegetables or wash, but to experience intensity, I go to the cinema or eat very well. And this power, which only belonged to me in dharma friendships, I have heard from Roshe again and this is for me one of the important things that I would like to discuss here at the seminar today.

[31:39]

Because I think that at this point the possibilities of friendship that are not built in normal friendships. And the surprising thing for me is the simplicity of the situation that supports that. Just like you said, sit together and sit together, do nothing, and not talk to each other. Yeah, one of the joys of my life is is that I live with a sangha.

[32:52]

I don't go to the movies with people much, but still basically I live with people that I wouldn't know through ordinary friendship. Somehow all other ways one associates with people except jobs, leads you into relationships that are quite similar. But practice brings people together who wouldn't normally know each other. But somehow brought together by vision more than any other reason. There are shared some kind of gut sense of how to enter the world. To me it's every day a gift that I get to spend time with so many different kinds of people.

[34:16]

And I feel tremendously connected with each of you I practice with. But if we went for a walk together, we might not know what to talk about. Because our personal experience is quite different. But if we get out of that personal experience, out of images, then there's somehow some connectedness. I think people notice it when they become friends with someone who doesn't speak the same language. Marie-Louise and I had a conversation about this last night.

[35:24]

And she has had a number of experiences like that. And I, in Japan, have had quite a lot of experiences like that. Although I speak Japanese, you know, moderately well. And when I lived there, I could do everything in Japanese. I never knew Japanese well enough to really have intimate conversations. complex conversations. Plus, Japanese idea of friendship is to be next to each other, not to talk to each other. So at first it's rather disconcerting for Westerners. You may go on a trip with someone.

[36:48]

Maybe you drive in a car for an hour and a half and then you're on the train for three hours. Then you take a walk and a bath. And then you see some people and do something. And in the whole time, maybe ten words are spoken. They just sit beside each other. And you try to talk and they think, why are you interrupting the friendship? So what happens, it's interesting when you, and it might be part of the reason, I know in fact it is part of the reasons I haven't learned German. Also, I'm stupid, but that's... You guys have made just too complicated a language for me. But anyway, because there's some... You have to enter the field of the other person.

[37:51]

And when you begin to have a friendship outside language, you have to pick up many small things that tell you what's going on that you can't find out by speaking. But of course, even in the midst of language, you can learn to do that. But language tends to interfere. with knowing the person from their side. The more you get into The field of another person.

[39:20]

Or you establish a field with another person. Field. That field tends to let you feel them from their own side. And Sukhirashi used to speak about that. Don't always know things from your own side. Well, you could say that, but... Yeah, that's great, but how do you do anything about it? One of the ways is to try to enter the field, the shared field of the relationship. Now I'm talking about something quite slippery. I mean, it's hard to get hold of this.

[40:21]

But I'm trying to find some words to lead us in this direction. Aber ich versuche, Worte zu finden, die uns in diese Richtung führen. There's various words we could use for friendship. Es gibt eine Vielzahl von Worten, die wir anstatt Freundschaft verwenden können. One is, I used last night, is dance. Who do you dance with? Also ein Wort ist wie das von gestern, tanzen. Mit wem tanzt du? But we could also use usher. Sometimes people have a feeling of ushering us, leading us into something. There are some people who are ushers in our life.

[41:23]

They may not have much relationship to us, but they showed you where your seat was. They led you somewhere and said, why don't you sit here instead of over there? Why don't you take this course instead of that course? I have a strange relationship like that with a friend. I was in college. And I decided to leave college one day. And I don't know, I just decided to leave. So I got a little trailer and filled it with my stuff. It was only three months to graduation, but I thought, what the heck?

[42:40]

Who wants a college degree? And anyway, I wanted to enter the world naked. I mean, not really naked, but you know what I mean. I didn't want to enter the world with the prestige of a college degree and stuff like that. I want to make life a little difficult for myself. Yeah, it'll be more fun that way. So I, you know, like it's 11 o'clock at night, 11.30 at night. And I finally got this little trailer full of my stuff. And I hadn't told the college I was leaving or anything. I figured they'd figure it out. So I drove off. I went out and got ready to drive.

[43:55]

So I thought, it might be more fun to do this with a friend, though. Yeah. So I drove over to where my friend was. He was in the mathematics department. And so I went up and knocked on his door. I said, I'm leaving college, do you want to leave too? And he stood there a minute and he said, why not? And he said, but I don't have any shoes. I know he said that. I can't remember why he didn't have any shoes. I don't know, but maybe it was quite snowing out. And actually, being a poor student, somebody had given me some shoes, some...

