Are you all well fed? Too well fed? Now, one of the things that Cohen brings up is, particularly in this faith and mind quotation, Is the idea of equanimity. And someone mentioned too the relationship between equanimity and compassion And I think that's also related to the question you brought up earlier, because it's about how do we act and trust our immediate situation.

[01:14]

It's not so... You know, it's... Much of this is very difficult for me to put my finger on and say it's this or that. Yeah, so I can... I can try to, with the help of the koan, give you a feeling for this territory of practice and of being and becoming. And even not getting caught in being and becoming. So equanimity means, well, you know, there's we like things or we dislike things.

[02:35]

So there's three areas of feelings, like, dislike, and neutral. And neutral sounds the most boring. How are you feeling today? Neutral. What's your Zen practice like? It's pretty neutral. But the idea here is an interesting one, actually. And what I want to do in these days we have is talk as much as I can about the... paradigm of psychology in relationship to Buddhist practice.

[03:43]

Because we're all operating to actually a very great extent out of an assumed psychological paradigm. So I think trying to think about that, which make us notice that which we take for granted, like, well, that's just natural, and look at how Buddhism is a little different or similar. We have to do this at a certain pace too because We need a little more time together and with each other to kind of nudge ourselves along in this looking at things differently.

[05:13]

It says here he was looking for an utterly new sun and moon. Perhaps we utterly knew sun and moon is a little much, but we might have a glimpse at a new way of looking at things. So let me come back to this neutral. Is we have a mental habit of an either or mental habit. Most things that come into our consciousness we either like or we dislike.

[06:19]

Or it either interests us or doesn't interest us. Or we can either use it or not use it. And things, perceptions that don't fall into these either-or categories, we don't see or notice or care about. Now, this either-or habit, going back to childhood, has, I mean, developed. dramatically shaped what we see. And slowly robs us of subtlety. Until we can't really function without distraction.

[07:20]

We always need some kind of excitement or distraction. So the practice of what these three feelings, like, dislike and neutral, point out is this either-or tendency. So neutral means that mind which appears when you don't fall into either or. And it may look neutral because it's not in the categories of likes and dislikes, but it's where most of everything exists. Most of the world isn't paying that much attention to whether you like it or dislike it.

[08:52]

And most of your own subtlety isn't in the categories of whether you like it or don't like it. So equanimity means to establish yourself in a mind that isn't caught by either ors. It's another gate to or way of talking about this background mind or unmoving mind and bringing that imperturbability and clarity into your thinking.

[10:07]

Or into your emotional life. No, I can't tell you what this is like. Because I can only speak mostly in either or terms or likes and dislikes terms. So what you have to do to practice it is you have to kind of take it on faith or intuition, that if you could sometimes refrain from an either-or state of mind, it might be a good idea.

[11:10]

And this book is sometimes translated not as the book of serenity, but the book of equanimity. So this isn't a calmness that's arrived at getting rid of likes and dislikes. Or a calmness that's arrived at through settling into the stillnesses I spoke about. Oder eine Ruhe, die dadurch hergestellt wird, dass man sich in dieser Stille niederlässt, über die ich gesprochen habe. But a calmness or serenity or equanimity that's come to by freeing ourselves in our emotional and thinking life of either or.

[12:16]

Now this is also what's meant by this thing, the ultimate way is without difficulty. It is only avoiding being choosy. Now this, this is also the meaning of the middle way. And I think maybe I'll go into that a little bit tomorrow. And I'm speaking about these things also as part of a psychological process that can help open up your processes to yourself and to therapy, for example.

[13:27]

So when you read a koan like this, partly it's designed to be expected to be read with a mind that's not caught by either ors. It says here, most people would make a logical understanding. Or others would just stay in the realm of non-striving. Not making an effort, just being passive. So how do you read something or stay present in your own meditation? Without making a logical understanding.

