I'm impressed with the therapeutic theory you developed here. Oh, okay. Well, the way I see it, what you're saying and how you went about it, it's all so precise and so differentiated, like I've never done it before. So I notice that the accuracy, I don't really know. I mean, what impresses me is the way you presented this and the way you work on yourself is so full of precision. And it's something that I completely lack. My approach to things is very different. And so that is very impressive. Yeah.

[01:03]

Maybe it's... Maybe I... I find it hard to say that I'm a precise person. I'm a kind of a mess, really. I'm not very disciplined. My rooms are a mess, etc. But I must have an ability to be precise. And what I found is that to survive some clarity and precision was necessary. So that's why I was precise, not... But it does turn out that Buddhism is also extremely precise.

[02:13]

But that is not so clear to me in my head. I can feel it very well when something is still next to me, but not resolved, or that a picture is not correct. I don't think about it much, but when it gets better, that's fine. Well, in my therapeutic work I guess I must have some kind of precision too because my work is actually quite successful but obviously I don't really look at myself as being somebody who's precise or working in a precise way. Maybe the way I experience it is not so much coming from my head or my intellect but maybe the precision is more on a feeling level that I really feel when an image doesn't fit or work with a person, or a process doesn't work for a person. Yeah, I think that's precision too, for sure. On the one hand, I am very surprised, and then I think, well, I would like to adapt to that.

[03:42]

And on the other hand, I think, well, that's just a matter of words. On one hand I really admire this ability and say this is really what I should work toward to develop my sense, and on the other hand I think this is a huge effort. Well, here I am. You look okay. I think at the time I was doing this, it mostly occurred in feeling territories that I moved into the center of each feeling territory. So from very early on I spoke about background mind, I know, when I had to talk to somebody about what I was doing.

[04:56]

But of course to be precise about it, I'm more precise about it now than I was then. And one of the the two main, I would say, yogic skills for practice, are, as everyone knows, one point in this, and a non... Interfering, observing, consciousness.

[06:01]

And I think This is simply a yogic skill to have this. And the classic example of this would be to observe samadhi without interfering with samadhi. Only if you observe samadhi and samadhi. So it's a yogic skill to realize samadhi, but that's nice, but it's not really very important until you have the ability to observe it without interfering. Yes, and this is a yogic ability to really experience this state of samadhi, but I mean, apart from the fact that it is very nice, it is actually not so much, unless you develop the ability to observe this state without changing it. I call this niyok, n-i-o-c. So I call it niyok.

[07:03]

And it's this, it's both of them which allows one to be precise about exactly what's going on. Come to me. Do something else. For me, the painting was very pleasing, because I heard a lot that was actually familiar to me, but that I hardly exchanged with anyone. And in this respect, it was like a good labyrinth, to be able to say again that it is also normal, so to speak, to think like that.

[08:24]

And I notice the point that I find the most difficult, And where I am at, it is how to achieve this new aging. So you can go a little further for me. So this, where I also think, whether it is now a state of war or whether it is now simply a discord between people. So from this inner aging or somehow how you can get closer and also come into contact again. For me this was really almost a nurturing experience when you talked about this because I have a lot of inner experiences that touch on this territory but I have very few people or even words to really share this or express this. So it was very deep and really nourishing to hear this from you. And what I'm interested a little more is this process of reparenting, because it's something that's really, I haven't fully sort of, you know, worked out or worked through it, what it is and how to do the process with other people also.

[09:41]

Even in that situation. Yeah. Like wars or conflicts. Well, you know, it's just a... I didn't expect this to be very useful or meaningful to anyone. It just occurred to me this morning, oh, maybe I could talk about this as a basis. And I was a little embarrassed to speak personally, but... I thought, well, I'll say something about it. But if I speak about the process of reparenting, and I thought of it that way, And let me also say that this practice in those days was not simply mental.

[10:51]

I mean, I gave a lot of attention to my body And I noticed different feelings, like when I was counting my breath or following my breath. Or concentrated... in my backbone or lifting through my backbone, things like that. And I tried to bring this little flashlight of attention not just to background and foreground minds but also into my body. Because I had some feeling I had to open up my body too.

