So for Buddhism, for people who are in busy lives and don't really have time to seriously practice, you give them mantras. I don't say that's right. I just say that's the view of Zen, Zen in particular within Buddhism. Yesterday you helped me and mentioned that when you go down from story down to the line, that the myth will expand and you can be stuck in there. I don't know what you mean with the myths, the cult, the tradition, which you are stacked as a person. Yeah. Do you want to say it out?

[01:05]

I mean, everything together. Do you want to say that in German? Yes. Well, what comes to mind is a German psychologist I believe was telling a Japanese fairy tale to his little child. I don't remember the story exactly, but I believe about halfway through the story, the little kid says, well, when is the prince going to slay the dragon? And the prince never slays the dragon.

[02:15]

He turns into a bush warbler and flies away. That's something that warbles in the bushes. You see them at night sometimes. So this kid already had the sense of a kind of progression in story. And there are certain progressions built into our culture of expectation. And I think implied in our culture are stories that are more explicit often in our dreams than in our consciousness. And I think those are not the same stories in every culture.

[03:25]

Now, I think in a healthy, integrated person, those myths integrate into your story more and more consciously, and you see them act through them, so forth. And I think in a healthy, integrated person, But I think in people, and in some spiritual people, and some people with complex psyches or psychologies, without meditation practice, there's still a tendency toward emptiness or toward stillness. And if there isn't a skill or a knowledge or permission to enter emptiness, which often is very fearful for us, Instead of integrating mythological elements, you become a mythological, you become an archetype, and that is very destructive to the self.

[04:32]

And there's teachings in Buddhism how to survive being an archetype, the poet or the teacher or something like that. I don't know if the teachings work, but I'm still here. Barely surviving. They should give me a special symbol for my car so I can park in the special parking place for cripples. You think I'm kidding. Something else? Yeah. You said yesterday that for Westerners it may be at another point of the teaching to introduce them to that immediate consciousness.

[06:07]

And at another point you said it's not so difficult, just take a breath, and stop for a moment, and then do things completely. Not like that, not like that. In the first place, Roger said that there was no need to go to the bathroom. It would be better to take a deep breath for a moment and then go to the bathroom. Could you translate what she said? Yesterday you said that the teaching about immediate consciousness traditionally comes at a later point in practice, but your opinion is for Westerners it should come at an earlier point in practice, and that on the other hand it was actually quite a simple teaching in the sense just take a deep breath or... Actually, I didn't say immediate consciousness, I said...

[07:20]

the maturing of the personality, the perfecting of the personality and maturing of your story come late in Zen practice. This ability to distinguish between But the ability to distinguish between immediate consciousness, secondary consciousness, and borrowed consciousness, that actually takes a little bit of yogic experience before you can make those distinctions in yourself, feel them in yourself. But so much of this, I mean, let's put it this way. All I'm teaching now, let's see, some 30 years after I started practicing, is what I practiced in the first five years, which I didn't understand.

[08:27]

But you don't have to understand it to practice it. Because the understanding is built into the practice. So a certain kind of faith is needed to practice. You ascertain the truth of the teachings up to a certain point with a certain amount of understanding, but at a certain point you say, this makes enough sense for me to just do it. Then you had something. I'll say it in German. Well, you know, I'm not a psychologist or psychotherapist.

[09:42]

And the craft of therapy, I mean, intellectually I understand a lot about therapy. The craft of therapy I don't know much about. But I would say the answer to your question should be yes. But the degree to which it's useful, if you're also practicing Zen, to identify the hero's journey or the great mother figure and so forth, I don't know. It's not something that's been particularly important to me. Though I think if I'd been more conscious of those things, I would have dealt with more intelligence with some of the things that I've gone through in my life, because my life is so mixed up with other people's lives. No, you can do both.

[10:51]

Yeah, it's not... Again, it's like more how I responded to her. These teachings are sometimes true. So you use them sometimes, sometimes you would use something else. Okay. Yeah. I have a question about breathing. I have noticed that I constantly change the rhythm of my breathing. I don't even know how I breathe or how I count my breathing. Could you say something about that? I've noticed that my rhythm of breathing changes continuously during meditation. So maybe you can say something to that. And at some point I feel like I'm kind of out of sync or kind of like thrown off in my breathing.