[14:48]

But at the same time, not being passive. There's a full energy and effort in it, but you're not trying to form it into either or or a logical understanding. So reading a koan like this is a special sort of technique to let it in and let an own organizing process and an inner cooking work with it rather than trying to grab it too quickly. And part of that process is what they call here studying from the side. So I'd like it, if you're willing, for you to break up into small groups and study from the side.

[15:59]

Maybe eight to twelve people in each group, something like that. And I hope that in each group there'd be at least one or two or so people who are familiar with our way of looking at koans. Now, there's a way of rotating a sutra. Where everybody takes the sutra and opens to a different place. And everybody starts reading in different places at once. Yeah, and you're reading there and you're reading there and pretty soon you hear and a wonderful kind of pattern appears.

[17:09]

And you can actually feel like when it's time to stop and when it's time to make more effort or something. So that happens when we have a number of groups all talking together in different... And I'd suggest that you maybe read the koan together or look at it together and just, you know, just kind of... You know, I can't bring you each group an espresso, but, you know, something like that. And the Dharma Center gets more developed, we'll have a little espresso counter. Okay, Ted, please. Maybe you can help.

[18:27]

You know, when Fayan met his teacher, He said, what are you doing? Where are you going? Fayan said, well, I'm just wandering. His teacher said, his teacher-to-be said, well, what's the purpose of your wandering? I don't know. This guy said to him, not knowing is most intimate. Or not knowing is nearest. So you maybe have that experience, you know.

[19:54]

You know, this is... In a situation like this, it takes his not knowing and stops it. Nun, in solch einer Situation ist einfach sein Nicht-Wissen nötig und hält alles an. Oder verwandelt sein Nicht-Wissen in Wissen. Und ihr braucht im Grunde wirklich diese Art Selbstvertrauen. is that whatever your experience so far in reading this koan is, that's the experience you're supposed to have. I'm not kidding. You think I'm kidding, but I'm serious. There's a... You know, there's a saying, don't mistake the finger for the moon when you're pointing at the moon.

[21:16]

So someone said to Fayan, what's the moon? So Fayan said, the finger. So he said, what's the finger? The moon. He even tried to get around it by saying, I'm not asking you about the moon, but what about the finger? And this isn't just playing. It's to take away the either-or or the language. So you think, well, if it's not the finger, then at least I have the sutra. Or the moon. But he takes away both moon and finger. Okay, how do you stay in that state? But you often have dreams that you don't, you know, it's quite common to have a dream you say, geez, what was that about?

[22:38]

In fact, most dreams are like that. This koan is not much different than that. Yeah, just imagine you dreamed it. What a bad dream that was. You have to know the zero point on the scale. You wake up to zero point on the scale. Okay, so let's sit for at least a few minutes before we stop. Either or thinking completely weighs down one side of the balance scale.

[23:42]

Until everything seems heavy, we seem burdened by our life often. until everything feels difficult, until we feel completely overwhelmed by our life. Our body feels heavy and our thinking feels heavy. What we look at looks heavy.

[24:46]

This dream scale can come more into balance. It wants to, but you have to cooperate. You know, a kalpa is a Buddhist term meaning a period of time from the beginning of a world system to its destruction.

[26:02]

It's an interesting idea, of course, because there could be no, if world systems are created and then destroyed, cosmoses, there could be no knowledge that such things happened. So anyway, it also is used to mean something like how long a memory system can hold a world in place. How long your memory system holds your world in place. Now one of the things we're very aware of in contemporary paradigm we have from psychology is the role that memory plays in our life.

[27:39]

And the digging up of memory and looking at it again. And memory has a, for us it implies at least some measure or ideally or paradigmatically a measure of accuracy. So we use it in school, like when you study for a test, you try to remember the facts. Now, but also, you know, I'm just using two English words here.

[28:50]

I would like to say that there's also something we could call, we can try to define as remembrance. It's the same in German, I would guess. It's the same word? Well, let's just use English then, remembrance. Maybe you could say a little more what you mean in contrast to memory. Okay. Ah, yeah. Is it the ability to remember, remembrance? Well, remember, there's a little poem. It's something like, he goes out himself with a bottle in the village and gets it filled with wine.

