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Compassion Over Justice in Zen

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Seminar_Zen-Practice_and_Dharma-Friendship

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The talk explores the intricate dynamics between justice and compassion in Zen practice, emphasizing the need to prioritize compassion over justice for a more harmonious life and practice. It highlights how one's initial approach to situations in terms of justice can impede genuine compassion and acceptance. The dialogue further delves into the complexity of teacher-student relationships within Zen practice, describing it more as a 'friendship' than a strict hierarchy, aiming for mutual growth and understanding within the Sangha. Acceptance, illustrated through Zen teachings and parabolic anecdotes, is presented as a practice of non-attachment and transcending dualistic thinking.

Referenced Works and Relevance:

  • The Eightfold Path (Buddhist Teaching): Discussed in the context of how one's views, particularly the prioritization of justice over compassion, shape perceptions, behaviors, and spiritual development.

  • Blue Cliff Record, Koan 22: Used to illustrate the interactive and dialectical nature of teacher-student relationships in Zen, highlighting the nuanced balance between guidance and autonomy.

Individuals Referred to:

  • Harry Roberts: Recalled as having a distinct perspective on experiential reality and perceptual differences between cultures.

  • Suzuki Roshi: Mentioned in connection with the speaker's personal experiences and reflections on the transformative nature of Dharma friendship.

Other Works Mentioned:

  • Bob Dylan's Lyrics: Used to explain the capturing of a moment’s essence, akin to a Zen capping verse, illustrating a point in meditation practice.

  • Einstein’s Theories and String Theory: Referenced to underline the concept of perceiving dimensions beyond conventional perspectives, paralleling spiritual dimensions and Zen practice.

AI Suggested Title: Compassion Over Justice in Zen

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Now there's a difference between having a break and not having a break. So let's have a break. Until 10 to 12. And maybe we have discussion. Maybe I can. Are we OK? All right. The idea is simple. If you have some kind of samadhi, or whatever you want to call it, some kind of concentrated state, if you get angry, It disappears right away. If you make a comparison, it disappears right away.

[01:03]

Okay. So if you want a wide, inclusive, concentrated state of mind... The actual experience of practice is that it has to be relatively free of distinction. For some reason, I always like to say this may or may not be science or philosophy. And I guess I say it not to be critical of science or philosophy, but to emphasize how rooted Buddhism is in an experiential reality. What is real is what you experience.

[02:10]

I remember Harry Roberts, who was kind of trained as a Yurok shaman. Yeah, I said that if a white man sees something in a bush, That's more dramatic than I... You're getting carried away there. Calm down. If he goes and looks at the bush and can't figure out what it was, he thinks he just saw something. Isn't that funny in English we say, oh, I just saw something, meaning it's not real?

[03:14]

But, um... But, of course, he says if an Indian sees something, he says, well, something was there, just not in my usual sense world. In a way, I mean, I loved Harry Roberts, and he lived in our sangha for years. But, you know, I get tired of putting down the white man. Indians are better, Asians are better, etc. We're not so bad. But we have caused a lot of trouble in the world with our sense of superiority. So maybe it's natural since we're

[04:15]

historically defined as superior in terms of civilization, we should knock our image a little. But certainly there's some truth to that, that we tend not to trust our experience unless we can verify it or unless it falls into the categories of normality. So again, our practice brings you into a world which makes sense.

[05:51]

And makes sense only if you trust your experience. And look carefully at your experience outside of categories. Okay. Now, some years ago, I felt pretty good about some people that I'd had not felt so good about before. But I really couldn't. I could tell that I felt, you know, okay.

[06:53]

But I couldn't quite let myself open my heart to them, open my feelings to them. So I kept trying to think, why is that the case? And for maybe two years or more, I asked myself this question. And I'll try to tell you my solution, the solution. Okay. It's one day I suddenly realized that at the bottom of all my views the first view was justice. So if we imagine something like this,

[08:13]

And we imagine that at the base there's emptiness. Impermanence. Everything's changing. There's no fixed substantial world. So we can call that logically and experientially emptiness. Okay. The next view I discovered the first time that comes into form was justice. And the next view was compassion. And then there's, you know, I realized as long as I've been practicing Buddhism, in some way I remained a Christian.