[12:20]

Okay, I'd like to respond to that and then respond again to your second question. And then I'd like to do something a little different. Okay. Okay. I didn't say earlier somebody asked me about breathing. I think you did. And I said take an inventory of breathing. Is that right? And I said also to count your exhales. And you also just follow your breath, allow your breath to just be present in your breath. And you can feel the touch of your breath, which develops a kind of intimacy in your body. And you can follow your breath throughout your body, down into your feet, up through your shoulders and so forth.

[13:38]

But basically what you want to achieve in meditation is a way of breathing that does not stop when you become concentrated. So if you're breathing in your lungs, you will tend to stop your breathing if you become concentrated. As you notice, if you take something and look at it very carefully, you stop right here and you look carefully like a watchmaker or something. But if you look carefully at something, you tend to stop your breathing because it makes you still. So you don't want to breathe with your lungs. What are you going to breathe with?

[14:43]

You don't want to breathe with your... You breathe with your big toe. You don't want to breathe with your chest. So your breathing with your diaphragm and your chest remains pretty much doesn't change. So in the sensation of breathing, which is the most stable, your breath feels like it's coming out of your nostrils and your exhale. and then it feels like it comes in from below. And when you're breathing that way, you can breathe only one or two or three times a minute, and your breathing still goes very slowly, even though you're completely... your whole body and mind feel dissolved.

[15:54]

Thinking and emotion require a lot of energy. And the brain requires a lot of oxygen. So your breath is very sensitive to emotional thinking, et cetera, changes, mood changes. So you're in effect by this kind of practice. As I said, you're... By learning to sit still, you break the adhesive connection between thought and action. You, in a way, make breathing separate from thinking and emotions.

[16:57]

Until you have the feeling that it's not you who breathes, breathing breathes itself. And when you're meditating most sort of clearly, each part of your body feels like it's doing its own meditation. Your stomach does its own meditation, your knees do their own meditation, and so forth. Okay. Let me go back to Bodhidharma and his nine years of sitting. Partly Bodhidharma is presenting practice.

[18:00]

It's not just a statement that Bodhidharma needed to sit for nine years. And it doesn't mean that he... necessarily physically didn't move for nine years, though that's how the story goes, but that he was unmoving inside. Okay. Now, the sense of don't know is... that we have various selves and then we have non-self and we have no self. No self is an experience of self-dissolving. Non-self is the experience of functioning in the world without self and ego doing the functioning.

[19:17]

The whole world functions through you. At this point you can't say I know or I don't know or it's me doing it. So when Bodhidharma points out don't know, he's pointing out a way of being called not knowing. But if you come to an experience of not knowing, and Bodhidharma clearly realized this, then you'd think, well, he didn't have to practice anymore. From this point of view, enlightenment is bullshit. Sorry.

[20:20]

I mean, to present enlightenment as some schools do in Buddhism politically, as, you know, once you're enlightened, everything is glorious, shiny, and pretty, is politics. It's religious politics. And for us in the West to support that idea is to confuse Protestant conversion with enlightenment. Where you are converted and then you know God and everything's groovy as long as you stay with the church. Yeah. And the experiences, Protestant conversion experiences and Zen enlightenment experiences are phenomenologically, when described in William James or in Kapila Roshi, virtually identical.

[22:07]

Now, I'm not knocking enlightenment. It's great. In various degrees, it's an experience that really turns you around at the base of your being. And if you live in a fairly protected circumstances, it changes your life quite wonderfully. But it doesn't improve the world much, except your own. And it doesn't solve all the problems if you lead a complex life. And the whole teaching of the Bodhisattva is that the Bodhisattva is one who is enlightened, who continually challenges his or her enlightenment by living in the weeds.

[23:23]

So it's a good excuse for continuing to live in the weeds. So OK. There's something I'd like to say about something, but I think we've talked long enough. So what I'd like us to do is I'll tell you what I want to talk about. I want to talk about certain elements in the body of solidity, fluidity, motility and heat. And the usefulness of noticing something and how you notice something so that certain subtleties don't just whip by you. Because to notice something, even to label it, creates a little door where you can go in that.

