But I would say that if you look carefully at how that was realized, it's some version, some variation on the eightfold path. Okay. So the sense of a truth body... partially realized at that time through my practice, was able to feel the delusion I had that there was such a thing called an outside. And I really stopped in my tracks, on the tracks. And thought, I think there's an outside.

[01:01]

So I threw that down there as if it's going to disappear into the great void. And I went and picked it up, not to be a good citizen. But to support my realization that there is no outside and no inside. And my truth body kept unfolding this. In little ways. For example, I suddenly realized Japanese architecture is based on no outside-inside distinction. And it's interesting. One of the most famous buildings in Japan And uses an example of Japanese architecture.

[02:12]

In the West. The Katsura detached palace. Is... actually designed by a prince who was in love with Western architecture. So he created a building with a clear outside-inside distinction, and all the Westerners think it's great. But in a traditional building you can't really say clearly where the outside or inside begin and end. So such ideas actually begin to be influenced in everything. And I think it's not so different, again, from going back to Vienna of the late 19th century.

[03:27]

When these middle European intellectuals realized that you can't change the world by just changing the economics and the politics. The change has to be in the art and the architecture, which I think Giorgio knows well. If you're going to change the consciousness. And I also found myself realizing, seeing everything as a stomach. Und ich habe auch erkannt, dass ich alles als Magen gesehen habe. I didn't see my body as an outside and inside, but just something folded together. Ich habe meinen Körper nicht als etwas innen oder außen gesehen, sondern etwas, das zusammengefaltet ist. Yeah, that's all obvious, it's obvious.

[04:27]

Und das ist alles ziemlich offensichtlich. Something was different from then on, the way I felt it. Aber ab diesem Zeitpunkt war das anders, ich habe es anders gefühlt. suddenly nothing was hidden. There's nothing hidden. There's no night and day. Everything has a quality of sameness. So what happens when the truth body rubs up against the kind of habitual body or delusional body. Some sparks occur, insights occur. And this truth body, this body of woven together mind and body, woven together with the phenomenal world as well.

[05:38]

Not only throws off sparks or insights, but it also doesn't let them go unnoticed. And it begins to practice. The truth body says, oh, hey, okay, I bring this into my life, into my practice. Mm-hmm. Okay, so then you can begin to, by some kind of realization, through the latter part of the eightfold path, you can begin to have the ability to see into your views. almost like into the silvering of the mirror past the contents of perception contents of mind to these views which influence what the contents of mind are

[06:57]

then when you have these more wisdom views, they then transform our intentions, our speech, our conduct, our livelihood. Okay. So if there's a second part to this, it'll come in the afternoon. I think that's enough for now. Maybe let's sit for a few minutes and let Giorgio go. He has to make an important presentation today. I like the way you wag your heads at each other.

[08:13]

Are you awake? Yes. Don't be fooled by yourself. No, no. What a pleasure it is to practice with you.

[10:51]

I don't know if lunch will be ready, but I think we can manage. We're going to meet again at 2.30. Is that what we decided? Okay. Thank you very much. Yes? Thank you. Yeah, it's one of the best and sweetest sitting groups in all of Europe. Sometimes Buddha's teaching is likened to the spring rain.

[11:53]

Especially when you don't realize you're getting wet at first. And after a while you find you're soaked through. So I presented some kind of outline of the Eightfold Path. And I hope a realistic feeling for its practice. Yeah, and I hope it can... It's like, here's the Eightfold Path and here's your life. They can sort of curve into each other. But what have I left out? What doesn't make sense? Just give me some advice. Just any kind of discussion we can have. Yes.

[13:30]

No. Yes. Yes. Oh, I'm so sorry. Sunday, yes. Yeah. Okay, I'll come back to it. No, no, no. Where does intuition arise? And how is it with intention? So it's easy to mix up intention and intuition? It is. Sometimes, yes.