[09:33]

How did you experience, I mean, how that it was just? Clear, okay, okay. So justice is about right and wrong. And compassion is about acceptance. The dynamic of compassion is acceptance. The structure, maybe, of justice is right and wrong. So I could not really feel compassion because underneath that I could only feel compassion and acceptance when it was right.

[10:35]

That's a hard teaching. Compassion is a hard teaching. It means you accept what's wrong. Not many of us can actually do that. And it goes deeply against the Western dream. Yeah, but you can say, oh, the world, you can and you can make a good argument for yourself. But the world is so complex, it can't be divided up into right and wrong.

[11:35]

But when it comes to society, And your personal life. And your friends. And people who've harmed you. It's very difficult to actually practice acceptance of what's wrong. By the way, does anybody know, is Milosevic out or in? She's out in the country? He got out of the country, yeah. When I left, no one knew where he was when I left the news last and Friday.

[12:38]

Right and wrong made me think of this. Okay, because I don't want to accept him. But I discovered as long as justice was the most the first way I looked at the world I couldn't truly forgive or accept. Okay. So I shifted the position of these two. So I had something like compassion and then justice.

[13:42]

I'm still in a world where justice makes sense. But my first, my initial movement into the world is one of acceptance. And how did I see this? I knew there was a problem. I couldn't identify it. How do I... I kept noticing that I... I kept noticing that I was concerned with justice. With the situation being understood. Which meant to me understood in a way that justice prevailed. And I also realized that I wanted and felt compassion.

[15:00]

And after a while, I simplified the situation till it was these two things. Why are they interfering with each other? Yeah. You can see why it's hard for me to learn German. It takes me two years to find the relationship between justice and compassion. Those are only two words. And English has a fairly simple grammar. But anyway, basically to answer your question, I suddenly saw it just like this, like architecture. I saw that my initial response was justice and my second response was compassion.

[16:17]

I saw it just like a structure. I have seen that my first original answer was always justice and then the second one was compassion and I have really seen it in such a structure. Immediately as I saw it, I knew I could shift the position of the two. And I shifted it in the whole dynamic of how my personality functioned and emotions worked, changed. This is an example of why the Eightfold Path starts with right views. Because your views control your perceptions and conceptions. and much of how your personality functions.

[17:20]

So, I mean, you can feel in, you know, I use the word to represent, how one is represented. If you represent your spouse to your friends, When you represent your partner, your friend, you represent your friends. in negative terms, say, or in terms of right and wrong, you really change the atmosphere in any situation.

[18:27]

So that's what part of right speech is. to represent the world and to represent your friends first in terms of compassion and acceptance and then sometimes secondarily in terms of right and wrong. Ideally is a feeling, particularly within the Sangha, of absolute acceptance for each other. That's part of the dynamic of Dharma friendship.

[19:35]

And then within that absolute acceptance, there can be criticism. In fact, teachers, it's like you can read in a book about Sakyurashi, his teacher, are often notoriously critical. But that makes sense as part of practice when it is based on an absolute acceptance of each other. And it's possible It is possible to absolutely accept another person. As they are. And... Yeah, anyway, I said enough.

[21:07]

And still have realistic relationships, you know, based on how we do things. How we do things. But if there's a sense of absolute acceptance, it allows us as human beings to grow. It's almost like you make a fertile field. The Sangha is a fertile field in which we can grow. Because underneath annoyance and so forth, there's still acceptance. And this is also what this line means, transcending intimacy and alienation. Now acceptance is one of the a magical dimension.

[22:20]

If you accept and then accept within that acceptance, and then accept within that acceptance. This is also a way of practicing non-corrected mind. Now this is what appears. And you accept it. And the acceptance, somehow you sink down in to merge into the mind when you accept it.