[44:56]

months before. Nice shoes with the little holes in them, you know, leather things. But they were too big for me. So I said, well, I've got a pair of shoes in the car. He said, okay, so... So... So I was the usher. I gave him the shoes. He packed his stuff. By two o'clock we were in the morning driving down. We've seen him a few times since. But I certainly was an usher in his life. I like the word pilot too. Pilot actually comes from the word foot. So the pilot still has his foot on the ground somehow.

[46:12]

But originally it meant, it came to mean something like, it was something like the paddle of a boat. And then it became the rudder of the boat. And then it became the person who steered the rudder. Sometime in France it became a balloonist. Person who drives a balloon. So now we think of it as mostly an airline pilot, but they're boat pilots too. So some of these words, I just try to suggest various forms of friendship. It was certainly an act of some kind of intuition on my part to realize if I went and asked him, he was ready to go.

[47:17]

We'd never talked about it, but he was ready to leave. And neither of us have ever looked back and said, oh, that was a mistake. So I gave him the shoes and we flew. Okay. Now when you can when you have a sense of knowing of the field of a person You don't have to be rather careful because it's so close to falling in love. I mean, I know lots of, again, having lived in Japan a long time. Sometimes a Japanese and a Western person fall in love not knowing the language.

[48:32]

When they finally learned to speak together, they found they're not compatible at all. So one of the things that happens is what I would say are micro-movements. And micro-movements are part of the path and part of practice. I gave some Sazan instruction the other day in Johanneshof. To not just lift through the backbone, the spine. But to feel the space of each part of the body. And open that space up. Essentially with what I'd have to call micro-movements. Tiny feelings of like spreading, moving the legs outward.

[49:51]

They're almost imaginary movements. And then tiny movements of moving that space up into, in this case, your gut. And I think we talk in English, we say a visceral feeling for the world. That means to feel a kind of physical in-touchness with the world. A physical topography of the world. Which goes way beyond language. And visceral means, in German too, maybe your gut, your viscera.

[51:07]

Also viscera bedeutet... Your intestines. Die inneren Organe auf Deutsch. And then you sort of feel like you're moving your hips out slightly, left and right, front and back. And all the way up through the body, moving a sense of opening a space up and moving it to the next space. Moving the tips of the lungs up into the shoulders. And moving the shoulders out slightly. Spreading and making space. So that's an example of what I mean by micro-movements. But when you know the field of another person, and you come into that out of language, outside of language, you begin to pick up micro-movements from the person.

[52:36]

Very tiny things. And that's very much like being in love. In that relationship, there's tiny little movements both of you tune into. So you have to be careful in practicing entering a path with another person. The intimacy of practice is most fulfilled through a normal friendship and not through being in love. This is a territory we have to learn.

[53:38]

If you have a too simplified idea of love and friendship, love and friendship don't develop. they get stuck in a simple pattern, not a complex pattern. And there is a difference when you know a person from their side and not just from your side. Now, I pointed out recently a number of times If I pick this up this way that's in the realm of consciousness. If I do things like that it establishes consciousness.

[54:40]

But if I hold it this way that's outside of consciousness. That's done with awareness. And in Buddhism and in tea ceremony for example, you tend to pick things up more like that. And if you have a number of people doing that, the whole room can go into a trance. Because it takes you out of language. It's one thing Robert Wilson, if you know who he is, does in his choreography and orchestras. Das ist etwas, das Robert Wilson macht, den ihr vielleicht kennt mit seiner Choreografie oder seinen Operinszenierungen.

[55:59]

He has, like in the ordinary opera in my head, 60 like hues, he has 400 like hues. Four hundred. And they are all cued to tiny changes in movement. Movements that are outside of consciousness. They seem like they're moving. And it puts the audience into a trance. They don't know how they got there. So he can have an eight-hour opera, you don't know what happened. I've been somewhere else. So if you want to practice with those kind of things, to remind yourself, you can find little movements to do that are outside of ordinary consciousness.

[57:08]

One is to do that. That's an unusual way to move your hand. So if you just, you know, sometimes you feel a little something, just move your fingers that way. That actually puts you in a different state of mind. And that's what mudras are about. Mudras are a language of the hands in the body. But more specifically, they're a non-ordinary language. They're a non-ordinary language. Okay, so what I'm trying to speak about here is territories of friendship and connectedness. that are in all friendships, but when you begin to see the layer, the actual experience of friendship, not the idea of friendship,

[58:43]

When you see the actual experience of friendship, not just the idea of friendship, you can begin to see that Dharma friendship is in a rather different territory than ordinary friendship. And as you pointed out in Frank pointed out. You sit with people or even cut vegetables with people. Here's this person you went to a sashimi with. You never met this guy or gal before. Diese Person, also diesen Kerl oder die Frau, habt ihr noch nie vorher gesehen. But by some mistake, the Eno sat you beside this person on Sunday.