[14:31]

When I ask myself, is this an intuition? And I look into it and I find out, no, these were intentions which were not somehow clear. They didn't become clear. Well, you know, the word intuition is an important word for us. But it's not so important in Buddhist practice. Partly it covers so many things. First of all, at least in English, men aren't supposed to have it, only women have it. Oh, not in this case. But your feminine nature is so obvious. Yeah, sometimes intuition means something like an insight. Yeah, and sometimes it means a deeper feeling that arises from our unconscious or something.

[15:57]

Yeah, and sometimes, as you say, it might be a feeling we think is an intuition, we find out it was our intention. So I, you know, sometimes I might say that was my intuition. Actually, I don't think I ever say that anymore. I used to, but not anymore. Because for me it's not clear if I say that, what I mean. I might say it was an insight. Yeah, or a deeper feeling I had or something. but I don't have an experience of it coming from nowhere.

[17:12]

For me an intention is like I make a decision to do something, that's an intention. Like at some point I've made an intention to practice. I can tell you when it happened. Again, these are stories I've told before, but anyway. I had a good friend named David McCain and he was going to leave California and go back to New York. And so we went out and had dinner the night before he left. And I was going to drive him to the airport the next day.

[18:21]

So at the restaurant he said to me, you know, Dick, if we were really serious, We would just practice Zen the rest of our life. And I looked at him and I said, Yes, you're right. It was like something came down. I said, yes, that's right. Then we finished our dinner and he went home, I went home. And I said, I picked him up to go to the airport, 7.30 or so. And I said, I'm grateful for what you said last night. And he said, what did I say? And I said, you said, oh, I don't remember. Did I say that? So for him, it was just something he said.

[19:23]

But for me, it... And since then, I never had any other idea. What age? 25. Yeah, and I never cared whether it was a good practice or a bad practice or the right practice. I just said, yeah, what have I got to lose? I should try something, I thought. So that's an intention or a vow, something close between an intention and a vow. And vows are the root of practice. Somehow the chemistry of a vow makes a difference in what we do.

[20:34]

It's a rebuke. Yeah, I understand, yeah. Well, you could have a vow like I'll never stop trying. Because trying is part of it. It's like you can vow to be married, but you also try to be married. For a lot of us it's clear, as you pointed out, with our children, we think, okay, you hardly have to make a vow, it's just there.

[21:38]

But I think the way the unconscious works, the non-conscious works, The idea of intuition is what happens to, at least to me, becomes clearer than something I'd call intuition. It doesn't come from nowhere. But I suppose that the field or the feeling from... I'm just speculating out here. I don't know. These are all words. I'm trying... I suppose the feeling from which or the mind from which intuition comes is one that you try to awaken and have an ordinary part of your life. So I could say ideally my life or one's life is one continuous flow of intuitions. In the sense that insights are quite common, not uncommon.

[22:51]

The more you get out of a patterned way of thinking, then thinking tends to be more like insights. And the more you come out of such a thinking in patterns, the more this thinking is simply a emergence of insights. Okay, someone else? Yeah? There is feeling. Yeah. This is somewhat related to what you asked.

[24:03]

This is not a list about what our life is like. This is just, in a way, a kind of targets for attention. When you bring attention to... When you bring attention... to your speech, or to your behavior, your conduct. What you discover, what you see, is your feeling. It's like bringing a magnifying glass to something. The magnifying glass is not the feelings. So you notice in your speech and in your conduct and in your

[25:16]

livelihood, your job, that you have feelings. And through the process of seeing the way feelings and also ideas, views, intentions, etc. flow together, Again, since I'm speaking, let's talk about speaking. Yeah, I couldn't be speaking to you unless I had some... I couldn't speak to you with any... I wouldn't even do it if I didn't have a feeling of caring about you and caring about what I'm speaking. So my speaking is inseparable from caring. So when I bring my attention to my speaking, I seek caring.

[26:24]

And I find how unsatisfying it is if I have to speak in situations where I don't care. That's why I... I like social situations with friends, but I don't like social situations in general. Because you have lots of people talking about things they don't care whether they're talking to you or not, you know, talking to anyone, you know. The worst thing is when I'm in a place and somebody comes up to me and says, well, tell me about Zen, and I know they don't care one bit about anything I would say.