[12:07]

My consciousness, awareness had to permeate my body as well. So I did practices I just thought up. Which often turned out to be traditional practices later, but at first I just thought them up. Like I'd imagine a little flashlight and I'd bring it around my muscles and kidneys and throughout my body. And doing that I noticed that some areas were darker or more, the light wouldn't go into some areas and so forth. And then I noticed that there were areas that were both with or without the flashlight. There's areas that felt dark or light or warm or cold or energy moving in or energy moving out, etc. So then I began to chart the topography of these patterns.

[13:25]

And I noticed it was generally clearer down here, and as I practiced, the clarity moved up my back. And then I extended that to see, is it around me? Is it light or dark or what? And then I found that my left side here would be very light and the right side here would be dark. And then I asked myself questions, who's in that space? And I had some scary moments. I remember I was sitting zazen at somebody's house when I decided to ask who was in this space.

[14:42]

And it was full of demons and my mother and other things. And I felt, yeah! But I was supposedly showing some amateurs how to do zazen, so I couldn't. So I had to act normal. And so then I worked on clearing up the space around me. Who populated the space around me? And I began to know the inhabitants of the space around me. Both historical persons to me and other kind of forces. And as I got familiar with them, I would practice things like, okay, it's dark on this side and light on this side, can I switch it?

[16:09]

So I found I could switch and move the darkness to this side and the light to this, then I began to have some participation and control. And I found I could intentionally, once I got that kind of intention, I could intentionally move this area of clarity up my back. Yes, so parallel to doing this I was also working with my body in this way. But mostly I had no plan. It was just to observe and see what was going on. And finally I found that I could make my body equally conscious from top to bottom. And as most of you know, there are little practices in Zen that are part of monastic life to help you do that.

[17:24]

I've shown you before, one is you always stand your ankles this far apart. When you gassho, your fingers are always that far from your nose. And sometimes, there's a lot of people who, when I go around in the morning, they're like this. If I see it repeatedly, I sometimes go by and say, Hi, Mom. What do you say? I say, Hi, Mom. And they don't know why I've said it, but they're sitting there like this. And also you step in a door with the foot nearest the hinge. So I learned those practices by watching Suzuki Roshi and they helped me bring a consciousness into my body.

[18:42]

Now, this latter part was very much in the context of doing zazen regularly, so it wasn't something I would have done on my own without having developed the practice of zazen and mindfulness. Okay, so my feeling is that particularly for Westerners, we should be open for, if you do Zazen regularly, say two periods or so a day, I would say it takes around two years to do this re-parenting process. In which you just open yourself to the flow of whatever comes up. And more and more stuff, things you never would remember under ordinary circumstances,

[20:08]

It's kind of like a psychoanalytic process. And the physical secret to this is the ability to sit without moving. So now I don't think this is... necessarily useful in a psychoanalytic context because I only know it in a practice context. But I don't see how I could have been as open as I was if I thought that I might move if something really disturbing happened. I knew that murder, suicide, anything could come up, demons, and I was able to sit without moving.

[21:19]

If I thought, oh, if it gets really bad, I'm going to get up or something, then I wouldn't have, I'd been too scared to do it. So the rule to sit still for 40 minutes or 30 minutes, no matter what happens, And to sit, whether you're sick or healthy, rests control of your behavior from the ego. And it frees you from feeling that you might act on thoughts. So if you have a couple years of sitting like this, and this is my observation of other people, not just myself, somewhere between, I don't know, one and a half years to three years maybe, all of this stuff just stops coming.

[22:54]

And it comes up, as I've often said, into another kind of mind than your conscious waking mind. And coming up into your zazen mind, it resorts itself, reconstitutes itself. And you just become very familiar with yourself. I would say at this point there's almost nothing that happened to me that is retrievable that I haven't retrieved. So it's a way of bringing your personal history into your consciousness, into a kind of consciousness. And one of the things you notice in this process, or I notice, is that some things that come up are accompanied by a kind of light.

[24:14]

There are certain memories that come up. There are certain memories that come up. Some memories come up often. And some of the memories that come up often are accompanied by a kind of light. And I found that observing those, it took me quite a while to really notice them. These were usually turning points. Like simple things like crossing a street for the first time in front of a hotel where my parents were staying when we were driving across the United States. And doing it very carefully. But disobeying my parents who told me not to do it. But I got up very early, like 5.30 or something.