[29:56]

And then he goes back to his temple. Puts on his robe. And he's now the host. Okay. Now this poem is totally simple. You know, he goes out and he gets some wine. He comes back, puts on his robe, and then he's his own host. But it's also a poem which resonates in Asian culture, Japanese culture, because you're a different person when you have robes on than when you don't. We have that sense too at the office where one person... But still we sort of, we have more of a sense that we should be or are the same person in different roles.

[31:05]

And there's also a sense in Buddhism of the host being emptiness and the guest being compassion or activity. So this poem resonates with a lot of things and so is used in a Zen context sometimes. But I used to, you know, I lived for some time in a very off and on for 20 or more years in a little village that used to be extremely remote. Now there's a tunnel to it, but there used to be only one road that a bus...

[32:09]

could barely negotiate. It went round and round, you know. A little tiny neighborhood bus, you know. So when you were up there at the end of this peninsula, near the end of this peninsula, you were in a pretty remote place. So it was like before there was liquor stores and transportation of goods. Everything was local. All the vegetables, fish, everything was local. If you wanted sake, you went with your bottle out to the local sake factory and they filled it for you. But I don't actually remember for absolutely sure whether they gave me a bottle or I brought a bottle.

[33:36]

You could also go to this farmhouse and he kept beer in the garage. You would wake him up in the middle of the night, I need a beer. Come on, I'll give you a beer. The village took care of itself. So I can't You know, the poem is part of my remembrance. I can't tell really whether the poem is exactly what I remember, doing something very similar, or the poem has affected my remembrance, or what. So remembrance is found in the present. You can't dig for it into the past. You can't say, what was that remembrance? All you can do is certain association, certain context, bring up a flow of remembrance.

[35:04]

And that's what a poem, I mean a novel, poems, but novels particularly do, is they enter you into a flow of remembrance. And if it's a good, really a great novel, a pretty good novel, after a while you don't know whether that was your experience or it was part of the novel. Great novelists have the power to change the remembrance of a whole society. So that's what I mean by remembrance in contrast to memory.

[36:21]

Now it's funny for us to, in a way it's quite funny for us on a nice Sunday, pretty nice day Sunday, sitting in a warehouse talking about something that happened. you know, hundreds of years ago. And I know we have at least a couple unborn babies who are in here, you know, sort of enjoying the sitting at least. So why are we going back to these ancient ones, these ancient stories? Well, the present is really primarily a flow of remembrance. And how do we get a perspective on the present?

[37:41]

If you want to, I mean, much of what the present is, is what we don't see. And maybe when you're older you'll say, oh yeah, jeez, I didn't see that then. Or historians will look at this period and they'll say, oh yeah, this is what it was like, but we don't see it. But how do you have the perspective a historian will have in the future is to go back into the past. The perspective the historian will have in the future when he looks at the past.

[38:42]

You mean how we have that now? How we have that now is for us to go into the past. We're trying to step out of time in some way to get a perspective on what we're doing. So anyway, we're constantly in a flow of remembrance that is present on every mental and physical event. And there's a certain structure to that remembrance. Every psychic event or mental or physical event has memory work, psychic work, structure that goes into that before it appears to your consciousness.

[39:59]

How do you create a new sun and moon? So in Zen practice, we're not just trying to look at our memory or recall our memory. But we're trying to change our memory system. We're trying to step out of the flow of remembrance and memory for a moment. Wir versuchen aus dem Fluss von Erinnerungen einen Moment lang herauszutreten. And the experience of now and the experience of time and the experience of space, all are psychically structured for us.

[41:05]

Und die Erfahrung von jetzt, die Erfahrung von Raum und Zeit, sind alle psychisch für uns strukturiert. Now this is what this koan is trying to say or point out to us. So what is the image of fire? Fire seeks fire. Well, of course, the god of fire, the goddess of fire, would seek fire. Why not? If you're the god of fire, you might as well look for some more fire. It's perfectly natural. There's a possible god of fire. Pretty far out, you know. You'd love to meet him at a disco. Well, I don't know.