[27:41]

So I don't know if I could go into it more than that, but what you do is see your emotions and feelings always present. This is not a teaching about what to do with your emotions and feelings. It's a teaching about how to make your life clearer. Of course, trust is a feeling. And you find you enter into a deep feeling of trust. And that trust becomes the kind of fabric in which the weave is your feelings. Now if you practice with the four foundations of mindfulness, one of the main practices is the mindfulness of your feelings.

[29:09]

So if we take that part of Eightfold Path and open it up, then you work with being mindful of your feelings. Now, there's a number of ways to be mindful of your feelings. The most basic is to... How do I describe it? Is to notice your feelings. Die grundlegendste Form ist, die Gefühle zu bemerken. We say detached, yet not separate from.

[30:10]

So you notice your feelings, but you don't feel separate from your feelings. So, and one way you do that is when you have a feeling, whatever the feeling is, you say to yourself, oh, now, the most easy example is anger. Now I feel angry. Du sagst zu dir, jetzt fühle ich mich ärgerlich. It's actually a useful practice just to tell somebody you feel angry. Und es ist wirklich auch eine nützliche Übung, einfach jemandem zu sagen, dass man sich ärgerlich fühlt. You know, you say, what you just did really makes me feel angry. That's quite different than being angry. Das ist ganz nützlich, einfach zu jemandem zu sagen, was du gerade getan hast, das hat mich ärgerlich gemacht. Und das ist anders, als wenn man nur ärgerlich ist. Now, if you practice this and you say, oh, now I'm really getting angry. Wow, look how angry I am now. I have fun watching Sophia, you know.

[31:16]

She gets quite angry. You wonder where it's coming from. She's very loving, she's kissing her dolls, she's kissing me, and she's kissing, you know... And then suddenly she'll get this little... She'll take Marie-Louise's finger and bite it so hard she's losing a fingernail at one point. She's really kind of... I mean, she wants her separateness as well as her togetherness. I remember another anecdote when my oldest daughter is now 39. We told her once, she was about four, she grew in Japan. But she should do.

[32:33]

Her mother was telling her to do something. I told you this before. And I said, finally she wouldn't do it. And I said, look, you do it. I'm telling you as your father. And I said, look, Virginia and I made you. You belong to us. She said, too late now. I belong to me. So I said, whoa, OK. So what I find is if you practice this way of observing your emotions, noting them, you actually begin to have more and more emotions. And as you begin to feel, you don't have to act on your emotions.

[33:41]

Many emotions come up that you would have been afraid to act on. I think once you feel that you have the ability... Well, one practice is also... Am I going into too much detail here? One practice is... One practice is to, a good way to practice is to try to let yourself feel things completely. And I think in Zazen it's actually good to exaggerate your feelings. To see how angry you can really be. What kind of murderous acts you might plan. But you know, you also have the feeling, I don't have to act on it. So you don't repress, but you also don't express.

[35:05]

And after a while you find you have an amazing fabric of emotions. Yeah, it's interesting, the word emotion, because it has the word movement in it, motion. And in a way, you're letting your emotions be present, but you're stilling them because you're not either repressing them or expressing them. And you let the emotions... You let them be there, but you also silence them somehow by simply noticing them without expressing them. It's the contrary of the Christian education.

[36:07]

One told us always the same things. You have... Yeah, Dostoevsky says that, I think in Anyway, I think he says, I've read Dostoevsky for a long time, says the thought to kill the father has the same guilt as the killing the father. If that were true, you could never meditate. Because in meditation, the more open you are, all the feelings humankind has come up for, something close to that.

[37:18]

So karma is not created by thoughts. Karma is created by acts. So it's a rather different concept. I mean, thoughts influence you for sure. But it really doesn't become part of your karma until you act on it. And until it's an intentional act. Accidents aren't really part of your karma. Yeah. I mean, I can give you a kind of strange example. Did we talk about these two boys who shot somebody? Yeah.