[24:45]

So anyway, but what I'd like to do now is take a break. And maybe for less than 20 minutes. And then I'd like us to get together with the people around you, without making much choice, in groups of eight to 10, so five or six groups. And I'd like you to have some discussion among you of the line you chose from the koan, your own line, your definition of this, and at least some discussion among yourself of the structure, if you're listening to my English, of the structure

[25:47]

of personality and consciousness. Yes, so after the break, please come together in groups of 8 to 10 people. So it's not so much about your preferences, but the people around you. And please then discuss this line or sentence that you have chosen from the choirs, the sentence that you have added and your definition of one of these terms. It is important to me that you have an exchange among each other about the structure of consciousness or these structures that I mentioned here yesterday. Because for me, just to talk these things at you or even with you isn't in the end as helpful as you're getting some discussion with each other about how this makes sense or doesn't make sense. I'd rather you come away from this with one thing than ten things that float away. And I'd like to give a little bow of thanks to Ulrike for all this hard work.

[27:06]

Watching you all speak together is the only time I really wish I could speak German. Because you all feel a little different in German than in English. So I feel like I'm half German, but the half that's German doesn't know how to speak. It's the silent part. Do you want to say about counting? Yes, I would like or we would like to clarify a misunderstanding that has spread a bit here regarding counting. And I think that's because of a translation difficulty, because basically for the English word exhale, which is not a verb, basically there is no equivalent word in German, and then you always say to breathe out.

[28:28]

So counting Every time you exhale, you count one more. One, two, three, four, five... And the jury first. Harry. Harry. Harry. This is a whole new practice you should make it. So let's have some headlines, I mean body lines.

[29:44]

and that it is the respective crystals of the personal history that make up the interpretation or what is brought up in the respective consciousness. Well, what mainly came out of our discussion is that each one of the sentences in the koan is basically empty, and that the storylines of our own personal history, that they form crystals on these basically empty sentences. And they're kind of like washed up or washed out of our unconscious mind. Sounds like a necklace. You could wear your history around your neck, and when you want to, you can take it off. Okay, someone else? Yeah. It was like one sentence that was presented evoked something in the group, and something that happened was the interest for the next sentence.

[31:23]

So it was also like a necklace. And the different stories of people, or how the dialogue was in the group, represented the different sentences that were presented. Intuition was defined to be inherited spiritual wisdom. Intuition is inherited spiritual wisdom. Yes. Intuition was also defined to be the inner voice, very deep knowledge as to the right way. This is all intuition, definitely. It was defined to be purity, Mind was defined as urtümlichkeit. Primordial. Right. And then... Soul was connected with emptiness. And spirit with psychic phenomena.

[32:24]

Thal also had the connotation of something constrained and at the same time something connected with a search. In some sentences, well, that was where the terms were discussed. In some sentences, we shared that we liked very much, and I don't know whether it's appropriate to kind of share them with a big group. Yeah. Space connects. Ah, yeah. Moving water only comes out of silence. Yeah. Feeling is the water and emotions are the waves.

[33:43]

And something very beautiful like I can tell the friend of it. And this friend also has the right to tell me everything whether I want it or not. things we discussed. Oh, thank you. Dankeschön. Next. Ja. Wir haben uns in der Gruppe gegenseitig mitgekramt und dabei die Begrenztheit der Zeit mit Begrenztheit und Vermittlung hinlassen. Wir haben nur einen Konsens in den Waffen gegangen am Schluss unseres Gesprächs, Yes, the work by Bohidana has been expanded. It already dates back to antiquity. I know that I will not like it. In our group we talked a lot about the limitedness of our time and our means, and consensus could only be reached in the last sentence, sort of in the Koran, which we changed a little bit, which is the old sentence of Socrates, I believe.

[35:06]

He said, I only know that I don't know. Okay, good. It was a bit similar for us. Everyone chose a sentence and then told us how it was touched by the sentence. But we also couldn't get to the point in time that we were in a common important point. And with these terms we also had different ones. And here, too, we did not find a common consensus, nor did we have time for it. Basically, everyone would have to say his own thing again, because you can't put it together at all. I can't. Quite similar in our group, we all shared our sentences and talked about our feelings about it and so forth, and each one of us had different sentences and also dealt with different terms here, so it wasn't enough time that a kind of group consensus about something in particular happened.

[36:07]

Yes, yes. Okay. Our group also tried I will do it now. I would say it's a new kind of understanding each other. Everybody has an own personality and has an own definition of which sentence he found. And it's his personality or self or ego. I would only try to say Everybody has a lot of feeling, but you have to try to understand. OK. That's everyone? After lunch, I think we'll have lunch around 12.