[25:27]

They were still asleep. And I was six or something. And I went across the street and there was a big kind of cliff and a park going down into some kind of canyon or valley. And that and other images like that came up quite often. And I realized at first that, of course, it was a point at which I established a certain freedom for myself. But it also was one of those little bubbles of light, like we talked about yesterday, which are embryonic enlightenment experiences. It's one of those experiences that you can hold and open up. Like Dogen says, the decision to practice is initial enlightenment.

[26:38]

When one day you say, I'm going to practice. If you really explore that and open it up, it's basically an enlightenment. It may be obscured by lots of other things, but it's still there as a seed. Because it means you're taking charge of yourself, you're taking responsibility for yourself. So the reparenting also begins to show you that your parents are also the Buddha. In other words, you have the history of enlightenment or realization in you already. It's just that you haven't had a field plowed and ready to receive these seeds. So in this reparenting yourself with the thoroughness that's possible through still sitting, which I think is an amazing discovery of these yogic teachers,

[28:06]

also allows you to find that your ancestry includes Buddhism, or Buddhas, or something like that. Now, I've never said that before, so it's nice that I had your question. I mean, I've noticed it, but I never thought that this re-parenting process is also, as I described. Anything else? And so you can change the situation which you told us, crossing the street, leaving the parents, it's not so much because of leaving the parents, but it is to find that line.

[29:15]

Yes. To find that bump. Yeah, that's right. Because that bump of light is on many different experiences. So we have a new psychology. Perhaps. We could call it radiance therapy. Ha ha. I told him that the situation he told me about with the motel and the street, he said it was about leaving the parents, but you can formulate it differently, he said that he crossed the street to meet this light. And that gives me a different motivation, a different direction and a new step out of it. Anything else?

[30:18]

The first thing I found astonishing was you were explaining your body work and what you did in that. And I'm sure many of our body therapists and therapy are working with these methods and these steps. Probably, I just did it on my own, so I didn't know. Yeah, you did it on your own, but we caught it at the mast. Yeah, okay. On us as steps or... Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting that it's overlapped. It's astonishing that it overlaps. I had said that it is so amazing and at the same time I am actually very pleased to hear these things that he describes, that he has found for himself in his bodywork, that we who do body therapy know similar elements, know similar methods. How does that feel today? Of course it's not quite right to say I got it on my own. Because I was spending as much time as possible with Sukhiroshi.

[31:25]

Who for some people looked like an ordinary person. But for me he glowed. He was very shiny, he shined. And I'm sure that without his saying anything I internalized processes which he'd done And that's why I found out later they coincided with Buddhist practices, because I just felt his body and felt my own body doing something similar.

[32:26]

So it's not really on my own. So I would say that the first part for sure and much of the latter part was just my own effort and desperation. But the fuel, the subtlety, the craft, the face that made it work, all came from Suzuki Roshi. Yes, you want to say something? In my practice, the control of this point of attention is a very important question, because for me the main question of practice is whether it is possible for me to get out of this point,

[33:46]

to bring down the associations and impulses and to control them in the cow. In everyday life, when you talk, it is very quickly back up in the impulses. And that's why I found it very interesting and would maybe hear about it somewhere, like this spot of attention, so to speak. So that's where, for me, in my personal experience, there are keys for me. to control the government. Well, in my practice really the crucial point is really how to handle this spot of attention and how to keep it outside the impulses and associations. It's like I kind of bring it down and I want to physicalize it and then it pops back up. And this is why it was so helpful for you talking about this and I would like to know more about it, how to really use this spot of attention.

[34:51]

Okay. For me, working with this point of attention is also a crucial point, working on my own and in my own practice, but also working with clients. And this process of parenting is a very important part of our work when we work toward a solution with people. And I'm wondering if in the therapeutic process the therapist provides a little bit of what the posture of the sitting also does, or that we as therapists also do a little something like looking together where we could now put this flashlight, so somehow also on the one hand to go with the client and on the other hand to take over the leadership.

