yogic practice to extend beyond the self. And now again, this is very simple, actually. What are the three functions itself? Well, the first is to establish separation. OK. Now, the immune system is a kind of self.

[01:11]

The immune system knows what belongs to this system and what doesn't belong to this system. It seems to get confused as you get older, but, you know, it works pretty well. And you have to know that that's his voice and not my voice. And although you're hearing, you still have to know it's not just a voice in your head. If you can't establish this kind of separation, you're in deep doo-doo. And the second is simply connectedness.

[02:17]

The second function itself is to establish connectedness. And for most of us, I find for most of us it's something like being polite or friendship or something. As I said yesterday, we much more quickly experience and recognize separation than we do connectedness. One of the qualities of yoga practice is less emphasis on separation and more emphasis on connectedness.

[03:19]

If you spend time with somebody, Without talking or doing anything or just meditating with them. Somebody you don't know. You can feel extremely connected with this person. And it's not just that you happen to be together so much. but if you're meditating together it seems to open up ways we feel connected I would say for convenience sake in awareness and not through consciousness.

[04:26]

Now, I use consciousness the way I do. Because of that, that's the same root as scissors. It means to separate. What consciousness does is that mind which makes distinctions. It's fully essential. We have to make distinctions. and my teacher used to say if you want a Zen teacher you want a Zen teacher who makes very good clear distinctions but consciousness notices distinctions not

[05:28]

It's dual, it's by definition dual. Okay. Now the third function of self is continuity. And we need to establish continuity. We have to establish some kind of continuity from moment to moment. But we don't have to do it through our thinking. And usually we do do it through our thinking. And if you have some experience, like sometimes people who take drugs do, they lose their usual sense of thinking continuity.

[06:44]

Like say I look this direction. And I see you all. And I turn this direction and I can't remember that. Say I'm trying to cross a street. And I look left but when I look right I don't know where I am anymore. And I look left but when I look right I don't know where I am anymore. Maybe I'm going crazy. Well, in little ways, we sometimes lose thinking continuity. And it can make us feel rather crazy. Because we have to have a sense of continuity. All right. Now, if I ask you all to bring your attention to your breath, And you can do that very easily.

[08:14]

Right now you can bring your attention to your breath. You can feel the individual inhale or exhale. But you can't do it for very long. Why can't you do something that's so easy for a longer period of time? Why does your attention very quickly, as soon as there's a chance, go back to your thinking? Because that's where you establish your continuity. And that's one way you'll stay in borrowed consciousness most of the time. Okay, so let's say we know that, we feel that. Okay, if you know that your attention is going to go back to your thinking, and the reason it's going to do so is

[09:46]

in large part to maintain thinking continuity with the world. Then if you want to change where you establish continuity, The breath is a very effective way to do it. So if you want to come into this yogic world you can practice mindfulness of the breath whenever you have a chance in your daily life and just do it when you think of it don't criticize yourself for having forgotten

[10:53]

Because then you're really back in thinking conscious. Just when you think of it, because now you really know it might be possible to establish continuity some other way. So you hold the intention to bring it back. The intention. The intention. Now, some people say to me, I have to go around all day walking on the street and shopping and things with this observing consciousness telling me to pay attention to my breath. This is really dualistic. When I shop, I want to shop. Drink my coffee. I want to drink my coffee. Yeah. But it's not really like that. you are pretty much aware of your posture all day long.

[12:29]

You may be fairly aware of your posture during the night. You can increase your awareness of your posture during the night if you want to try this practice. You can decide to hold something during the night and keep track of it all night long. a stone in your hand or something. If you want a little more advanced practice, you put something that's balanced on your forehead and see if it's still there in the morning. It's possible to do it. But just something in your hand actually begins to make you aware a bodily awareness during the night.

[13:41]

But even without doing that, You're still fairly aware during the night whether you're sleeping on your side or which side and so forth. And during the day, all of you are aware whether you're sitting, standing, how you're sitting and so forth. After a while, have an awareness of your breath very much like you have awareness of your stance or posture. You just feel joined to your breath the way you feel joined to your posture.