[37:12]

And maybe if we take about a half hour to eat, that gives us an hour break, and then at 1.30 we'll start again. And at the latter part of the afternoon, the quadrinity teachers have asked me, It made sense to me and to Ulrike to have us all discuss how the quadrinity process has worked with meditation and what we're talking about and so forth. And the few of you who are non-duals and not quads, I think we can all benefit from, at least I'm excited to participate in this discussion or at least be an observer.

[38:15]

Now, maybe you could bring up your question about the body and so forth. Yeah, both of you, either of you. Okay.

[39:39]

What's the word place? Place. Whether the heart and the body has a place in Zen. Nowhere heartless. The cold frosty moon. She said, but you didn't mention it. I know. It's true, I didn't. And I appreciate your bringing it up. And that's interesting to me because yogic practice produces a body culture, not a mind culture. Now maybe the body is understood or talked about, it is talked about and understood differently than in a mind culture which then refers to the body.

[40:44]

And I don't know. It's such a dramatic difference. It's a little hard to point out without moving us into a different way of thinking. When you say space separates, you're in a mind culture. Because you're distinguishing between mind and material and the material is out there and you're here and... Your mind is here and your body is there and so forth. And in a body culture, space connects because space is part of the body. Okay, and it's expressed, I mean... The reason we practice with our breath and the posture is because it's so much easier to work with one's psyche and one's mind through the body than the reverse.

[42:07]

So, where some people have asked, I know, why am I being sort of Buddhist or formal by bowing and things like that? This doesn't have much to do with Buddhism. The way I do it, if anybody looked carefully, comes from a particular lineage. But it's a gesture of a yogic body culture that goes back into India. Now, supposedly, when I put my... They say that Westerners shake hands because they're showing they're friendly by joining their sword arms.

[43:17]

This is someone's theory. Who knows if it's true? But it's clear that, say that you don't know somebody very well or you're feeling a little distant from somebody and somebody says, well, at least you guys ought to shake hands. So you don't want to... Ulrike and I have been having a little argument and we say, all right, let's shake hands over there. Not that we've ever had an argument. And immediately, you know, when I hold her hand, I feel better. Even if I didn't intend to shake her hand, I didn't want to, actually.

[44:18]

So the whole yogic teaching is in the truth of that, that if you make a physical gesture, it actually has its own power, independent of whether you intended it or not. So, now the word shin in Japanese and a version of it in Chinese means mind. But actually it means heart. And it means not just heart-mind, but it means the experience of the simultaneous connection between heart and mind. And it means all true thinking is done with the body and the heart and mind joined. So it means heart-mind. And so when you do this gesture, and when I tell you, when I say these things, I begin to feel I'm a little weird and I'm saying too much.

[45:38]

Or maybe I shouldn't say because it's a little, I don't know. But I will say this is the territory when I speak about it. I feel a little funny. I shouldn't maybe speak about it because it's either weird or should be, I don't know. You all make us very curious. Yeah, I know. The territory I... When I speak about it, I feel a little funny. I shouldn't maybe speak about it because it's either weird or should be, I don't know. You all make us very curious. Yeah, I know. You're supposed to translate, not comment. Okay, your comments are better than your translation. Okay, which is the sense in the body culture is there's a kind of liquid around you. Now, do you know what lay lines are in England, where they talk about, lay just means fields, but lay lines are like stone hinges on certain lines or certain power lines under the ground.

[47:08]

And in yoga culture, there's a sense that there are ley lines in space. And the sense that space connects is also that space has a structure which we've just created in this room. Und in dem Sinne, dass es Raum verbindet, gibt es eben in diesem Raum auch Strukturen, die wir selbst erzeugen. Yeah, and the famous example, famous, I've made famous, the common example I've made is that I asked Sukhreshi once, what do you notice most about America? And he said, you people do things with one hand. Because when I pass this bell to Ulrike, really I should be passing myself to Ulrike through the bell.

[48:12]

Passing the bell is fairly unimportant. The reason on the table you have only one salt and one pepper is that it allows you to pass yourself to each other in the meal and relate to each other. Otherwise, you could all have your own little salt. Der Grund, warum es auf dem Tisch nur einen Salz- und Pfefferstreuer gibt, ist, dass also damit die Gelegenheit geschaffen wird, dass wir uns jeweils selbst immer übergeben können. What did you say? Give us an over also means to vomit and drink.

[49:31]

Well, that's what some people do in relationships with each other. They're always vomiting. You didn't translate that. So if you've eaten in a Japanese restaurant or you've eaten in a Zen monastery or in a sashin, the way the meal is designed is to increase the relationships between the people serving and eating together as much as getting the food in your mouth. Now that's why in Japan and China there's no handles on the cups. Yeah, it's not because they're not smart enough to figure out that a handle might be useful. Because you're always centering yourself when you have to pick something up with two hands.