[36:09]

And my question now is really whether we as therapists, whether we apply something, some kind of attitude which normally is carried by the posture of sasen, so we can sort of help the person on one level to enter this space and this area of this light, and on the other hand we are sort of give it some guidance where to direct the torch. And I'm thinking about it now, because it's always such a question to me, how much is good to take as a therapist and how much do I leave to the client? And I wonder how far this question of psychotherapy or dermal therapy could also be a question, how can we find out how much we can leave to the client ourselves, and that is the most necessary thing for me. So of course the next question is how much guidance should I really provide and give to the person and how much should I just leave the person alone and just trust the process itself and the choices or whatever the person here or himself does.

[37:29]

And that's, I think, also a crucial question in the distinction or in looking at the difference between psychotherapy and Dharma therapy, I feel. Maybe we have to use completely different methods, so to speak, that allow the client to be in the responsibility and still accompany us a little bit. Even though we are not spiritual teachers, we are something else. So maybe we have to use other methods that really leave the client in his or her own responsibility, and at the same time we give some guidance, but on the other hand, of course, we are not spiritual teachers. Oh, yes, you are. I mean, I don't... In that, then I'm not a spiritual teacher either. I'm just hanging out, you know. Well, of course, that's the craft of it. I think one has to trust one's intuition and what pops up.

[38:32]

Like, I think it's good to hold back doing something, and then if it pushes through, you just do it. I find if I practice for a while, a year or two or so, holding back and not doing... But then doing when something pushes through. Then I learn what pushes through whether I hold back or not. Then I don't have to hold back. Because I already know what's going to push through. But if I think that at least from a Zen point of view, the first priority is you leave the person alone.

[39:54]

The second priority is you interject. Interject? Interject? to throw into a process, you interject into a process, wisdom statements. And maybe personal things, but that would be a third priority. Okay, but mostly the first priority is to leave the person alone. Okay. Now, if a trust is established where there's no leaving alone because there's so much connectedness, then if I took, for example, the implied process here, of developing an openness to and welcoming attitude to the non-conscious reservoir.

[41:07]

And a similar openness, it's different but it's structurally similar, openness to the background mind, the presence and flow of the background mind in the foreground mind. Okay, so these two attitudes of being open in the reservoir mind and the background mind, is a physical feeling. Because again, that's a yogic thing. All mental states have a physical dimension. So you learn that physical feeling. So say you're with someone who you think would be good if they were open in this way.

[42:10]

So if you feel that they're somewhat open to it, or you feel the surfaces are there, you create that feeling in yourself. And you allow it to be there, to be osmotically absorbed, but you don't do anything. Another way is to you hold that field in yourself but you hold it in kind of a seed form and you don't let it come into your body and then you're with the other person and suddenly you feel a gap and then you let it flow into your own body and it is likely to flow into theirs.

[43:31]

So these are traditional teaching methods of Zen. But again they are based on a familiarity with the person but you may have that familiarity from seeing a person once a week for an hour or something too. And more so, because although you don't live the same way and practice the same way, you probably spend more time with a client than I spend with a practitioner. But there's absolutely no question in my mind that, for instance, doksan during a saschin, these kind of processes just happen... almost involuntarily, while doksan, you know what doksan is, doksan in other contexts, in a sesshin, it's very unlikely to happen.

[44:39]

In sesshin you create a shared experiential basis. Does that respond to you? Anything else? Yes, I am a little shy to talk about it, because these are very new experiences for me, and I think they also have a little something to do with this re-parenting, and in the last time in my practice, partly triggered by the Hellinger work, I have not really

[45:40]

I dared to have such conflicts in my life that were really so encapsulated and which are also partly encapsulated in the presence or in the present and where I have not seen any possibility of really purifying them with the people and I am then always with really went into sleep with a very strong intention that somehow, through some force, a process is being initiated that brings some kind of solution or redemption. and in the last few years I have had several lucid experiences against the morning, which have lasted a very long time, and where I have always had the perception that the garbage truck is coming outside, or the prospect distributor, and I have always returned to this experience, and it was also really a dimension of timelessness, so no experience of fear at all, it could now be interrupted.

[46:46]

and actually in this lucid state these processes really took place and triggered a deep sense of happiness and then accompanied me for days and opened up solutions that I could not imagine and that I would never have been able to create. It was so complete and so perfect. certain areas in my practice and was partly encouraged to this Bert Hellinger work I started last November to really deal with certain areas in my life that were kind of suffering or something that almost start to cry.