[38:18]

But not here. Not here, last one of these years. Yeah. Okay, so two boys in Aston, Colorado. We're playing with their father's gun. On the mountain. And they were just shooting up in the air and some of the bullets went over and landed in the Aspen music tent and killed two old ladies. So they, in a sense, murdered two people. But the father came home and they got in the car and they drove off. So there was no karma for them. Mm-hmm. However, that's not what happened, otherwise I wouldn't know about it.

[39:19]

The police figured out the trajectories of the bullets. Went to the area and these two boys said, well, yes, we were shooting the guns. So they had the karma of being careless, they had the karma of the newspaper stories and all that, but they didn't really have the karma of intentionally murdering anyone. So Buddhism karma is really inseparable from intention. So part of practice is to really enter into your emotions and even we need to exaggerate them to see how deep they are.

[40:29]

Because we don't see how deep they are usually unless we exaggerate and then we find the exaggeration wasn't enough. And you begin to see how deeply you love and how deeply disappointed we are and how deeply we care And how as adults we usually kind of hide the depth of our caring. Like we learn that very early, especially if our parents let us down. But Caring, we also see that caring is at the root of emotions.

[41:33]

You don't get angry unless you care. So you can practice and not be identified with your emotions. It doesn't mean you don't think the emotions are yours. It's... It's that you become wide-mind in which emotions occur. You're not... you're identified with a calm, wide mind more than the emotions. It's a little bit like maybe sitting on a, you know, you have a campfire, you're camping along a lake.

[42:40]

If you sit on the campfire, it's quite hot. But if the campfire is way across the lake, I remember a time when I was in the grip of an extremely powerful, dangerous emotion. I woke up in the middle of the night so in the grip of it that I thought I might do it. And I deeply knew I could not, did not want to do it. And I was looking out at the sky, out the window. I know exactly where I was, on Russian Hill in San Francisco. I looked out at the sky. And the sky was calm.

[43:51]

The moon was clear and it was dark. And suddenly my identification shifted to the sky. The sky didn't care what emotions I had one way or the other. And suddenly I didn't care either. I could just look at it. And since that experience, I've never been caught by my emotions. But I've never stopped feeling my emotions. And I would say now, emotions and deeper than that, what I would call non-graspable feeling, are the root of all of our thinking and feeling and perception and so forth.

[44:53]

That actually feeling is more fundamental than thinking. And our thinking, when you're at the level of thinking, when you're at the level of this feeling, thinking, intuitions all come up from that. So when I'm speaking with you, for instance, my topic is not really the Eightfold Path. My topic is certain feelings I have, which then I hold while I'm speaking. And I don't know what I'll say, but I know what feeling I have. And then the feelings discover some words. So does that partly respond to feelings and emotions?

[45:59]

Okay. How much we love and how much we care. How deeply we feel disappointed and betrayed. And yet somehow some kind of clarity comes up in the middle of that. Then we can love again and feel again. Yeah. Something else. Yeah. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I named the word Feier. Someone else?

[47:20]

Someone who hasn't said anything yet? My son, he is handicapped mentally and physically. He is 14 years old now. And in the beginning as a father... I think... So we... My son... At some point I felt how complete he is in his limited way. So I'm feeling him.

[48:28]

This is my little Buddha. So this is a feeling, there is no word for it. I could express how, when I think of him, what comes up for me. So this is a feeling which came up for me. This is so wonderful and I cannot express how much I love my son. How much I discovered by faith? By that what came up through my son and my faith. I cannot... Enablement. So this seminar also brought up for me and opened the door for me.

[49:39]

So you asked me how I feel and what the seminar is for me. So I think there's no word in the world which can express it and I don't want to look for it. Okay. I want to sing and feel I'm walking on the Eightfold Path. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Somebody else want to say something? One thing I could speak about is that... Go back a little bit to what we spoke about in the pre-day.