[50:47]

Unless you want to stick your thumb in the hot tea, you know. You have to use two hands. You pick it up with one, transfer it to the other. And if you've ever noticed two, they stop the cup at each chakra. Because you activate the chakras by relating your body to physical objects and to the world. So when I do this, I am taking the energy of my hands, which you can actually feel a spongy material between your hands at some point. You bring your hands together and then you relate your heels of your hand to your heart. And so you bring your hands, this energy together, and you awaken this energy, and you direct it to the person that you bow to.

[52:02]

Now, when I bow, often I do that, I bring my hands to this point, then I lift them up until it's at the tip of my nose. And this is, when I do that, it's more of a Zen expression of, I do this, and then I bring it up here, showing that I'm complete and I respect your completeness. Because this interferes with your energy a little. It actually shoots a little energy at you. And it's sometimes better to just do this to start it, but then you bring it up and you let the other person alone.

[53:11]

So there's no, in this culture, there's no natural. Because all postures are yogic postures. Yeah. I can't just wave my arm at you naturally, because if I do this, I'm sweeping something across you, particularly if I feel the pace of all of you. So we're actually in an unconscious orchestration with each other, which you can be more conscious in which we are actually orchestrating each other's feelings like a conductor. And now I feel that it's better for a culture to know these things than not to know them.

[54:22]

Because you don't know them, you're very easily controlled by leaders who intuitively do know them. So Zen is basically a body culture. And maybe in the afternoon I'll talk about it, but this part has connected with a certain kind of memory, this part has connected with a certain kind of presence and activity and so forth. And the simple home base and the simple practice, as I said, from what you can realize, all these things, as the case says, don't appear too quickly. is to get in the habit of coming back to your breath.

[55:48]

To rest in your breath. To realize your breath body. When I integrate all that, then I end up as a Japanese. I don't think so. But I will say that... You want to say that in German? I know. When I integrate all that, then I end up as a Japanese. Well, I think you'd end up to be liked by the Japanese immediately. Because I've been present in Japanese meetings.

[56:50]

And they say, Westerners will never understand us. It's a kind of secret. But as soon as you understand what we're talking about, Japanese are so relieved because they immediately feel their body talking to you. And there's even in business circles a term for talking to your fellow associates under the table with your stomach. While the Westerners don't understand. Yeah. So it's quite a different culture. but the root of it is yogic practice which is not related to Japan it's something that's just us and Japan is an interesting but not perfect culture for sure it's not perfect so I'm not holding it up as an ideal and we have to have lunch

[58:02]

So, shall we come back at 1.40? 1.40. Please enjoy your lunch. Now I'd like to say something, because it seems to be a part of what we're talking about today, is anchoring reality. But first let me say a little bit about where we're coming from, where I'm coming from in this practice and in relationship to some of the questions that have come up. And Helmut asked me a very good question at lunch, which is, is all Buddhism tantric?

[59:19]

And in the larger sense, all Buddhism is, you could say, is pretty close to tantra, if not tantric. No, we're not talking about Hindu Tantra, which is quite different than Buddhist Tantra. Hindu Tantra works with feminine energies and deities and in extreme cases a kind of Marquis de Sade school of licentiousness. You practice everything vile you can think of. In Zen, so then to answer Helmut's question, in Zen, could you have a non-tantric Zen and a tantric Zen?

[60:57]

Yeah. Most Zen that's taught in the West is more or less non-tantric. Because if you, well, first of all, if you're practicing the Zen of the historical Buddha, if you're practicing the Buddhism of the historical Buddha, The precepts, morality, patience, generosity, and so forth, this is not really tantric. So that's the historical Buddha. Then if you practice from the point of view of the three bodies of Buddha, the so-called Dharmakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Nirmanakaya bodies, then you're really in a tantric realm.

[62:10]

But if you emphasize the Dharmakaya body, which means the sense of the body and mind as space, again, you're not really practicing so much tantra. And so most Zen, I think, my impression is, most Zen practiced and taught in the West is more Dharmakaya Zen. It emphasizes clearing the mind, emptiness, enlightenment, and so forth. And Sambhogakaya Zen, which is the so-called middle body or bliss body, emphasizes, and also I should say that in Buddhism emptiness is considered feminine.