[59:48]

Aber aus irgendeinem Fehler hat der Eno euch im Sendung neben diese Person gesetzt. And they may have some bad habits you don't like. But after a while, you've just been sitting. Seven days you sit beside this person without saying a word. Some kind of connection has started. And it's one way we could look at it is you begin to attune with each other through micro-movements. So there's an actual communication going on. It's not just because you happen to sit beside them, you get used to them. Something's going on outside the usual territory of friendship.

[60:52]

Other different and maybe deeper way of establishing connectedness of friendship. Eine andere, vielleicht sogar tiefere Art, wie man eine Freundschaft aufbauen kann. So, that's enough for this morning, I think. Also, ich glaube, das ist genug für heute Vormittag. And some of the things Frank brought up again, he hopes we could discuss more or really help me out. This afternoon, as usual, at some point I'd like to break up into smaller groups and have some conversation. You had some conversation about friendship. in general, when, you know, the friendship situation of us right here today, not just stuff from the past.

[62:21]

Friendship is at the center of practice. I said practice is immersing yourself in the sounds. It's opening yourself to the flow of the lineage. The horizontal lineage in the present. The so-called vertical lineage. of people in the past who you may be very close to. This poem that Beate put on the little poster on the between True friendship is beyond intimacy and alienation.

[63:41]

Between meeting and not meeting, there's no difference. On the old plum tree, fully blossomed, the northern branch owns the whole of spring. Dem nördlichen Zweig gehört der ganze Frühling. And the southern branch owns the whole of spring. Und der südliche Zweig, dem gehört der ganze Frühling. And this is a poem that's part of a koan. Dieses Gedicht ist Teil eines koans. Where Daowu asks Yunyan. Wo Daowu Yunyan fragt. Where will we meet after death? So let's sit for a few moments. We are drawn to friendship, drawn into friendship.

[67:06]

Friendship then does something like draw us into the future. If we have this When we have this deep trust in things as they are and things as they appear we have a saying to become one with what appears. We have this saying to become one with what appears. This kind of trust is center of friendship. Be very present in the tiniest ways in your body.

[69:59]

In the tiniest ways in your mind. And the tiniest way in your breath. We start to have the basis of And then we start to have the basics of friendship. I remember a couple of people asked me if they could meet with me to discuss practice or something.

[71:42]

I said, fine, I'd like to. Maybe this evening, we're not meeting this evening, are we? Maybe this evening you might speak to Beate and I can see one or two or three or four people if you'd like to talk about practice together. And I think they have acorn mush out there for us. I think now would be a good time to break into smaller groups. Maybe four groups of about eight people or something like that.

[72:57]

I'd like to suggest you ask yourself, do you value friendship? Do you make space for it? Do you make time for it? Or do you more or less take it for granted or think it will happen by itself? That's one question I'd like you to ask yourself. And another few questions. What is the basis of friendship? That's the secret of friendship.

[74:02]

What is the function of friendship? What's the best thing about? And maybe if we can have some feeling of that, we can then see if those questions apply to Dharma friendship. Okay. Thanks. Thank you. Of course I'd like to hear the latest news. Reports from the front lines.

[75:12]

Front lines of Dharma friendship. I'm waiting. At least one person from each group should tell me something. It's a ritual. I think it shows someone or someone is self-selecting. Okay. Yes. We work with number two. On... I don't know, one, two, three. Oh, you were the twos, okay. Die zwei. Very zwei. Nein, die zwei. Die zwei, ja. Die zwei, ja. Ich würde ganz gerne mal so ein Stichwort machen. Yeah, just read it in kind of short sentences. Wir haben den Punkt Beerschätzung.

[76:17]

Yes, giving it value or appreciation. Importance. Maybe everyone would like to hear you, too. Okay. Wertschätzung. Importance. To trust. Weggefährten. Companions or good past colleagues, you know, walking on a path. Connectedness. To accept the other the way the other one is. To keep the contact upright. What form, whatever form. And it's a dynamic process. Understanding. To take care of the other person.

[77:22]

Some kind of regularity. Some kind of... Friendship can always appear or can happen. It doesn't depend on time or duration or something like that. We also discussed the common vision. To add yourself or to integrate yourself into that, bring yourself into it. Inner connection. Being touched by. That you feel that you've been touched or you feel touched about.

[78:29]

Intimacy and home. I show myself. I let myself be recognized. Without judgment. Space for development. Longing for completion or unity, merging. Is there anything you left out? Okay, somebody else. I'll try to do it virtually if I can.