[47:53]

Maybe someone else can translate it. Like in my past or certain conflicted areas in the present where I felt no... It's not tears of sadness. where I really felt, by dealing with it a long time, I felt no possibilities to really resolve that. So what I did, I of course worked with it in Sazen, but I just decided to try out something else. So I went to bed in the evening with this... with this real strong intention to create a space these things would resolve themselves. And I started to have very lucid experiences normally in the early morning hours.

[49:26]

So you went to bed several nights, not just one night. Yeah, it's a practice I did for several weeks and months, almost like a prayer-like attitude. I had this intention, and I would go to bed with this intention and let it work through me at night. So in the early morning hours repeatedly I had these lucid experiences where I was clearly in a different state of consciousness than sleeping or dreaming, as you know, or whatever. And then I could draw these situations toward me and work with them in the most healthy, blissful, fruitful, nourishing way that I could imagine. And there was this feeling of completion and perfection and timelessness. Like I could move out of the space really see or hear things from the outside that people getting up in the house and leaving and return to that state and I mean I felt really blessed with these experiences and I feel it's very related to what Angela said this process of reparenting it's also I feel it's like a process of

[50:47]

re, I don't know what to say, really re-solving. And it's, yeah, I just wanted to share that with you. Thank you. And this feeling of solution stayed with me ever since, whatever that was. It informs my life and what I'm doing. I wouldn't say that, or at least from my point of view, this is not Zazen practice or Buddhist practice, because what you're using intention, and you're using yogic skills, and your lucid dreaming is common, but it's also developing and sustaining as a yogic practice. And so, to me, all of that which you just described, is similar to things I did, which just came out of Zen practice.

[51:51]

So the fact that you can, what's nice about it is it's a tool, then you can bring in psychotherapy, you can bring in things from other sources, and use these tools to explore how you are and so forth. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. But I feel maybe this, I mean, I don't really know where this came from, but maybe the yogic skills or the ability to have these skills comes out of practice, I think, to hold this. I think it does. Because I find people who don't practice, it's very hard to talk to them about doing anything like you did. But I also find I can usually tell when a person's done psychotherapy or not because there's a kind of cloudiness about people who haven't done psychotherapy. There's usually some sort of clarity about themselves that you can see in a person who's done psychotherapeutic work on themselves. Well, I should probably translate it again. Yes, that such abilities, similar to that, do not necessarily come from the Zen practice, but are generally yogic abilities, where you simply use the power of intention.

[53:04]

And the rest I forgot. What else? Thank you very much. It was interesting to me also that... What's that particular thing? Oh, yes, and that Roshi also notes that when people, for example, have not done psychotherapy, that there is often a kind of uncertainty or cloudiness around them, and that certain practices or exercises or instructions do not go any further. Okay. We should finish up in a few minutes. And my task, my next task when I get to this point was how to

[54:05]

how to stabilize my general field of mind. And by general field of mind I mean, although I may be concentrating on you, I can hear this other stuff going on. It's nothing big. But it's already a development to see the difference between the spot of attention and the field of mind. Now, so I intended to stabilize, I had an intention to stabilize the general field of mind. So it was what was prone to compulsive thoughts or etc., moods. Okay.

[55:30]

So I think the simple shift to seeing background and foreground mind was part of the stabilization process. Because one of the things that I did when I did that is I began to shift things, the non-conscious operation and a lot of stuff into the background mind. I shifted the reservoir mind, etc., into the background mind. So that was coincident with and part of a process of taking out of foreground mind things that were disturbing foreground mind. So I had the sense of stabilizing foreground mind.

[56:32]

So probably the next step was to notice triggers. Okay, so I'd be walking along the street And I noticed that my state of mind changed. Or I might notice, say, that I got a headache. So I'd ask myself, when did that headache occur? So I'd ask myself also, when did my mood change? So then I thought, well, I'm not mindful enough to notice the triggers when it started. So I'm not mindful enough to notice the topographic shifts.

[57:35]

Okay, so then I tried to develop the mindfulness to be present when things actually happened, not later when I was in the middle of a headache and I didn't know when it started. So I tried to do it because I knew that I was subject to these things, but I didn't know when they started. And since the second noble truth is that everything has a cause, I thought the first step is to discover the cause. But I wasn't mindful enough to discover the cause, but I knew that it was worse now than it was then, so there had to be a point where it started. So I just tried to develop a finer and finer gradient or resolution of mindfulness.