[63:16]

And emptiness is considered from the Yogacara point of view to be a womb. A womb of all possibilities. So it's a very creative matrix we live in. So in the Sambhogakaya body, the emptiness is experienced as bliss. The sensation of emptiness is non-referential joy. So what I've been teaching mostly is Buddhism and Zen based on the energy body, the bliss body, and so forth, and that's all a kind of tantric side of Zen.

[64:17]

So, and strangely that my school and my lineage within Zen emphasizes a simultaneous Abhidharma, which is a very early form of Buddhism, combined with a tantric way of understanding the Abhidharma. So anchoring yourself in reality. First, a small confusion that came up. A number of people have spoken to me and said, you said past and future exist, but the present doesn't. And I really wasn't, and I don't want to now try to talk about philosophy from the point of view of physics or Buddhism or something.

[65:37]

All I meant is in a simple sense, if I look at you or you react, by the time I perceive you, you've already moved ahead of that perception. Or if I touch a hot stove and I move my hand away, by the time I move my hand away, I'm already burned because the burn, my perception was a... You see, there's a gap there. Yeah. So unless you follow thoughts to their source and find yourself at the source of thoughts, if your present is thoughts, you're already in the past. Because thoughts are occurring already after you've been burned.

[66:59]

But you can be at the present at which thoughts arise and other people's thoughts arise, so you're experiencing other people as they're beginning to think, not just after they've thought and expressed. So I was using present only in this sense that it's an extension in your senses that in some senses covers what we generally call past and future. Now, when you practice mindfulness and you are paying attention to, now I'm a sitting person, now I'm a walking person, and so forth.

[68:09]

Yeah. You are anchoring yourself in... You're anchoring yourself in this immediate consciousness. You're not thinking so much about that you're walking. You're just noting that you're walking. This is a very healthy thing to do. Now, I have a feeling that part of Buddhism you can look at psychosociologically and say it's the development of a highly urbanized complex culture that was complex in a way our culture has only recently become complex.

[69:19]

So my feeling is, for instance, in America you have this immense problem of homelessness. And one of the most peculiar aspects of it is that you have highly trained, intelligent, say, engineers homeless. And you say to yourself, why don't they get a job as a gas station attendant or anything? They could do lots of things. The only explanation I can come to is that they actually are people who can't handle complexity.

[70:26]

They may be very intelligent, and they've been able to be an engineer, say, but when they lost their job and too many things, they lost the ability to function. And I think that when Europe moved from an agrarian society to an urban society, you had an immense problem with beggars and homelessness too. So I think bedlam. Bedlam? Bedlam. Oh, beggar. Bedlam is a word for crazy, and it was a famous mental hospital in England, I believe. Um... Um... So I feel that these teachings, separate from Buddhism, are teachings in how to handle complexity.

[71:41]

Now, I'm maybe trying to do this too quickly, but I'll try. We can divide the body up into so-called four elements that you experience. Solidity, or the earth element. Fluidity, or the water element. And motility or movement or heat. And space or air. And so when we're talking about movement, Now, if I name these things, you can begin to experience them.

[73:03]

So there's a certain power to naming them. So if you feel the solidness of you, And you begin to feel the solidness of you or kind of a pressure that's separate from the fluidity and so forth. You can begin to remember that. And if you have a little experience sometimes of this solidity, including the physical solidity of the world that seems to come through you, and if you feel that for a moment, The practice of Dharani memory is to sort of feel it as if you're going to remember it with your body and then go back to the experience and then feel it and go back to the experience and eventually you remember these things with your body.

[74:24]

So say that you have a certain experience of pliancy, of fluidity, of connectedness. If you begin to get this experience of kind of remembering it physically, then you can amplify it later. Or you might feel some kind of, after the seminar, you walk out on this porch and the space seems like opening up and yet part of you and very gentle. Now, from the point of view of practice, you allow yourself to feel that without thinking about it for an instant. It's almost like you stop in the midst of it and file it.

[75:25]

It's kind of an education. Now you're not saying, oh, this is natural, I feel natural, and I hope I feel natural again in the springtime. That's great, you know, but then you're kind of at the mercy of if the day's right, if the weather's right, and so forth. From the point of view of Buddhism, this is a capacity of us that's not dependent on the spring day. But you have to remember it to open it up. It's like one of the questions I haven't dealt with but have been brought up is intuition.