[42:19]

Will you lead? Anyway. I buy American pie. This will be the day that I die. So what happens when fire, we can like have some sense of what, of the, at least some idea about fire. I mean, what happens when you, fire meets fires, it burns itself out. In a forest fire, you start a backfire to burn themselves out. And fire, it's a little bit like a, you know, you can think of it as a black hole or a whirlpool that sucks everything into it.

[43:24]

So, this image of fire, studying the self, is fire seeking fire. Now, I'm just trying to give you a feeling for this, because these images, an image... works not because its words carry linguistic or meaningful content. An image is a container for remembrance. I mean you can stay with this fire seeks fire It doesn't have to have a meaning, it just can carry remembrance, it can carry things with it.

[44:53]

Or it can be an image that takes away language, or takes away, like this image of fire seeks fire, it takes away your thinking. So I told you the story of Fayan when he first went to see the man, the person who became his teacher. You said to him, you know, I'll repeat the story, what are you doing? What are you doing? And Fayan said, I'm wandering. And what's the purpose of your wandering? He said, I don't know. And his teacher to be said to him, not knowing is most intimate. Not knowing is nearest. Now, we have to... At that point, you know, as is, you know, supposed to happen in Zen stories, Fa Yan was enlightened.

[46:38]

Now you can say to yourself, hey, how come it hasn't happened to me? I listen to this story very carefully. And, yeah, I'll I don't know either, but I haven't become enlightened by not knowing. So, of course, timeliness and readiness in the actual situation has a great So, of course, timeliness and readiness in the actual situation has everything to do with this. It's sometimes called pecking in and pecking out.

[47:42]

Because the little chick starts pecking out, and the mother has to hear her peck in, and they work together, and boop. So pecking in and pecking out has a certain timeliness, of course. And for the chick, in a sense, it's the beginning of time. The beginning of a memory system, a kalpa. So how do we get ourselves out of time? Out of the structures of remembrance and memory.

[48:54]

So although I don't think any of us were enlightened hearing that story, but don't thinking is nearest. So we can start. Part of these, we can learn from these stories, is start here. Start here. But how do we use here to start? How do we use starting to start? To start, you have to stop. So how do we stop so we can start? I'm sounding very zen. This is good. Maybe I'm getting the point finally.

[50:05]

So how do you stop so you can start and use here to start? This is the fundamental question behind this koan. And we all know, use fire to fight fire. Fire seeks fire. Use language to free yourself from language. So start here. I mean, you say, I don't understand. Ah, that's where you start. And you enter that not understanding. You don't seek in the future for some time when you will understand. As I said in the Sashin, enlightenment does not happen in the future. You know that is a fact, right?

[51:17]

It can only happen in the present. So if you have a mind that anticipates the future, you are defining enlightenment out of your life. And once you're enlightened, you're not seeking anything anymore. So enlightenment can't arrive through a seeking mind. So again, we're at the same point again. How do you come to a mind that neither anticipates nor seeks?

[52:17]

That doesn't strive or doesn't create a logical understanding. Everything in Buddhism is pointing at this, but there's nothing there that's being pointed at. Is it the finger or the moon? It's neither. So how do you start here? So somehow when he said, I'm wandering. And Dijan said, what's the purpose of your wandering?

[53:34]

Dijan said, I don't know. Same question Bodhidharma gave to the emperor. Same answer. There's not much difference between Bodhidharma's, I don't know. Who are you? I don't know. And Fayan saying, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm wandering. You know, once this young monk once the Indian patriarch, but still there's not much difference between their I don't know. There's a difference in whether you see it as an obstacle or a starting point. So Pha Yan said, I don't know.

[54:44]

And Di Chang said, not knowing is nearest. And somehow this stopped time and space for him. The flow, structures of remembrance, everything stopped for a moment. And the structures in which we're put together are visible for a moment, visible for a moment through the veil of remembrance, and they can shift. So he was received, entered a kind, some stage, some enlightenment. And he continued to practice. He stayed with the Dijak. And at some point he decided to start wandering again.