[23:25]

Then you begin to notice tiny things, as I said. And then you just accept that. That's what appears. And for some reason, that attitude of accepting what appears allows you to notice something working even under that. Now that's expressed in one of these capping verse poems. Particularly in Rinzai practice, you try to find when you finished, pretty much completed working on a koan,

[24:27]

Try to find a line from a poem or something, it could be a popular song, that catches the flavor of the koan. Like there's a line from Bob Dylan, one of his songs, it may have been a sun-caught fly. Yeah, that's like a little tiny moment when a fly is caught in the sun. That could be a way of speaking about a dharma, something like a sun-caught fly. The sun tried to catch it.

[25:52]

Like I try sometimes. So that's what a capping verse is. Can we tell them what you translated? No. It's quite amusing, I think. You have to bring the suggestion back to them. It's like the time somebody translated for me calm abiding mind as karma biting mind. And I could see it was in Berlin. Everybody was saying... I kept talking about karma biting mine. The best translation I've ever had.

[26:53]

Okay. So I gave you a capping verse the other day. I only saw the petals blown by the wind How was I to know the many green shadows of the garden trees? So we notice, you know, in our meditation, we notice maybe the petals blown by the wind. But there's shifting green shadows also. Such poems are trying to get you to notice actually what happens in your meditation experience.

[28:10]

And when you get fairly good at that, and you can stabilize yourself in this noticing, then you can start removing dimensions. Because you've just seen that the dimension of right and wrong didn't allow compassion to work. And acceptance is a removal of dimensions. Do you get that? You just accept. Again, don't worry.

[29:12]

It doesn't mean you have to, you know... Live with a thief. My mother was entirely too accepting. She rented a room in her house to this woman who came, who used to come home from the store. She worked with new dresses all the time. And she'd say, oh, I took this from them. They don't mind losing a dress or two. That should have given my mother a clue. Is it the boxes piling up on the back porch were her antiques? My mother would say, wasn't there a clock up here somewhere? My mother was entirely too accepting.

[30:13]

And this woman simply shipped about a third of my mother's stuff and labeled it and sent it off. She carried acceptance to not compassionate levels, but anyway, yes. But Tsukiroshi would say, a thief is stealing for his mother. that's compassion but ok steal for your mother but stop stealing from me I'm trying to be realistic here and show you that you can function in the world and still have compassion and acceptance your fundamental way of entering the world

[31:24]

Maybe it's good to understand it as initial, your initial response. Like you can practice with your initial response is yes. And your second response is no. Or it might be yes but then it's a yes-no response. We kind of train ourselves this way. Someone said, do you want to go to the movies? Yes. But actually I can't, I have no time. But in simple things like that you can actually begin to practice acceptance.

[32:30]

Okay, now what are the views? Oh dear. Hope this isn't all too much. But you put the poem on the poster. Now, Again, we're not talking about like, as I mentioned, string theory. Is a string a person or is it just a string?

[33:32]

String, yeah. String theory. And it was a Polish physicist, I think, who first suggested it to Einstein. He had the daring to suggest in 1919 or something that there might be more dimensions than three plus time. And when he One reason he had the suggestion is because he saw that if he took Einstein's equations but applied them to more than three dimensions, sometimes suddenly Maxwell's theories on electromagnetism made sense in terms of Einstein's equations. So he had the daring to think, maybe this world has more dimensions than three or four.

[34:44]

And when he did, it suddenly made sense. In another scale, mathematically. Okay, so I'm just using it as an example to say, maybe you can look at your own dimensions. Okay, so what are our experiential, not scientific, dimensions? Okay, there, right and left. Okay, back and front. Up and down. Now, those are the three dimensions of sort of geometry.