[50:57]

Which is that... we can also bring practicing the Eightfold Path. Not only do we develop your sense of a body, that we can trust. And that's really what it means when we say, don't look outside yourself.

[52:05]

But that expression is a little confusing because when you have trust, you can look everywhere and see trust. But the importance of that in our usual way of thinking, in the way society conforms itself, This actually takes some courage to really come into that. And society really doesn't want us to be so independent and so individuated. I think of, you know, I mean, democracy depends on each person.

[53:07]

If you have a monarch, the monarch can just say, the monarch can give you a lot of freedom. Because if you get too far out of line, that monarch can just say, off with his head. Like in Alice in Wonderland. Off with his head, said the queen. But in a democracy, you've got to get everyone's agreement. And one of the most telling remarks I can remember reading Japanese history. In Japan, they have what are called, as I can remember now, I can't remember the word, Japanese word, but it means a small group of villages which are self-sufficient.

[54:36]

A small group of villages, six or eight, will have all the carpenters, all the agriculture. Everything they need is there. They don't need the national government. And this was one of the strengths of Japan. But the Kamakura government wanted to control all of Japan. And they couldn't control these small village units because they didn't care. They didn't have to pay taxes. They didn't do anything. They just didn't need the national government. So the Shogun, he must have been pretty smart, said basically, hook them on Tokyo goods.

[55:55]

Make them want products they don't make themselves. And I think there's actually a collusion, not a conspiracy. Solution is when things work together to... You're not actually... It's not a conspiracy, like you're trying to do harm, but it in fact does harm the way it works together. There's a conspiracy, and we could call it, how could I make a pun, The commercery, the democracy, democracy.

[57:01]

Also, wie könnte ich da ein Wortspiel machen? Eine Verschwörung, das ist Demokratie, Kommerz. Between the way commercially we try to externalize our needs. So wie wir kommerziell versuchen, unsere Bedürfnisse... If we have externalized needs, then the government can control us. Actually, in my book, I go into that in some detail, but I must go into detail about it here. But it means that there's a deep, you know, if we want to identify ourselves with the majority, You can be eccentric, you can be free in a certain way in a country like America.

[58:09]

But they don't want you to think things too out of line. And there's a kind of thought control. Right now, if a college professor objects to what's going on right now with Afghanistan, they practically lose their professorship. But that's on an obvious level. It's much more subtle than that. So... So it's to really come to the point where you feel quite independent and clear within yourself.

[59:33]

It's the kind of thing even your friends will sense and it will scare them a little bit. They'll feel there's something slightly wild about you. Or they'll feel they can't be friends with you anymore because there's something a little strange about you. You're not predictable. There's a kind of You're very nice and friendly, but there's a kind of unpredictable quality about you. So this process of coming into the truth body is a process, not just a benign process. It's a process in which you have to come into your own being in some way that is connected with others but also quite independent.

[60:49]

That is connected with others but also quite independent. So, I mean, such a simple another list of the five fears is quite telling. And most of you know the five fears. I hope I could say, okay, and several of you could recite them, but I'll tell you what they are. The first is fear of death. That's expected. Fear of loss of livelihood. Fear of loss of your job or whatever. Your farmland. Third is fear of loss of reputation. And fourth is fear of unusual states of mind. And fear of unusual states of mind means meditation too.

[61:51]

Because if you go deeply into meditation, you have to be willing to have experiences that you're not sure anyone has ever had. Yeah, and this, you know, people feel they're great. I mean, a lot of business of therapists is people come to them because they have feelings they're not sure other people have. We give everyone a private life, but the private life has to be somehow able to be made public. Private-public is another one of these interesting outside-inside distinctions.

[63:12]

So, yeah. Oh, I haven't got there yet. You know, I like to keep a little suspense. I couldn't be a storyteller. So the unusual states of mind is also really at the root of the fear of death. Because you're in a situation where you're not in control. And it also means the ability to think separately from your culture. And now you know, most of you know what the fifth is.