[14:44]

So if you keep bringing your attention back to your breath, and you notice it snaps back to your thinking. It's easy to do again, but then it goes back to your thinking. Then you forget about it. Then when going up the stairs in your building where you work, say, You use the stairs to remind yourself to come back to your breath. Or every time you happen to look at the sky or out a window, you use that to bring yourself back to your breath.

[15:47]

At some point, suddenly, you notice, I'm almost always with my breath. And what's happened when that happens, you've shifted your sense of continuity from your thinking to your body, breath and phenomena. It's a remarkable change in life. You simply feel where you are all the time. Your feet don't feel like they're down there. Your feet are down there, only if you feel you're up here.

[16:55]

And you feel you're up here, when your continuity is in your thinking. It's like a kind of, there's a shift to your whole body is present. And the boundary between you and the world and the breath all seems to be a kind of kind of, dare I say, kissing? Yeah, kind of intimacy. My little girl calls me, wants Marie-Louise to call me in the morning so she can talk to me. And she kisses the phone right away.

[18:02]

Hello, Papa. And she likes maple syrup a lot. So she takes the maple syrup and pushes it against the phone and says, Maple, Papa. And then she takes the maple syrup and pushes it against the phone and says, so there's anyway there's some feeling like that that the world is like this and this somehow releasing this continuity establishes more connectedness And your sense of self now seems to cover whatever you see and do. So you can see self as functioning. And you can change the way self functions.

[19:21]

The whole idea of freedom from self or non-self begins to make actual sense to us. Okay, so I think I've said enough. And maybe we can sit for a little bit. So the first stage of any practice like this, any teaching like this, is to notice what you actually do.

[22:20]

Notice when you feel separation. zu bemerken, wenn ihr getrennt sein empfindet. Almost all the time? Fast immer. Some of the time? Manchmal. Notice when you feel connected. Bemerkt, wann ihr euch verbunden fühlt. And what degree of connection? A little bit or quite open? Und was für einen Grad von Verbundenheit? Ein bisschen oder... Is it easier to feel connected to a tree than an adult person?

[23:21]

Is it easier to feel connected to a baby than a tree? You just take a kind of inventory without criticism. Just start noticing your own mental topography. Just start noticing your own mental topography. And from moment to moment, how do you establish a sense of continuity? Is it sometimes just in your breath and body? And are you in immediate consciousness just now?

[25:06]

Or thinking consciousness? Can you feel palpably the difference? Can you feel the energetic difference? It's your choice which you want. You can't make the choice till you notice the difference. Thank you very much for another afternoon together.

[30:11]

Thank you for translating. Hope your voice feels better tomorrow. Good afternoon. Rilke has a poem which, in my paraphrase, goes something like this. If you want to know, the space outside ourselves violates things.

[31:11]

If you want to accomplish a tree, accomplish in state the existence of a tree. Mm-hmm. you must invest it with that inner space, that intimate space, which has its source in you, which has its being in you. You know, I would say that this is a experience of Rilke's or an intuition of Rilke's that's close to what we mean in Buddhism by both wisdom and compassion.

[32:39]

And I said I would to vote this third afternoon session to speaking about practicing the practice of wisdom and the practice of compassion. And you can hear us both okay? Okay. So I have to find a way to do this.

[33:43]

Because these are not philosophical terms. They're a means, they're a practice as a means To enter the intimacy of our particular everyday life. Okay. So I would like to start with some I'm with sitting as I did yesterday.

[34:44]

So I'll again hit the bell three times at the beginning and once at the end. in your body.

[37:07]

And the openness in the body that arises somehow through this lifting. And relax into your breath. And just as you are just now. The space outside ourselves violates things.

[43:04]

What could Rilke have meant by that? If you said it or felt it, what would you mean by it? And if you want to accomplish the existence of a tree, Invest it with that inner space. That intimate space. That intimate space. which has its source, its being in you.