[36:01]

But I'm putting them in terms of your experience. And you will notice that in a lot of Zen stories, that really they're talking about no up and down. Now, yes, there's up and down. But you can stop thinking in terms of up and down. Notice that we tend to think of our feet as down there. In some sense, my feet are down there. But maybe one of the reasons we sit cross-legged is that we bring our feet up, so they're not up or down. When we bow, we go down to where our feet are. In any case, it makes sense as an experiential dimension to think of your body, not think of your body in terms of up and down.

[37:32]

To think of your body as everywhere at once. And to think of the mind as everywhere at once. So I'm just suggesting, try it on. Okay. And then you can also back and front. There's back and... No, this is the front. I'm mixed up here. This is the front. No. Okay, here's the front now. So you kind of play with back and front. And right and left. Yeah. I used to have a lot of problems. I have a mole right there, and that's the only way I knew where my left hand was.

[38:33]

Luckily, there used to be one on my left foot, too, so I could figure out which was my left son. I'm kind of stupid, and I remember in school they'd say, all the kids on the left, and I'd say, It's a rather arbitrary distinction. There's left, oops, no left, no right. Okay, now there's some other dimensions as well. Near and far. And again, this dimension is also challenged in Buddhism. We have the famous koan of Matsu and Bajang. Bajang says, what's that? Matsu says, Matsu Bajang.

[39:36]

Bai Zhang says, what's that? Bai Zhang says, what is that? I get them all mixed up, you know. Which is left, which is right. I once took a test in college where I analyzed all these things and I said, I don't know which name it belongs to. Here are the names, here's the different positions, you attach the names. Teacher didn't like it too much. Anyway, so Bai Zhang says, what's that? Marie-Louise's brother is living in Rostock. And the brother of Marie-Louise lives in Rostock. And we said, what's the news from Rostock? And then we asked him, what's new in Rostock? Thousands of migrating... Cranes? Cranes, what in German?

[40:49]

Cranes, yes. And he said, thousands of migrating cranes. So... Matsu said, wild geese. And in this way Matsu said, wild geese. And Bai Zhang says, where have they gone? And Matsu says, oh, no way. That was the wrong answer. So he grabs his nose and says, it's harder to grab a Chinese nose, but anyway. When have they ever flown away? Are you still in the sense of near and far? The universe is also non-local. So, when have they ever flown away? And we have in and out. And I often say to you, think of this whole thing as an inside.

[42:14]

This is also a practice. Stop thinking of inside or outside. Inward, outward. So this poem implies that a certain kind of friendship is understood when we take certain distinctions away. Another one is subject-object. No, when would you feel most friendly with another person? When you don't make a strong subject-object distinction.

[43:15]

In a way, friendliness is a kind of plowing the field in some way that the subject-object distinction is less strong. Now, practically speaking, don't think of these things as absolutes or states or contraries, but rather as a direction toward less distinctions or a direction toward more distinctions. If you think of it this way, you can practice with it. You can notice when you make a very strong subject-object distinction. Andreas is out there.

[44:24]

He's different than me. Younger, etc. Those are subject-object distinctions. I can notice that I make them. I can try to withdraw them. I can not think of him as younger. Or I can refrain from thinking of him as younger. I can refrain from thinking of him as over there. And every time you move in the direction of less distinctions... The movement in the direction of less distinctions changes your mind. And more the field of being becomes apparent.

[45:25]

And this field of being enlivened through acceptance And known as compassion is the field of the bodhisattva, it's the field of dharma friendship. Yeah, I think that's about as much as I can say about that now. And we have lunch in about ten minutes. So let's sit for a few minutes at least. It's funny, the movement of caring is in the direction of less distinctions.

[47:34]

The movement of not caring, disliking, is a movement toward more distinctions. So if Buddhism is about enlightenment, the field of being. Then the only expression of the condition of enlightenment and knowing the field of being

[48:49]

It is caring, compassion, acceptance. Acceptance. So it's not just because these are good things. It's because it's actually the way the world works. It expresses the most fundamental level how we exist. In us human beings, the way the world works, when we express the way the world is, What we express and experience is compassion Acceptance Caring Just the way it is

[50:15]

So compassion and wisdom are simply different ways of noticing, saying, entering the world. Entering and knowing the world as it is. And we practice that with each other.

