Then we can say it's also the physical exploration of states of mind. Yeah, I mean, people intuitively know most of this. You have to go into a difficult meeting. You kind of compose yourself physically because you know it's going to affect your state of mind. But the Japanese, for instance, coming from a yogic culture, go much farther in this. They actually have a term, business term, called haragai. Which if you can compose your stomach, your haragai, you can affect the other person's state of mind.

[01:07]

And if you have three or four people, you can say, let's get our hair together and control the agenda of this meeting. Now that's a... Yeah, I mean, they think the American-German businessmen are paying attention to their yellow pad of paper that they give them, while the Japanese are... It's pretty American. Yellow, right. It's pretty American. But that's the kind of difference when you carry the sense of body, mind, awareness a lot farther than you carry it. Now, okay.

[02:22]

So what is the So noticing is an essential part of this practice. What we notice and how we notice. But I just noticed that it's 11.15. So I think it's time for a break. Okay, so let's have a pause. And since we have quite a few people here and only two toilets, I think we need half an hour. The microphone turned on.

[03:55]

Sounds good. Yeah. Does anyone have something you'd like to bring up? You had something, didn't you? Yesterday I had a question. Maybe, yeah, okay, English, German or English first, I don't care. I had a question yesterday. I couldn't speak German.

[04:55]

Yesterday at the intention I couldn't find the point where the intention appears or starts or begins. Well, host mind doesn't have to have intentions. But it's the territory of intentions. Okay. Not okay. Okay. So say something again in response. Although I can feel the different qualities of host mind and guest mind,

[06:18]

In the host mind, I come to a point where I feel he is also only guest. Whose guest? Wessen guest? First and past would have was to say, my guest. Who's that? I knew, but you forgot. Well, then I have no choice. I mean... I got a little bit further.

[07:55]

Because I took that question home, of course, and I followed on it. You took what? I took that question home. I hadn't for a very long time right now. I went a little bit deeper probably into it. What I found out, I can't If I want to watch something, I can't be the one who does something. So, probably I got, or that is my thing. This is a bit after I say. Ich habe dann diese Klage, die sind schon länger geschickt, noch mal etwas genauer betrachtet. und habe für mich festgestellt, dass ich in dem Moment, wo ich mich beobachte, nicht in der Situation bin, wo ich entscheide. Und von daher musste ich eigentlich von morgen bis morgen nicht mehr gehen.

[09:01]

Well, basically, the kinds of questions you're asking, one has to, I mean, for practice to be real, you have to ask yourself those kind of questions. It's not so important to try to answer them as it is to ask them. And to let them percolate. Percolate? Yeah, in you. But you can certainly... You know, I trust your experience that you can't do while you observe. Yeah. But I also think it's not true.

[10:04]

And certainly the practice of mindfulness is based on the fact that you can observe that you're angry while you're angry. So I would, you know, my... feeling is you just continue with these questions and mostly they turn into other questions and somehow they disappear into our activity and we realize them in our own activity. But again, host mind is not a thing. It's just an activity. And it's an activity of mind described in relationship to discursive mind.

[11:15]

Now, we have a tendency to say, is host mind the same as big mind, the same as fundamental mind? That's all taking them as if they were real, as some kind of entity. Yeah, they're talking about a similar territory, but when you speak about them or notice them, they're different. Right now, is this a dojo or a zendo? Yeah, last night, while we were trying to get started, it was a dojo.

[12:28]

Now it's a zendo. Is it the same room? If you think it is, you're thinking in entities. Because really this room is the activity. It's the activity of making it. The activity of using it. And I suppose if I could afford it, I'd love to turn this into a nice flat to live in. Okay, someone else? I would be interested in what Roshi thinks about dreams and the mind. So my experience is that whenever I sit with him or when I make a scene, my mind doesn't just take over. And sometimes it's from the last moment, from the last day. There are also dreams where something is said in advance that hits and sometimes it's answers.

[13:32]

But also questions that I've been asking myself for a long time. Would that mean that dreams are different from mine? Or how do I see that? And how can I bring my post-mortem into my dream world? I experienced special weight before I met you. I had a lot of dreams of golfers, skiing, breathing, and I found out sometimes there are kind of leftovers in my dreams. Sometimes I get answers. I've been looking for a long time. Sometimes things... Let me start. Before you go to Sashin or you come to a seminar, before that time you begin to have some dreams. Yeah. And they're leftovers from what, lunch or...? Sometimes they're very, very specific, but sometimes I just get answers. But does this mean also in dreams there are two footprints?

[14:37]

Yes. And how can I bring my host mind into my dream world? Is it possible? Yeah, there's different kinds of dreaming mind. And one of the most satisfying dreaming minds are teaching dreams. And the mind of teaching dreams is different than the mind of... The dreams that reassess our daily activity. The ordinary dreams that reassess our daily activity. What is what? The dreams that teach us are different.