[44:25]

I think if you want to think about compassion and wisdom in yogic terms and not as generalizations or philosophical ideas but as practices and something you can actually practice. You know, we have to see it as something face to face, something under our nose Something within our gaze. So I would say the central act of compassion is the bow.

[49:09]

Now, I don't expect you all to go around bowing to people. But you can have that feeling. And in Zen monastic life, it's the custom to bow whenever you see someone. In fact, the architecture and the grounds are designed to increase the opportunity to bow to other people. You create paths which make it likely that people will pass each other often. Yeah. So I think, let me describe the practice as I know it personally.

[50:47]

Alice Dare McIntyre, who has written a brilliant book about the practice of virtue, Alastair MacIntyre, der ein großartiges Buch über die Praxis der Tugend geschrieben hat, Er sagt, dass die Tugend immer eine verkörperte Praxis ist. I would say even an embodied space. Okay, now I can give you the feeling for it in a yogic practice like Zen. And I think you can find it in your own life as you practice. are as you wish. So if I'm walking along, and say I come up to you, or you are passing me.

[52:06]

So I'm walking, I see this, what's your name? Bruno. Bruno, I see Bruno, as a fact. Oh, okay. And I actually stop. And I put my hands together and bow. Once I bow, then I go. Okay. Okay. But what I do is actually I start the bow here. Now again, I'm not trying to get you to do this. But I'm so in the habit of it, I'm in a grocery store and I suddenly come and I say, bow and I think... I have to kind of stop myself.

[53:08]

Because I actually practice an inner vow Every time I meet someone, even if I don't express it outwardly. Okay, now in yogic practice, there's a feeling of... Well, your mind isn't exactly just physical, right? Just physical. The body is not exactly just physical.

[54:13]

You know, I mean, you all probably all had the experience of standing somewhere and feeling someone staring at you or looking at you. And you turn around and there's someone staring at you. Now you know that most of contemporary science says that's not true. That's impossible. Or or the scientists who feel it themselves, separate it from their official worldview. I met a woman the other day who was a neurobiologist. And she was going to a meeting of a society of neurobiologists of which there were 50,000 members.

[55:33]

And she belonged to other societies with large numbers of members. Now, this sense that you can feel someone behind you, Or as blind people feel in the world. Or even you. do what's called vijnana practice in Buddhism, you practice with experiencing each sense separate. You probably feel it more. But do you know how many scientists there are at least in the Western world who are researching things like feeling something behind you?

[56:52]

Maybe five or six. And if you do research it, you might lose your university position. So, I mean, we have some kind of subtlety to the world that most of us know about. but it's not part of our world view. And we could say that practice, Zen practice, Buddhist practice, Sometimes it strikes me as funny as I speak here in English. And magically what I say appears in German.

[57:54]

Yeah, but I know how that works. I have a good friend. So what yogic practice, I'm going to have to say, assumes a kind of presence to the body. And that when you stop to bow to somebody, you kind of stop in that field. And we, in fact, generally have our feet, our ankles this distance apart. Again, I don't expect to see you on the street to check any of these. But you don't know where we are.

[58:54]

You don't know much about your body. So a little practice like that helps you actually begin to have awareness more and more throughout the body. If we define walking, maybe I'm about to have a baby and I'm pacing around here. Can you make me about cigars? What did you say? Sidney, you know how in the cartoon somebody who's about to have a baby paces back and forth? The father. And then the father says it's a warrior girl. The father gives out cigars.

[59:56]

In America. So walking in the yogic sensibility is secondarily about locomotion, getting something. And primarily about... And I say this, but I don't want to sound too weird. but primarily about letting the earth come up through you.

[61:07]

Now we even speak about breathing through the heels, breathing through the feet. Now you're not actually, of course, breathing through your feet. But that feeling we have of breathing is extended and drawn up to the feet. If you get feeling for that, you'll find You feel more alive, actually. Okay. So again, if I stop the Bible, I put my hands together, bringing this subtle space together.