[51:45]

And make for each other a fully blossoming possibility of of realization, of Buddhahood, Buddha nature, Bodhisattva practice. All of these are ways of talking about what happens when we fully make space, this space of true friendship.

[52:50]

Das sind alles Arten wie wir davon sprechen können, wenn wir wirklich Raum schaffen für wahrhafte Freundschaft. Thank you.

[55:09]

Is there anything anyone would like to bring up? Yes. Now, loosely you can say aura. But I think really if we speak of aura, we speak of something more like a field of light or color you see around a person under certain circumstances.

[57:18]

But what I'm speaking about is more like not something you see, but something you feel. And you feel in relationship to each other or a situation. In a way, it's something like feeling the presence of another person. Like each one of you has a somewhat different presence. But even that's not what I mean. I mean that... If I have a sense of Marie-Louise, for example, and I don't... I mean, if Marie-Louise and I are sitting here, there's some kind of...

[58:56]

I mean, I can feel her presence there. But more than that, these things are so hard to speak about because they're not in the realm of ordinary speaking. But when two people together establish a kind of effort to communicate, and you're not so much focused on your own experience, but a kind of field of knowing that arises. There's a kind of knowing that's not just from your senses. Yeah, so that's not exactly presence, it's not aura.

[60:39]

Some people do see auras and some don't. But if you do see auras in people, you can feel how concentrated they are and what state of mind they are, but it's very particular. Yeah. Okay. That's my experience anyway. It's not okay for you. Yeah. that seeing is not seeing, but to feel. And therefore, I have problems to differentiate between aura and feeling. Deutsch, bitte. Also, ich habe bei dem Workshop aura sehen gelernt, dass sehen heißt

[61:53]

So I didn't see the aura, but I felt the colors. You felt the colors. Yeah. Feeling the aura. Well, I think you'll just have to kind of... You'll have to kind of figure it out for yourself. As soon as we're talking about something like we don't see the colors but we feel the colors, you're in a very subtle territory. And it's a little hard for me to talk about. Because there's a lot of rules in Zen.

[63:00]

And one of the rules is you do not tell anybody whether you see auras or not. Because you do not speak about things unless everyone can feel it. So I don't, that's one reason I need permission. I have to feel you already sort of know something before I can talk about it. But let's imagine that someone did see auras. Then if that person had a student who also saw auras, Then, if I knew anything about it, I might say to that person.

[64:09]

When you see auras, for instance, on the left side, it tends to mean this, on the right side, that. When it's mostly concentrated here, then you should focus yourself here. And when it's mostly white, then it's something. When it has color in it, then it's something else. But that's seeing with a certain kind of seeing. So sometimes, for some teachers and students, some people use auras to figure out, to under-feel another person in Dokusan. But it's not a... Not a capacity that not everyone necessarily has.

[65:17]

You don't want to bring that up. So in Zen we almost never talk about chakras or auras or enlightenment intensives and things like that. So that anyway, so that's what I would say. You told us about your meeting with Suzuki Roshi and what this meant for your world view and opening up a world inside of you and I think you mentioned it as a special or maybe the most intense possibility of friendship and I would be happy if you could say something more about this this possibility of friendship because usually I understand friendship as a kind of

[66:43]

of relationship on a somehow similar level, talking to somebody who is equal to me. So how can a friend be a teacher for me? How can I be a teacher for a friend? And what has this to do with Dharma friendship? Okay, Deutsch, bitte. Yesterday, I think, Roshi told us about his encounter with his teacher, Suzuki Roshi, and what kind of world that opened in him and showed him. And he also described it in the context of friendship, perhaps from the possibility, from the most intense possibility of friendship. And since I normally understand friendship as a relationship that is relatively equal or meets in some form of equality, it is interesting for me the question of how far a friend can be a teacher to me or I can be a teacher to a friend.