[15:48]

The mind of teaching dreams is different from the mind of our usual dreams. Okay. So that we agree upon, I think, right? And there's more dreaming minds than just that. There's a dreaming mind that doesn't dream. That is just aware. And it could dream, but it doesn't dream. Hey, sounds interesting, yeah. Who said yes? Okay, good. But there's no reason, again, to think of host mind as some kind of entity you can bring into dreaming mind. Post-mind is a way of noticing mind in contrast to discursive thinking.

[16:53]

Now again, it's helpful, I think, to think of minds as different liquids. And the different liquids of mind have different viscosities. Okay, so there's a different viscosity between the host mind and guest mind. Okay, now, does the intentional mind, is it the same as host? Well, no, it's some different viscosity in contrast with ordinary sleeping mind, non-dreaming mind.

[17:59]

Now, we want to resist, even though, just resist mapping these various things on each other. The deep tendency in us to want to think there's somehow one truth. Now, most scientists today think there's gonna be one truth that unites all the aspects of the cosmos. Certain way particles are.

[19:05]

But Buddhism takes the view that there are many cosmoses And they might have different rules. We'll never get, from the Buddhist point of view, to some unified field theory. No. No. We might actually, who knows? I don't know. I know very little about this cosmos, let alone about other cosmos. And I know, and I've been pointing out recently, that this cosmos is 80%, no, 33% dark matter. That means we don't understand.

[20:06]

And it's 66% dark energy. And there's about 1 to 4% of measurable material in the cosmos. And we're a little tiny dot on that 4%. But we still are part of this dark energy and dark matter. The dark matter seems to be holding the universe together because the known gravity wouldn't hold it together. And the dark energy seems to be pushing it apart. Okay. But neither can be measured directly, only by implication. Okay. So we live in some kind of mystery, for sure.

[21:46]

And even within our own world, our consciousness is a very tiny part of our fullness of our living. One of the questions is, can we extend our knowing beyond consciousness? Because mind is much wider than consciousness. So again, one of the questions motivations of practice is to discover, to know the mind that's wider than conscious. Okay. But the best way to do that is to just notice

[22:48]

Notice, notice, notice, and not try to put it together in a single framework. Maybe eventually it fits a bigger framework, but it's not useful to think that way. But now what you can do is you can bring intentions into your dreaming. And the kind of intentions you bring into dreaming will generate a dreaming mind shaped by that intention. That I can say. But can I say the mind that's generated by that intention is the same as the mind generated by intention in Zazen? No, I wouldn't say. I don't know. My experience is just different. So one of the kind of mental postures you have to have is to let the mind be different.

[24:08]

Let the world be different. Let the world be different. Let each person you meet be different. Okay. But thank you for that question because we all have this tendency, I'm not saying even you have it, but we do have a tendency to try to make these things understandable and then apply them. We make these things happen. understandable and then apply them uniformly.

[25:17]

Now, the attempt to make the world more uniform or fit together is one of the earliest tendencies in Buddhism to try to resist. And if all goes well, we'll come to that in the afternoon. So, anyone else? Yeah. My question is, would that mean to sort of Look for this original mind, be there and just put a question mark.

[26:33]

Well, I wouldn't, I think to call it in English original mind is already a mistake. Actually, if I'm going to use a term like that, I say originary mind. which means it's a source, but it's not there before. Kindly stumped him. It's a source. You jump in, yeah. You never name the fact, you never make an idea about it. Only a question mark. You try to know without conceptualizing. Okay, now I can give you a little exercise.

[27:40]

I'm supposed to be able to do that, isn't it? So say you're reading. And in the background, there's a train going by or some trucks on the highway. And you know the sound, and you know it's a truck, but really it's, or you probably know it's a truck, but it's just a sound. And there's no, you haven't conceptualized the sound. Because you're reading or something like that. Okay. Now, because your attention is on your reading.

[28:45]

Now you see if you can bring your attention to the sound without conceptualizing it. Now there's an immediate tendency for the attention to try to name it. Is it a truck or a train or a three-truck? But while your attention is reading, you don't have to conceptualize that. Now, technically in Buddhism, when you hear the sound and don't conceptualize it, it's called a valid cognition. Mm-hmm. But when you conceptualize it, it's no longer a valid cognition.

[29:50]

Because conception takes away its uniqueness. And immediately puts your knowing of it in the framework of language. So you can know it as a, you can know it's a truck. But you don't think about it as a truck. So what you're doing in a little exercise like that, you can see if you can break the connection, loosen the connection between attention and naming. Okay. The central act of mindfulness practice is attention without thinking. non-thinking attention that's at the very center of all mindfulness practice non-thinking attention doesn't mean again of course you don't think it just means that you want to separate attention from thinking

[31:26]

Anyone else? The first seminar I made with you was about 25 years ago. You were a young man. It was maybe 12 years ago. The book of Serenity, First Goa, and I remember one sentence, not exactly, that was said that the Zen school is based on a mind and the Taoist school is based on an energy. That says in the koan or I said that? You were interpreting this way, but it seemed to be correct, I think so.