[58:42]

So I got to the point where I could actually notice the triggers. And then I tended to notice what happened simultaneous with the trigger. And I would go back in Zazen and other times I'd go back over that point. It happened right there. What was going on? And it might be a cloud went over the sun. It might be I saw a man in a green jacket. It might be that some memory came up. So I learned, and I learned there was actually a series of things, when they came up, they'd shift my mood. Or when certain thoughts came up, I would then, 20 minutes later, have a headache.

[59:57]

So once I really got an inventory of the triggers, Now I'm sounding like I'm sounding too precise. But this is what I did. And I got an inventory of the triggers and then when the triggers came up, I knew, oh, I would just not let the trigger trigger it. So once I did that, for instance, since then, Maybe in the last 30 years I've had headaches four or five times. Because I can feel it start to happen, I see what caused it, and I just relax my mind. So this was also part of stabilizing my mind, my fort, my general state of mind. Okay, I also noticed that the topography of my general state of mind has weak moments and strong moments.

[61:12]

And as we say in Buddhism, there's rising mind and sinking mind. There were like little pit holes of everything's wrong, and you know, no good, and you know, bleh. And then I noticed there were areas where I felt confident or buoyant. And those are obvious topographic features, but there were a lot of topographic features. And I noticed that when the topography was, let us say, weak, that area would get picked up and swept into thinking, emotions, future, what's going to happen in the future, and anxieties and so forth.

[62:34]

Okay, so then I made this decision, I have to make the topography more equal. And that's when I started the practice, as I said yesterday, of bringing my attention equally to each thing. And I also in the process was, though I didn't really understand it, I was physicalizing my mind. Because one of the main things you're doing when you bring your attention to your breath is you're physicalizing the mind. As I've said before, you have an intention, which is more purely mind, The word attention already has more body in it.

[63:48]

But if I say to you intention... But if I say to you... Or attention, people, there's a physical quality there. So... So attention is already more physical and then you start mixing it with the breath. You're beginning to actually mix mind and body together. So I think the process of trying to bring attention equally to each thing So I honored the world or honored the present. Or honored my present mind, whatever it was, by finding how to put energy into my mind equally at each moment. Mm-hmm. And physicalizing it.

[65:11]

And noticing its topography. I would say the main process is by stabilizing the general field of mind. And once it was stable, I began to feel joy all the time. Just joy came up all the time, for no reason. I remember I said to Sukhya once, you know, I don't know what's happened, I said, but I now feel good all the time. And just a year or two before, I was standing at midnight outside his building, either to come up to talk to him or turn myself into a mental hospital. I got up in the middle of the night and left my wife and child and was walking in the street and I stood outside. It was dark, the window. I thought maybe I should just go to the mental hospital.

[66:25]

But I walked back to my apartment. About a year later or so, I could say to him, I feel good all the time. And he said, oh, Of course he was noticing. Just a little bit of personal lore. I've told this story once or twice before. About the drumsticks? Do you know the story about the drumsticks? At one point... Sorry, it's all right.

[67:28]

At one point, Sukyoshi had an installation ceremony as abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Actually not the San Francisco Zen Center, because that hardly existed. It was the Japanese Buddhist temple. And it was coincident, it was part of his decision to stay in America and teach us Westerners. So he asked me to beat the drum, which is part of the ceremony, as he comes into the room. So I think it was mostly a Japanese event, but he had me beating the drum. So I practiced quite a bit.

[68:31]

I had to watch over the balcony, watch him come in down below. And about a week or so before the ceremony, maybe eight or ten, nine days, I was riding after Zazen, I was riding my bicycle down a one-way street. And being a one-way street, I could hang back behind the cars. and wait till the light changed and then shoot out ahead of all the cars and make it turn. And I had a, I don't know where I got the bike. It wasn't a great bike, but it was good enough. But it displayed its weakness this morning, that morning.