[64:15]

The fear of speaking before an assembly. That means actually the confidence to speak out in your society. When you see your government's going the wrong way, can you speak out in your society? Or your friends or whatever. It's quite difficult to do it. And if you want to practice Buddhism, can you make clear to others that you practice Buddhism? I have a friend who's a good practitioner and she has a nice house and she's got a place in society.

[65:17]

And when the maid comes in, all the Buddhas go behind the mirrors and things like that. And the maid comes in to clean, the Buddhas go behind the mirrors and things like that. Or in the drawers. So, you know... Yeah, so what I'm saying is that this is a kind of, I think in our society, really a revolutionary idea of developing this truth body. We might all be crazy or deluded. And we might.

[66:29]

So, anyway, so the Eightfold Path is a daring, radical, revolutionary teaching, actually. The power of what the world is, is in each of you. Yeah, now what I was getting at is that I said earlier a yoked body in contrast to a truth body. Yoked. It sounds like a yoke, I mean a joke. No. Yoke. You can say a yogic body. But if you had two oxen, you'd say we have yoked oxen because they're yoked together.

[67:31]

Okay. It's not submitted, because being under the head has a connotation. Yes, I know, but it also just means connected. So, zusammengespanter Körper. Let's try that. Okay. So, but in the yogic sense, the word is the same. Yoga and yoke are the same word. Also, in the yogic sense, it's the same. It has the same roots. Yoga and yoke. Yoga means to link together mind and body. One way to understand. Okay. So when you... I don't know what word. I have to create words all the time. But when there's a unison of mind and body, which is one of the points of this practice, now, I'm not speaking now about this truth body, which comes in, but I don't know whether it's useful to make this distinction, but I just mean a body, the mind and body.

[68:58]

phenomena that feel in unison. And it's one of those experiences that you have to have contradictory words to describe. Because there's a tremendous feeling of there-ness or here-ness. And at the same time a feeling of transparency as if everything passes through you. So when you have something closer to that you can practice also with wisdom teaching. And one of the ways in which one comes into this realization of this solid transparency is to really, like I said, on each perception you see an object and you see mind.

[70:08]

You also get in the habit of seeing impermanence on everything. It just becomes your habit. And the practice of the four marks or the five dharmas is most useful. We could call them surgical instruments to break the habit of permanence. But I don't want to start talking about that because we have to stop. Yeah. This is suspense. Will it last till next year?

[71:25]

To be impermanent, to be continued. No, to be impermanent. So, anyway, that's enough. I think I should stop now. But what about this body now? Which body? Oh, that's right. Some other time. What I'm saying only is that... You can translate if you want. This practice doesn't mean you have to depend only on insights or realizations that arise from within you. You can also bring wisdom teachings into your practice. And one would be like, do not harm. Another would be impermanence. And during the pre-day we went into it a little bit more than I can now.

[72:43]

But you can't really practice impermanence until you deeply accept your own impermanence. And recognizing your own impermanence is... Yeah, almost, I would say only possible in a full sense. When you actively recognize the impermanence of each thing. Wenn du wirklich aktiv die Vergänglichkeit von jedem Ding anerkennst. Which is the center of Dharma practice. Und das ist das Zentrale in der Dharma Praxis.

[73:45]

So maybe next year we can have a seminar at the center of Dharma practice. Und nächstes Jahr können vielleicht wir ein Seminar haben mit dem Titel Das Zentrum der Dharma Praxis. The center of intentionless Dharma practice. Das Zentrum absichtsloser Dharma Praxis. Okay. So why don't we, we're going to end at four, I believe. So why don't we sit for a few minutes and... And when we have a good seminar like this, I'm sorry I don't live here. And Andreas likes his room so much. He wondered if we could make this a Dharma retirement home. When all of us get pretty old and we're sort of, you know, rocking and drooling.

[75:02]

And much too stiff to sit. If we could have a whole line of rocking chairs. Those old Diana students, look at them rocking together. I think Christiana will have to talk to Giorgio about it. The Dharma retirement home. Leave your karma at the door.

[75:34]

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