[62:13]

And I pull it up to my body. With this heart, mind centered. Well we know something's going on here. You feel it when you're in love. And you don't have to wait to fall in love to feel in love. Your capacity doesn't necessarily depend on falling in love or human capacity. Then, at least in our family tradition, we, reaching this point, which is much a kind of inner state, we

[63:14]

move it up into a more Shared space. And then have a feeling of disappearing into the power. Almost like you're going swimming. But you're diving into the power. Kind of mutual space you make with the other person. Now you're in a hurry and busy and monastic-like involved with... And most of the time, we can just stop for a moment and respecting, honoring the other person.

[64:40]

And then I like it. Okay. Now this is again also about space. as a kind of pace. As a kind of pace. Yeah. A space you enter into With each object.

[65:45]

And with each person. Okay. Now when I'm in a place like this where it doesn't make sense to be bowing all the time. I really, in myself, I can't... I don't know, it's like I'm too cookie, but... I kind of feel the face of the other person almost brushed me. Take a moment and acknowledge that in myself. This is another person.

[66:48]

Another person. Another person. From this point of view, I would say the practice of compassion, the center of the practice of compassion, is to create compassion. a common basis.

[67:51]

Now again, most of us can feel pretty good about babies. And we feel a common basis with babies. And even little, even baby human beings and baby dogs and Babies and other animals, they recognize each other as a baby. You know, my wife took our, I mean, most of you know I have this 19-month-old baby. And my wife, while I'm here, took her the other day to the zoo in Basel.

[69:00]

And Sophia knew most of the names of the animals from books, you know, because she's seen elephants and donkeys and tiggers and so forth. Yeah, of course, in the books, they're all the same size, and in the zoo, they're, you know... But she didn't want to see a lot. She just wanted to stand in front of the bears all afternoon. And then Marie-Louise got her to go to the monkeys and then she wanted to just stand in front of the monkeys. And then she said to her mother, but mama, they're all naked.

[70:17]

Because in the books, they're often dressed. You know, they put little... That was just an anecdote. But if we can feel this common basis with babies... Why can't we feel it with adults? Answering that question is the practice of compassion. Can you answer that question? Can you find that place in yourself, space in yourself, where you feel a common basis in each circumstance.

[71:23]

So that's a kind of short riff on the practice of compassion in Zen Buddhism. OK. OK. What about the practice of wisdom? Well, I would say that the center of the practice of wisdom is to recognize mind in every activity. Now, for those of you who have been here the last couple of afternoons, You know that I've suggested that you remind yourself that every perception points at the object of perception and points at the mind which proceeds.

[72:45]

And to develop that as a habit is the practice of wisdom. So that you feel mind on, on, in, every activity. You know, when I'm here with you, I don't know most of you.

[73:48]

I'm getting to know some of you. But I somehow I find myself wanting to see what I can say and get away with. But what I can say and have some kind of resonant sense for you. Yeah. Can I ask you something? Yeah. I can experience this basic feeling as a baby, yeah? But I think the difficulty for me is When I have this diagnosis, I get excited.

[74:51]

How to treat this? How to deal with this? How to deal with this? She's so quick. I understand. Because when the situation is left, I saw all. But when I am in the situation, it comes over me. It's so quick. It takes me. Because I'm very meditative and very, oh, I have, oh, perfect. But this situation, I cannot. It's always so. Okay. Can you say it in German? I think it's... We all have this problem.

[76:03]

Okay. First of all, it's to see the problem. Second is to make the intention to solve it. And let's leave psychotherapy and everything which sometimes helps, out of the picture right now, let's just say that in addition to other things one might do, if you hold an intent,

[77:05]

Often, often, the world starts telling us how to solve the problem. Now, let me just... say what I saw when you spoke, is when you talked about a baby, and when you said you could feel a baby, you had your hands together like this. And one of the ways you can actually feel the feeling of somebody who's behind you and you can feel them, is you can sometimes feel a kind of bouncy space between your hands if you concentrate.