[32:38]

It made sense in the core. No, I think that's right. And my question is that the concept of energy, um asiatic concept which comes to europe now in the western world and means that sentence that we um should be careful um with this concept and um because it catches us and leads our practice in a special direction okay My first seminar that I did with Roshi was about 12 years ago. It was about the first Koran in the Book of Serenity. It is a Koran collection that we treated back then. And there is a sentence in a large context that says that the sending school is based on the spirit, and the Taoist school was based on energy, on a concept of energy.

[33:45]

And that was my question, to what extent, where this energy concept from Asian thinking, also from Western thinking flows in, whether we can deal with it or have to deal with it, so that we don't let ourselves be influenced by another concept, perhaps a fascinating Asian concept, Well, I would say that, I would put it that the Zen, the Taoist school emphasizes energy more than mind, and Zen school emphasizes mind more than energy. But Zen certainly emphasizes both. And one of the four or five constants I want to come to later in the seminar, is energy.

[34:52]

And one of the things you can notice when you practice this distinction between host mind and guest mind is that when you find yourself in host mind, your posture will be a little different. Now, the Zazen instruction I gave, I don't know, in Johanneshof a few weeks ago or recently, is a threefold Zazen instruction for people who are a little past being beginners. When you sit, bring your attention to the top of your head. And then lift your spine up to that point on the top of your head. And then bring your breath down to your hara.

[36:29]

You can bring it down in a visual circle or you can bring it down kind of like that. So you breathe into your hara. And once you have that direction and feel and come to a spot It's Tanden or Kikai. They are slightly different, but it's okay. Then once you have that movement, you bring that through the perineum and up your backbone and across your head. And now you've brought it back now in a new way to this point. You've not just brought your spine up to this point, you've now brought a kind of breath energy up to this point. Yeah, and then there's a kind of circle you can feel. Now what have you done when you do that?

[37:30]

You've changed outer qi, breath, into inner qi. Not energy, but inner qi. Okay. Now, inner qi is related to... I've got energy. Energy is related to the physical breath. But energy is energy. Vitality, we don't have a word for it. But your outer breath and your inner breath, subtle breath, are in a dialogue with each other. And through your practice, after a while, your outer breath is always associated felt also as an inner breath.

[38:50]

Or subtle breath. A kind of physical breathing that's not air breathing. So that's the second part of this Zazen instruction. And the third is to put your... attention at the back of your eyes. Probably you can feel your attention both at the back of your eyes and still at the top of your head. And then allow your boundaries, your physical boundaries to melt.

[39:50]

Melting into the world, melting into a lover, you know, melting anyway. And you'll find that if you do these three two-fold practices, is that you use your posture to generate host mind. And you then find yourself in contact with this subtle body and subtle breath. And as your practice matures, you begin to find the top of your head tingles or itches or the spot begins to tingle or itch. And as your practice matures, you begin to find the top of your head tingles or itches And what's happened when this is, what's going on now?

[41:08]

If now entered into not just a host mind, but a host body. So through this simple distinction between don't invite your fuss to tea, Through this simple instruction, don't invite your thoughts to tea. You've discovered a host mind. and a host and a guest mind. And two kinds of thought, intentional thought and discursive thought, each with a kind of different mind. And you discover two kinds of breath, one a Outer breath or usual breath and another kind of energy breath that penetrates our body. And you've awakened now a subtle host body.

[42:11]

as well as your usual guest body. And now practice can be, for instance, During the day, maintaining this feeling at the top of the head while you go through your daily activity. Or letting it appear when it appears. Okay. Sorry, Thomas. but it's also Buddhistic. Yeah. I mean, this is... Yeah.

[43:24]

There's no reason to make comparisons between Taoism and Buddhism. They didn't influence each other in practices so much as they influenced each other in terminology. Because what I'm talking about is just basic Buddhist practice. But some of the language like chi and ki has been appropriated particularly by Taoists. And particularly by Marshall. arts or Aikido. I met him once. I saw him once anyway.

[44:27]

And as some of you know, Tanahashi sensei studied with him as a little boy, 14 or something. I think, you know, we have to have lunch, right, starting at 12.30 or so. Ich glaube, dass wir Mittagessen vielleicht so um halb eins. We have to find restaurants. Wir müssen Restaurants finden. And we have to get the restaurant to serve us food in less than an hour. So we can be back here at, let's see, 12.30. What, 2.30? Is two hours enough? Okay. So let's sit for a few minutes and then...

[45:30]

Let's sit down for a minute.

[45:46]

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