[56:12]

So Ti Chang went out to the gate to say goodbye to him. I'm sure he, you know, had his hat on and traveling front pack. He cleaned out his room. And Dijan said to him, you always say that the three worlds are nothing but mine. This is Yogacara teaching. That everything is mind. And so this rock here, is that in your mind? And Fayan said, yes. And Dijan said, now what's a traveling monk for you carrying a heavy rock around? That is a stupid remark.

[57:21]

I mean, of course he knew he wasn't going to... It had no weight when he carried it around in his mind. But Di Jiang was... The weight of Dijon was there saying, hey, your work isn't finished yet. And he said it in such a way that again stopped him. And he didn't come out with discursive kind of, well, yes, but, you know, he didn't think, he didn't answer that way. He allowed himself to be stopped. And that's also a characteristic of people who come to realization is they know when they don't know.

[58:45]

They're able to be stopped. And they're able to be, to see into things in enough detail to know that they don't understand. And also to be stopped means you can start. Why don't we sit for a minute and then we'll have a break.

[59:49]

So we've stepped out of time for a moment and joined these ancients in their out of time. And anyway, the past isn't in the past, it's just remembrance. As the present is remembrance. To step out gives us distance and depth. and may give us a meeting.

[61:23]

Buy, buy, American pie. Peter, come on. You have such a good feeling. I just don't know what the self is. What is that? A category, or is it the experience, or what is it? Not know, Miss Nearest, just... Well, we're making progress. Now, I asked all of you to bring a resonant question into your background mind.

[62:31]

Yes. So you should be able to give me a progress report. Or have you been unable to find your background mind? Or maybe the question got lost in the background mind. Anyway, something... I didn't complete the tale of Buddhism, you know. There's still more to be said or to practice. Yes. Thinking one question, I meet only questions. Where is the one question? Well, really, if I had that experience, I would just stay with that feeling.

[63:52]

Yeah. I was just thinking about in relationships, there's a lot of, it's not easy for me not to react either with love or hate, with like or dislike, you know, struggle. And my background question is a little bit of how can I use this unmoving mind or bring myself into a state to deal more or better or less disturbed with this kind of struggles. Because in relationships it's very easy for me that I like or dislike what the partner says or does.

[64:58]

Maybe if I don't react at all and she says, OK, you don't care about me, you just love me. I think they will get somehow a little bit further. Did you say that in German? My question was that I had the experience that in a relationship or in my relationship it is very difficult or very quickly this love or hate comes into contact with the partner, then I say that very quickly or I react to it very quickly with one or the other feeling.

[66:08]

In my case, how can I bring more of this anger into it as quality Where sometimes the danger is that I do it too much, that then it is said, yes, you don't care at all what I do. And that then even more is provoked until love or hatred. That is the question. I find it so funny because it is a very familiar question to me. I said I find this funny because it's something very familiar to me, so... Well... Again, you have to start where you start.

[67:24]

So if you have a feeling for this, you take that feeling right now that you don't know exactly how to act within this mind of act through or within this mind of neither like nor dislike or not running to opposites. Now, and if there's enough energy in the relationship to your partner or to your relationships in general, where you can use the energy of relationships, particularly intense relationships.

[68:30]

To also use that energy to stay with the feeling, What could be a mind that doesn't go back and forth between opposites? This is also called the genjō koan. To use the energy of your present situation starting exactly where it is as practice. If you do that, you're doing exactly what this koan is pointing out as one of the main entrances, the door of Samantabhadra. Which is to find a way to stop yourself or to have the feeling of a background mind in the midst of your activities.

[69:47]

One of the most basic way and most unique way of doing it from the Zen point of view is to use a phrase. And you use, the word is wado, and it means to use a phrase to turn the mind back to its source. And to do that, you have to use a phrase which is invested with energy. So it almost always has to be a phrase that you don't understand. Or a practice you can't accomplish.