[78:32]

Without thinking, it's almost springy. Okay, so... It was almost like the baby was between your hands. And it's that kind of feeling that babies bring out in us. And what did you do as soon as you started talking about adults? Your hands went like this. and like this you began throwing your energy out in all directions I'm surprised the pink baby blanket you have didn't disappear laughter laughter You're welcome.

[79:34]

So it's getting to be time that we're supposed to take a break. And I'm trying to be a good boy and follow the schedule. So let's sit for a few minutes. And when we come back, let's try to sit a little bit more together. It's more fun for me. And when you repeated what you said in German, you did the same mudras, the same motions.

[81:27]

How can we open ourselves to the sensitivity and wisdom of our own body-mind? That intimate space which has its being within us. that makes the world familiar. That's what we call the practice of wisdom and compassion. My baby thinks it's my bib.

[84:08]

Bib is what you put on a baby so this food doesn't... But it's a small version of Buddha's robe, which is made of pieces of cloth. Originally, Buddha's robe was made from scraps of cloth sewn together. Now you take a perfectly good piece of cloth and cut it up into scraps. And sew it back together. And then the custom is, if I'm speaking about Buddhism or listening to someone speak about Buddhism or whatever, I should wear this.

[85:15]

Now most of what I've been speaking about in this, the first part of this afternoon. Yeah, I tried to give it some meaning for you. Or some sense of how it can take form in your life. But really the meaning of it is in the doing of it. And what happens through the doing? Now maybe some of you have something you'd like to ask.

[86:26]

This is the last chance we have here. I have a question concerning the practice of wisdom. You can speak. You don't have to just whisper to me. Okay. Yeah? When I understood correctly, It's like when I observe this rose, I observe my observing of the rose. Yeah. In doing this, I feel a stopping, a pausing, an inner pausing. It's like drawing back a little part of my intention into myself.

[87:32]

The positive aspect I can experience within that is a kind of stillness or quietude. But I also feel partly separate from the rose. And that's different from watching the rose and having a feeling of connectedness. And this is a little confusing. In other words, Just to look at the rose, you feel more connected than if you notice yourself looking at the rose. Okay, I understand. Okay, I understand. But when you notice the rose, you don't have any problem with noticing the rose.

[88:56]

And it's possible to notice the mind without having any problem about noticing the mind. It's just that now as you're beginning this awareness, you have to remind yourself. And the reminding is a little bit of a, you know, you know, kind of a nuisance. Okay, so let's go nuisance, annoying or... Let's go back to Rilke's line again. The space outside of ourselves violates things. If you want to accomplish the existence of a rose, you must invest it with that inner space. That intimate space. Invest.

[90:20]

Invest. No? What would you say? What does invest mean? It means like investing in a stock. Yeah. How would you translate it? Invest in childhood rights and politics. you could also say in state but that's not a familiar word you must invest it with that inner space that intimate space which finds its being within us der dieses Sein in uns findet. Now I'm taking that as an intuition of Rilke. Ich nehme das als eine Intuition von Rilke. That we're looking at how can that just be the way we exist, not just an intuition that comes into a poem.

[91:32]

Wie kann das eine Art und Weise werden, in der wir existieren, und nicht nur einfach eine Intuition, die wir eigentlich... And again, one of my favorite little sayings of my teacher. Usually when we see a tree, we see a tree. But sometimes when we see a tree, we see a poem. What's the difference? When does that happen? Okay. Now you hear the words, what is your name? Hydron? Hydron, that's right, the heavenly goat. You hear my words. And you have, yeah, I think a pretty good idea, feeling for what I'm talking about.

[92:38]

But it takes actually quite a long time to change an idea or an intuition into experiential space. So if you do have an intuition, some kind of insight or feeling that catches you, please come up. Yogic practice or Zen practice is about how do we stay with that insight or that which took hold of us so that it unfolds within us.

[93:44]

And so that it unfolds into the world. And that really takes a little time. That's what mantras, mandalas, etc. are all about. It's a kind of repetition without thinking. So you have some feeling and I would stay with it.

[94:22]

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