[76:55]

Or the feeling that, which we've mentioned several times of Sukhiroshi, that when you look at a tree, you see a poem, and sometimes you don't. But this isn't necessarily an experience that's dependent on the muses tapping you on the shoulder. It's a state of mind you can move into, so most of the time you feel the same kind of engagement that everything's speaking to you. Now, I would say that intuition is usually when we feel, when there's a physical perception that we sense as truth. We haven't thought about it, but we just feel. That's right.

[78:06]

It's like that. And there's almost no idea of intuition in Buddhism. But there's an idea of thinking with your body. Of thinking with the whole of the situation, of allowing the situation to think you. And I think it's virtually the same as intuition. But it's just considered another way of thinking instead of something that sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't happen. And that usually only happens to women. I'm just teasing. I know Martin has had intuitions. When you begin to notice something that's very tiny, that slips by, but you note it and kind of remember it with your body, a certain way of breathing, it could be anything,

[79:44]

A certain insightful state of mind which you can remember the feel and taste of it. Or, for example, right now in this room or at certain moments when we've been practicing together, there's been a certain feel and taste to the room, to our experience here. And if you want to bring the teaching back, if you remember that feeling, much of the teaching will come back. You don't have to think about it. So if you begin to sense the body as also a vehicle of reality, And you anchor yourself in your body. And you anchor yourself in your breath.

[81:00]

And the breath is always the home base. Like you might, for instance, if you're practicing a kind of amplification in your zazen. Say that you're feeling angry. In this way of practicing, you may not act on the anger, but you feel the anger intensely. You're feeling fearful, for instance. In the security of the sitting posture, you amplify the fear as much as you can handle. Until you begin to find a territory within this that you can even feel at ease in the midst of fear. But when you're doing these experiments, like amplifying fear, you come back to your breath if it gets too much.

[82:11]

And even when you end the period of zazen, sometimes it's good to start counting again, because it's like a re-entry, you know. So in this kind of more tantric practice, zazen periods can be a period of intense psychological, emotional exploration. Okay, now that's one sense of locating yourself in your body. These four things I've mentioned of the motility, solidity and so forth, are a way of locating the world in your body.

[83:18]

Because if you feel the fluidity element, the liquidness of movement in your body as moving simultaneously within and separate from the solidity, It helps you begin to recognize the world as the same stuff as you. Instead of, I'm something different, special, and the world is dead or material. So even a stone just feels like a slowed down version of you. And you can feel your own solidity with the stone. And you'll find different people are relating to you, sometimes through fluidity, sometimes through solidity, sometimes through motility, sometimes through, you know, etc.

[84:31]

Now, I would define soul, for instance. Because in the yogic practice, everything is bodily and sensation-based. As the fluidity and solidity element... joined with the sense of interactions. So when you feel a certain pace of the world rising in you or appearing in you, in the stuff of you, and you can actually feel it as a kind of different kind of sensation, I'd say this is what we actually mean by soul.

[85:33]

This has a certain identity to it. It's like a jewel, like in this koan. It can also be a jewel. And you can begin to feel what emotions... are connected with this fluidity quality. But when you're emphasizing more the interactions like between us and in the sense of heat or air, then you're more talking about spirit. So what I'm saying is you can begin, and I'm going to stop now, is you can begin to feel a physical topography to emotions, thoughts, and so forth. And it begins to be not something you control, but something you participate in.

[86:52]

Then you begin to live in a topography that's within you and outside you and within others. And the fluidity element in people communicates back and forth just as much as speech does. And when you try to translate all of this into speech and talk to somebody and turn it all back into the ears and go back, it's hard. And someone asked, we talked also about ego. And one thing I didn't say about the ego when I gave you a definition of ego Ego is based in conceptual eye consciousness. Self is more based in the body, but ego is based in conceptual eye consciousness.

[88:05]

And most of our culture and speech is based in eye consciousness. I would say soul is based in sound consciousness. Where there's no distance in sound. Near and far is just in your ear. So you can actually separate out eye consciousness from sound consciousness, from smelling, touching, etc. consciousness. Even taste, actually you think it's just taste, it's actually a whole way of your mouth and energy and wetness works and alters your mind-body state.

[89:18]

The most successful matchmaker in Japan was asked how he is so successful in matching couples. He had the highest success rate, I believe, according to what I read. He said, oh, it's very simple. I match the wetness of their eyes. So, I'd like to stop.

[89:47]

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