[71:05]

Or something you can feel would be good or you desire but you can't realize it. And that can't realize it and that don't know then become the energy to keep bringing it back into your consciousness. Now you can't use ordinary thinking to free yourself from thinking. Man kann jetzt nicht das gewöhnliche Denken benutzen, um sich von dem Denken zu befreien. Oder sich von geistigen Angewohnheiten zu befreien. Man muss das Denken sozusagen begrenzen oder in einen Rahmen bringen, dass es wirklich diese normalen Denkmuster einfach durchschneidet. So you use fire to stop fire. So you can have an image of fire or you can have this feeling of it's possible to realize a mind not to attract it to opposites.

[72:19]

And already you have a third point. You have like, dislike, etc. And you have the third point that keeps saying, hey, I'm doing that. And the more you keep reminding yourself of that third point, you draw energy out of the two points. It's actually understood in a very energetic way. It's a kind of understanding of how structurally the mind works. And to create this third point generates a background mind. generates a field among the three points and draws energy out of the back and forth of the two opposites.

[73:24]

No, I'm answering this way not only because it's the teaching gate of this koan, but also because this poem, this koan, is based on a certain assumed structure of how the mind works synergistically. So, I mean, practice is incredibly simple. You just start where you are. You trust exactly what occurred. Hey, okay, there's the problem. I make the problem the problem. It helps to have the confidence of the teaching and a teacher press, but basically you see that, you keep reminding yourself, and something happens.

[74:50]

You'll start meeting your friends under a new sun and moon. It may look like the same sun and moon to them, but actually there's some difference. And you'll begin to feel the difference. Okay. Yes. My question is, if a feeling has the quality of a question, is there acceptance necessary or no? The answer is yes and no. Because Again, this is not about entities, it's about process.

[76:32]

It's a dynamic system, a pulse. And the common image is wave follows wave, wave leads wave. So you want to study Buddhism so you feel that it's affecting your practice. And you want to practice so that it affects your study. And you don't want to get much ahead of those two waves. But that image is true for all the dimensions of practice. So when you have a question, when a question comes to you, it soon melts into a feeling.

[77:34]

And your ability to physically hold a non-graspable feeling is very important. So on the one hand, a question is most effective when you turn it into a feeling. But that feeling isn't an entity. It needs to move. And if you can then take that feeling and allow it to manifest into a question or some other form, an image or something, That pulse deepens it and helps create the process which a resolution or change occurs through such a question. So, the answer is no.

[78:54]

The question, just the feeling is fine. Or yes, indeed. But it's also true that it's good to let the feeling be fluid enough to say, nudge it a little, to take form. I've often told the story of the brown telephone. And it's now in a little book of American koans or something. Somebody I know did. But I was asking, I used to practice this questioning very intensively in the early years of my practice. And I was, you know, keeping this question going as a mantra.

[80:02]

And in my imaginal space a phone kept ringing. Like a distraction. And I was, you know, trying to stay with this one pointed thing and this phone kept ringing. So I finally thought, well, the practice is to start here. I'm going to have to See what the phone has to say. So I went over in my mind to the phone. It was strange that it happened to be brown, I thought. That should have been a signal. Because often you can, memory has color, you can separate, you can follow the brown back to its source, you can follow the phone back to its source.

[81:14]

So anyway, I picked the phone up in my mind and it told me the answer. It was very convenient. I've never seen that phone again. I've never looked for it again. Yes. I don't know what you were saying to this little... I think it's all well and good to say, well, okay, I'm not going to like or dislike what you do, and I'm not going to get upset. I'm staying with neutral here. But this person, on the other hand, and I've experienced this personally, can get really outraged by that, really provoked by the fact that you just... You're just too cool.