[79:39]

No, no. I'll read it to you in English so you understand. But then you have to translate it into John. I'll translate it into John. First of all, there was a problem because there's so many kinds of friends, it was hard to have a pointed departure with conversation. And so the next are mostly just comments about what friendship is or could be. Friendship needs to be cared for. Friendship was defined as a freedom to allow others to be as they are, to be appreciated as you are. Friends do things that we wouldn't necessarily approve of or do ourselves.

[80:47]

Friendship can also be created through stones, through studying. Being prepared to accept others and be accepted. Discovering those we thought to be unfriendly to be exactly the opposite. In other words, as a first impression, taking someone to be, yeah, that we're by regret to have, I can't think of names right now, unfriendly, right? And learning later that they're not so bad after all. The other point is to be less target friend-directed in allowing friends to arrive, instead of going out and looking for friends, to allow friendship to develop through contact with people without it happening.

[82:32]

And then there was a few key words like trust and being together. Then it was said that honesty and friendship is of great value. And to be a pal That's very . Then it was expressed that friendship is no coincidence. Friendship is . And then fighting with other people could be expressed as a sign of love as opposed to indifference, because the only fight with those people may be that. You like? And then the friendship, the sharing experience, the friendship during Thailand. Truth as a basis without fear of loss, that we can be truthful with other people without fear of rejection.

[83:46]

We can't expect other people to read our minds, even our friends. One thing, the best thing about friendship is joy, which is expressed. That's best in friendship, is joy. And it was expressed that the type of friendship, the type of friendship is to be open with all people. That's the type of friendship, that's the kind of design, that's the best we can offer to other life design. And it was also expressed in our group that it wouldn't be possible that everybody maybe could be our friend. That's, I feel like, that's just, it's not like there's yet other friends I come to, or at least some.

[84:59]

Okay, thank you. Someone else? It's interesting to me. Do you remember best what you say? I had the same thought in life. We didn't make a list. And I think you need That appreciation of friendship. that they, even though one thinks one actually appreciates friendship, something important, one actually did not appreciate so much, you know. And sometimes there are things happening in life which kind of make it more evident that the most important thing in life is to have friends.

[86:06]

And most of other things is that this seemed all the other than friendship seems less important or unimportant than that. And then we spoke about what position we would give the kind of treatment or caring of friendship. And then with two entrances to this kind of And what kind of forms do we develop for this kind of caring? Some inner knowing that some relationships are important. But if you have this clear understood relationship, it's important that you also have to know that this relationship needs an expression or a form.

[87:09]

So sometimes if you can keep up the form, this can make the inner importance or quality follow sometimes even, you know. And then we spoke about Dharma friendship. Maybe we have to seek performance before that there is a space just different when meeting with people that in silence you can meet and become friends which has a big respect for individuality and person which you would think the person at first glance is not really somebody you'd like or you'd choose for yourself.

[88:23]

In the Sangha and that Dharma friendship there are different types of relationships. Some are just closer to you. We asked ourselves, Lord, what kind of yield arises if two people meet, kind of nourish each other and kind of enrich each other? And to deal with the differences in the Sangha. What does it mean to practice friendship? How do you do it exactly if the people in the sangha you meet, they don't feel so nice to you? It's kind of tiring to keep the contact. open the field, that the other one can enter your field and you can enter into the person's field, that you kind of enter more friendly into this other person's field.

[89:30]

And this is in context with Is it possible or impossible? Is it to wanting to change some other person? So that's where the discussion kind of stopped because we had to stop the discussion as well, right? Yeah, it is good. Yeah. You did it really well, Christian. Okay. Our group has neither a list nor somebody who's going to present.

[90:37]

Christian is also willing. We have no Christian. You have to pray. So I also ask for addition. Douglas, I don't want to repeat what she began to talk about. How we had intensive friendships and were friends over the years. Some of these very intensive experiences which happened in Prague. determined by the political situation those days were very close to the friends and difficulties of the family and after it was very difficult in a regular circumstance to find this content again not necessarily more everyday life friends were there when you feel which you can trust

[92:00]

and we ask ourselves what can we do for friendship and then we ask ourselves what is actually done in our friendship or what can we tell because it shows that there is a problem if you have expectations but at the same time it is really difficult to have expectations The experience of meditation creates a space of openness and that is very important for the friendship and for our friendship. Meditation makes space which is good for friendship. And then we ask ourselves, what's the difference between normal friendship and a dharma friendship? How much can my girlfriend be my teacher also? And then we try to figure out the secret of our relationship.

[93:24]

And now you can help me. He says, Christian, we figured it out. So outside of that contact we just met, and if you have more energy afterwards than before, that's a secret.

[93:49]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_74.75