[67:48]

And what this can have to do with dharma friendship. Yeah, okay. I say friend because I don't say guru. The sense of a guru is someone who does something for you. Mm-hmm. In Zen, the effort is always to empower the fellow practitioner to do it for him or herself. I'm not saying that all uses of the word guru mean what I just said. But you don't look up to your teacher exactly, you look over to your teacher.

[68:51]

Teachers either present for you or not present for you. Teachers sometimes withdraws his or her presence and sometimes allows his or her presence to be present. It's a complex relationship. It doesn't fall into the category friend exactly or guru. That's a relationship you have to get a sense of. But from the teacher's side, it feels like a kind of friendship, like friendliness. I remember I was with a teacher once.

[70:47]

Not Suzuki Roshi. And this teacher, while I was speaking with him, and we had a kind of conversation. I don't remember what the conversation was about. and the teacher somehow caught a dust mote. You know when you see in the sunlight these little things floating in the sunlight in the air? He somehow had one in between his fingers. And all the time I was speaking to him, he would move it into sunlight and it would flash in my eyes.

[71:49]

So while we were talking on one kind of pace, one level, he really brought his energy to this dust mote and just turned it in the light and he moved himself into the light and then out of the light. This really created a field of a person field. It brings you into another kind of dimension while the conversation is going on.

[72:54]

You begin to feel things in between the conversation. And when the energy changed or we moved out of what we were talking, out of the dharma part of what we were speaking about, And when the energy had changed and we moved out of the Dharma conversation he let go of the motor and it started off But this is an unusual friendship. But it's still a kind of friendship. Does that make sense, or am I talking something strange? Do you have an expression in German, dumb talk, don't you? Am I dumb schwitzel? Is this dumb schvitzel?

[74:00]

Nine? Ten. But it's a kind of companion. When you do that, if you did that, and that's a very typical Zen way of relating to someone. I mean, it's completely unique. I don't know, maybe it's never been done before in Zen history. But it's still a fairly typical way of making use of a situation. Yeah, I mean, I've spoken about Sukhiyoshi asking him a question. You may not have. I have spoken about various examples. One is asking him a question. And so he starts speaking about someone else.

[75:20]

And he starts saying that they're still on the outside, but they're not really still inside yet. While he's doing that, I clearly felt him change his breath. So I brought my breath in conjunction with his. And then I listened to him talk about this other person who's not really still inside. And then I tried to feel the stillness in his breath, in myself. Yeah, I think this is an interesting relationship. But it's a kind of companionship more than guru. Das ist eher so eine Art Kameradenschaft oder Begleitung oder sowas, aber nicht wie ein Guru.

[76:45]

Man ist nämlich beide auf dem Pfad und das gemeinsam. Hier ist jetzt ein Beispiel für diese Art von Gefühl. And that can't happen, you know. Such things sometimes happen, sometimes don't. There's the kind of friendship where you feel yourself drawn into a relationship and you don't know where it's going. You feel first maybe drawn by the other person's completeness. But then if they feel you're drawn by their completeness, they make themselves incomplete.

[77:48]

That's a kind of friendship. Yeah. I mean, the person starts thinking you're perfect and they show big imperfections flowing all over. Or then it becomes possible that you begin to feel the completeness between you rather than in either one of you. And then instead of the teacher trying to make him or himself feel himself or herself feel complete to the disciple, which might result in a kind of worshipful attitude.

[78:59]

Instead, you try to make the disciple feel complete rather than make the disciple think you're complete. I don't know. This is more like friendship than anything else I could call it. The spirit is, let's do this together. So der Geist darin ist, machen wir es zusammen. I think that's a spirit of friendship. Also ich denke, das ist so ein Geist von Freundschaft.