[69:43]

Because it was still dark and all the cars had headlights on. And I shot out ahead of them and they're coming down the hill trying to catch all the lights, right? And this little front fender came loose and jammed the front wheel. So the whole bike just went poom and I went poom and we all fell out and all the cars were coming down like Cossacks and none of them saw me. I was below their headlight. So I landed on my, I still have a little scar there, kind of on my elbows. And the cars were coming, and so I rolled like mad in between two parked cars, and my bicycle slid off, and all the cars went past me. Nobody saw me. So I got up and my arms were frozen in this position and I couldn't make my bike work and so I walked home.

[70:55]

So I went to the doctors and they drained my elbows and they put big casts on my elbows. But I still wanted to beat the drum in the ceremony. So I practiced with my arms in two casts. And Sukhya Rishi kept saying, no, no, you don't have to do it. And I said, no, no, I'll learn to do it. So I practiced. So when the ceremony happened, he was down there, I was in my cast, and I did it okay. So about two years later I went through this, and we'd made the sticks from children's baseball.

[72:09]

We'd made them ourselves. So about two years later when I went through this crisis of appearing outside his door in the middle of the window in the middle of the night, He was asleep and I just went back home. But the next morning or within two or three mornings, pretty close to exactly that time, as I went out of the Zendo, We always went out and bowed to him standing in his office. He'd go out first and then we'd all bow to him and leave. I found right in the meditation platform to the left of the door the drumsticks. He never said anything.

[73:21]

He just put the drumsticks there where he knew I'd see them as I went out the door. So I felt he has this confidence I can survive. Okay. He was good, huh? Maybe we sit for a minute. Please, okay.

[75:17]

I may be more Shang when I can't answer. Well, we weren't so sure what really goes with the background mind or belongs to the background mind. And the structure, because there were so many things, the structures, the views.

[76:23]

What else do we have? Yes, patterns, old patterns. Old patterns, so you can see both the original mind, the patterns, structures, views, because maybe that doesn't quite fit together. I also had a memory from Kassel that it was the mind field. So not the object, but the background mind, the experience of the mind which will unfold. That was not clear to us, what the background mind exactly means. We weren't so clear what it really is. I remember from Kassel that you more talked about it. It's the field of mind, background mind, and not so much the leaf dropping. The leaf dropping? You have an example of the leaf? Yeah, the leaf walk. The leaf walk. that you can experience the leaf falling or the mind at which the leaf falls.

[77:29]

The mind at which the leaf falls, you would define it as background mind. We have the views and structures in the background mind, and the question of original mind is part of background mind, so it seems different identities of qualities. Okay, yeah. The question was what is in the background mind. Washington defined it as the spirit in which the leaf falls, and not the leaf. When you see a leaf fall, you don't see the leaf, but you feel the spirit in which the leaf falls. We also said that the views are in the background mind, or it is the original mind. Well, I may have been too loose in the way I used a term.

[78:32]

And while... But also, even if I were extremely precise at all times, these are still just words. And the only way to make these things clear is to... approximate them through your own experience. And those that you can't yet approximate or connect with your own experience, Then you hold them as possibilities that you wait and see if your own development confirms these possibilities.

[79:56]

So that's just a general statement. But I may have meant something like The mind is a background to the content of mind. Because there's no such Buddhist term as background mind. This is a kind of intermediate stage. and a use of English that I found useful.

[81:10]

So I think that we do, in fact, any meditator ends up with something like a background mind and foreground mind. And I think that everyone who meditates has at some point an experience of this state, the background and the foreground of the mind. Yes, and basically every person has this experience, whether he is meditating or not, but this experience is simply not so clear and cannot be perceived as so precise as the foreground and the background. does that correspond to this experience, like in the theory of form, that there is a background that is not very clear and then something comes into the foreground of my consciousness with which I then deal with until a need is fulfilled, and then it goes back into a background,

[82:17]

den ich mit der Aufmerksamkeit erhellen kann, aber der nicht sehr stark mit Gefühlen oder Aktivitäten besetzt ist. Does this correlate with something from Gestalt theory like there is a background that's not very clear but that's just there and certain needs or experiences sort of kind of come out of this background and then get fulfilled or nourished and then sort of return to the source this background and I can brighten this background And I can darken it, but it's just there and sort of the basis for certain experiences, needs, states, and so forth. I would say that that's almost a background to the background mind. Yeah, and at some point you're into more this reservoir of... But I'm just trying to... create some sort of picture with some dynamic elements that we can enter into our own experience.