[82:22]

I mean, your answer was more directed towards, which was good, you know, how can I deal right now with where I am and my feelings and not judging back and forth, but aren't you also running the danger then of alienating this other person, maybe becoming kind of egotistical and being impersonal and wrapped up with your own you know, processing the world or whatever, and at some point this person's going to say, well, I'm out of here, you know, because you're not really interested in me anymore. So that's just a really real-life issue. It's not enough to just say, well, if I just put it in my own head and what's going on there, everything else is going to work out. Maybe it's not going to work out. Yeah, you want to practice your Deutsch? But she'll start laughing. Yeah, it's a kind of problem.

[83:34]

Um... At first, when you get the ability to stabilize your mind, people can get very angry at you because you don't get angry back. So this is one stage. And the next stage is, you decide that doesn't work, so you get so that you can be angry. Then you can really be angry because you're just being angry, right?

[84:38]

And you don't have to hold back because you know you can stop it at any point. So you scare the daylights out of people. So then you have to realize that that doesn't work either. So in general, as you get more familiar, you just participate. But you're not cool in the midst of that, uninvolved. I can't explain it better than that. But we've been talking, some of us, about the idea of compassion, empathy, and so forth. And I think empathy is a technical term for psychotherapy, I believe.

[86:00]

But the ordinary use of empathy in English means to embed yourself, to be in another person's feelings in a sympathetic way in which you like them. I'm very empathetic with that person. It's different than saying I feel compassion for that person. So I think the word in Buddhism we use is actually, I think the Japanese word is soku rei. Which literally means detached, yet not separate from. So the practice of equanimity means detached, not cool, out of it. Detached, yet not separate from. So it also means that empathy is somehow detached from something, but not separated from something.

[87:12]

Yes. To this question, I think when you do psychotherapy, a similar process happens with people, like when they practice this neutral space in Buddhist practice, that you get so excited about something new you learn, like working with conflicts and expressing everything, that it often causes relationship problems too, because you just come home from your therapy session and you feel, you know, wow! And it's like finding a balance as well. One thing people who practice find it becomes quite easy to have contact highs.

[88:21]

Everyone's drinking and you can get drunk and not drink. That also helps to go crazy with people. I want to make a distinction that Foucault makes, which I agree with, that all madness is not mental illness. And I think you had a feeling for that when you did that extreme states clinic. I mean, madness is saintly sometimes. And sometimes some people can function quite well and know they're confused. So I don't think we should reduce all madness to mental illness.

[89:44]

And in practice, there's a kind of madness. We kind of go mad within ourselves. But you learn to function within the many dimensions of yourself. But one learns within these many dimensions that one is to function. My understanding of the connection between psychotherapy and Buddhism for meditation is that, concerning this point, in a way in both fields you are developing this space in which understanding and experiencing is possible at the same moment. Of course, very paradoxical, but I think, especially concerning this question, it's a central point for me.

[90:54]

Deutsch? I thought that the connection between medication, Buddhism and psychotherapy is that in both cases one develops a space in which understanding and experiencing are possible at the same time, which is in this way a paradoxical situation, but which can be developed equally. I would like if you can explain a little bit more about compassion. I have to think about how to do that so it might be useful, because compassion is, for Buddhism, a technical term in relationship to wisdom.

[92:09]

OK. Anything else? Yes. When you talked about this remembrance and bringing this flow of remembrance into your meditation, I had the memory that you once talked about that doing this you can change That's how you change your story, and I'd like to hear more of that. Deutsch? Wenn man diesen Fluss des Sich-Erinnerns in Gegebenheit bringt und das auch in seine Meditation bringt, hat er mal in einem anderen Seminar darüber gesprochen, dass das so eine Möglichkeit ist, darüber auch seine Geschichte zu verändern.

[93:22]

Well, I don't know whether to use pictures or words. I put this poem on here, and I'll come back to it. Rujing, who was Dogen's teacher. He was doing a funeral. And he turned to the mourners with a firebrand, a lit piece of wood. Presumably, he was about to light the cremated body.

[94:30]

And he turned to the mourners and said, how to bring you back to life? And he made a big circle with this fireman and said, ah, the original.

[94:51]

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