[79:59]

You know, there's a... I think it's in Koan 22 in the Blue Cliff Records. Also ich denke, es ist in diesem Koan 22. Oh my God, I always forget the name. Very good. It says, if you smooth it out for you, if you smooth it out, I'll smooth it out for you. If you break it up, I'll break it up for you. That's an expression of the attitude of a teacher. So the teacher tends to go along with what you're doing. If you need or want it to be all okay, he or she will make it all okay.

[81:13]

So how do you understand the story of Sukhiroshi and this psychiatry professor? Yeah, I'm asking about enlightenment. I don't know. I've never had the experience. And then from the kitchen, you're right, he hasn't had the experience. Making tea for the two of them. And then later, you know, sort of, This is a perfect example. If you smooth it out, I'll smooth it out for you. I don't know what to say. That's what I said, though.

[82:13]

Yeah, please, someone else. Yes. What's the essence of that in the beginning when we came together that there was this big kind of distance and now it's quite a density. And something like friendship amongst each other. When we first were together, you felt a big distance between each other or between us or everywhere? From my feeling, I felt it. No, well, I think then the seminar must have been at least a moderate success.

[83:31]

Yeah, there's a kind of, I feel a kind of liquid here now that we're all part of. Someone else, something else. Some of you haven't said anything, have something to say? I like to hear everyone's voice. I would like to say something to this field.

[84:44]

I experience different kind of fields. One is like, she described it, maybe this kind of aura field. I mean, if it's now aura or not, I don't know. But it's a field where you come in contact with a person. But then, I don't want to say more about this, just in opposite to the field where I want to speak to, is this field we can establish with the teacher. It's a field what is not always has to be created Every time we meet him, it's a kind of interior field. It feels for me, if it's what's really established, it's so stable that it feels like the part of my own body.

[85:58]

It can't be taken away anymore. It's... It's very strong and stable, even if it's totally sensitive. And for me, and that's one reason I choose this poem method. It's, is it intimacy? On a normal level in a normal mind? No, I don't. I wouldn't call that intimacy. But when I switch a little bit, it's the most intense intimacy I have experienced in my life. And also the other side, in a normal mind, yes, sometimes it can feel like alienation. There are strange moments and different feelings and so on. But also when I do this little switch, then there's, I mean, even the question for alienation doesn't come up anymore.

[87:11]

It's dissolving in this field because there's no place for it in this field. And what I... I'm totally fascinated from this field because for me it's the hope of all human beings is in this field. And the hope for all kinds of possibilities of relationships is also there. And I really deeply appreciate that for my life. Deutsch, bitte. Für mich gibt es also bei diesen Freundschaftsfeldern verschiedene Felder.

[88:19]

One field is what appears in every encounter, where I go in, or the other in my field, where an exchange arises, where a common field is. But I think there is an even more important field for me. It is a field that has really developed at some point, has been built up and is always present. It is not in the concept of having to build up first. And that is, for example, a field of relationship with the teacher. It is no longer dependent on the teacher, it is something that has arisen in my inner space and thus becomes so stable, which in a way feels indestructible to me, also not to be destroyed by the teacher.

[89:22]

What else did I say? Yes, and in this area, and this was the reason why I came back to this poem, which touched me many years ago, in this area, when I ask myself, is there intimacy there, is this an intimate area, I would say, With my normal consciousness, no, I would not call it intimate, but if I move away a little and look at it from another mental state or point of view, I would call it the greatest possible intimacy between people. and with alienation it is the same, yes, I can say from my normal consciousness, of course there are alienations and misunderstandings in this field of relationship and so on, but also when I make this little switch again,

[90:31]

I feel that the term or the feeling of alienation is no longer possible. It is as if this term dissolves in this field. It is not even possible to ask this question within the field. The teacher's job is to... Establish or show what belongs to each of us. And to, um, to, um, um, to introduce a feeling that is a feeling of how things actually are.

[92:02]

Now, although we could say it's a feeling of how things actually is, At the same time, it is particular to a particular lineage.

[92:22]

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