[83:30]

But the question of like original mind, now this is a technical term within Zen. But in general it's a kind of challenge more than a description. A challenge like, you can feel better, but you don't know what better means. So you know you can feel better, but it's more of a challenge to feel better. You don't know exactly what that better constitutes. Yeah, so you can say to somebody, you should realize the original mind. You think, yeah, that's a good idea, but you don't really know what that is. But I think that, again, if you're a teacher, You have to understand the usefulness... You have to describe the function and provisional nature

[85:12]

of original mind with much more clarity if you're going to teach somebody how to realize this. But your description has to not slip into describing it as if it were real. Real in some substantial sense. For instance, if you talk about original mind as something you uncover, That's a deluded way of describing it. This would be like the controversy in the Sixth Patriarch.

[86:14]

There's a mirror and you wipe it to keep it bright. And the Sixth Patriarch said, there's no mirror and there's no wiping. But if you read most Zen, even famous Zen master's stuff, they really are saying it's something that's there that you uncover. And as a teaching process, it's probably on the whole not bad. But strictly speaking, such a teacher is not rigorous enough in his thinking. And it leads in succeeding generations to a complete misunderstanding of practice.

[87:25]

Okay, so original mind is not background mind. But you could say that the untainted field of mind is an expression of original mind. Does that make some sense? Okay. I mean, this is not easy to answer these questions. Okay, what else? That's not all. Yes, we also dealt with this distinction between fundamentally alone and functionally together, or fundamentally together and functionally alone, i.e.

[88:33]

civilization and the Buddhist attitude. And we especially asked ourselves, what does fundamentally alone mean? Yes, like that. And we have a little bit focused on our own images. That's how it is. Fundamentally alone there is also such a whole aspect of all one and yes. Another thing we talked about was these two definitions you mentioned, like fundamentally alone and functionally together, like in a sangha or like in our society, fundamentally together but functionally alone, and these two sides of it. And we thought about it, what does it really mean to be fundamentally alone?

[89:34]

And does it have maybe something to do with this all-one, all-oneness? Or, yeah, this all-one-being? Yes, both. I can see it from my own fantasy, from my own experiences, this feeling when you go out, for example, sometimes you breathe with nature or with a tree, or it's all somehow this long connection, and at the same time, nevertheless, it is so that I begin to observe myself in contact with people more and more clearly, or try to become independent. How strongly I am connected to others in my actions and where there is often a feeling of being alone, even when I am with others, I am still alone.

[90:46]

We discussed the various images each one of us had with this also this term fundamentally alone. And Kuni, for example, she feels like fundamentally alone doesn't mean to be separated, but for example, like you breathe with a tree or... You feel a connection to the breath with other people and she more and more also observes herself in her work and with other people how she makes herself in her actions or in her attitudes dependent on other people but also on another level she becomes more and more independent of it. and feels this contact like in nature and special moments like with the breath where everything feels really one. And that's the moments where she also feels really alone. Yeah, I think that's a, we can say that's a manifestation of being fundamentally alone. Or a gate to developing fundamental aloneness.

[91:55]

Now let me, look, as it's obvious, I have made a decision years ago not to use Buddhist terms. If I use Buddhist terms, Sanskrit or Pali, etc., I have to spend endless times trying to define them in English. So what I've tried to do instead is to... either take experiences I have that fit Buddhist terms or to take experiences I have that are related and in both cases create English terms for it.

[92:58]

Because I find that there's more power in an English word that we have some emotional connectedness with Even if it's occupied by definitions that aren't appropriate. It's a little bit like there's a house and I have to drive the tenant, ask the tenant to leave and get someone else to move in. But the house has more power than just a foreign, completely foreign dwelling. We don't know what it is. So I would say it's a rather long answer to what you're saying. So I would say that the early stages of practice Say it first, not to discourage you, first say seven years.

[94:35]

You're just basically absorbing the teachings into your, dare I say it, background mind. And of course you make a certain amount of sense of it as you go along. And it influences what you're doing. But at some point, you can start to make it clear what you're doing. And making it clear, I mean, you may practice in such a way that during seven years...

[95:21]

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