I know this is a lot of time for each of you to take from your regular life. And also expensive. The seminar is expensive and the loss of income is expensive and so forth. So I hope we can do something useful. It would be nice to do some, I don't know, real work together. I gave an interview recently to a Berlin woman Yeah, anyway, she was quite nice, and so I decided to do it.

[01:05]

She came to Johanneshof, and I spoke with her. And she asked me the usual questions, when we were born, and things like that. I began to think I wasn't. But in any case, I answered the questions. Then she sent me the manuscript, the transcript. So I had to look at it and, geez, you were born. And it's quite tiresome to look at this stuff. But I made the effort. And I said she was trying to get at whether what happened in my childhood led me to have the rather heterodox life I have now.

[02:34]

In other words, was there something in my psychological background that led me into studying Buddhism? By the way, I want us to be able to have a discussion here that's productive, and it's not necessary for us all to sit on cushions and things like that. Yeah. Yeah. So chairs are okay. She's more comfortable sitting that way. Yeah, that's up to you, yeah. But it reminds me of somebody. I saw somebody in Sushin once, and every day they had more pillows.

[03:39]

And finally, the third day, they had pillows under their wrists. Anyway, we have chairs here. There were chairs here. I don't know where they went. Oh, in the other room. Okay. And I said that a certain purity and naturalness of my childhood has stayed present to me. And then I said, it was fine, I said. And when I said that to her, I remember thinking, well, maybe. And then I said also that certain ways I experienced days and evenings of childhood And certain concentrations I came into looking at things carefully.

[04:53]

Continue in the satisfactions of my meditation. But that on the whole, my point was, I'm practicing doing this life primarily for circumstantial reasons, not psychological reasons. At least that's my theory. I might be wrong. My theory and my experience. I'm not someone who thinks karma is destiny.

[05:58]

Well, anyway, so when I got the manuscript, I looked at this sentence. It was fine. And in English, it was fine is usually preceded by but it was fine. Or all in all it was fine. Or in the end it was fine. It definitely implies things weren't so fine. Mm-hmm. So I don't know what it would be like to a non-English speaker reading it, but if you're an English speaker, you see it was fine, and you realize that usually something comes before that.

[07:06]

And if I look at my three siblings, actually five, but let's not complicate the matters, three siblings, I would say they have had considerable psychological misfortune. So something must have been going on in my family, which I don't want to go into, but anyway, something must have been going on. Now what I'm trying to introduce here is also coming up for me and that I'm finishing this book I started years ago.

[08:09]

A friend of mine literally talked me into taking this book contract back in, I hate to tell you, 1987. And that's exactly when I started Creston Mountain Zen Center. So really, if the book is about anything, it's about that practice is my first priority. So my priority had to be Creston Mountain Zen Center and then establishing Johanneshof in the last couple of years. So I had to put the book aside.

[09:25]

But Crestone and Johanneshof are both going quite well, and so I asked permission the first time in 30 years to be out of the schedule. I probably could have asked a few years ago, but I don't think I would have gotten such a clear agreement. So everyone has been extremely supportive and they slipped food under the door. So I just sleep and write. So I've turned in now about rewritten, they're completely new, about a hundred and some pages. But this brings up for me a question, what am I, you know, I feel quite confident, you know, some people don't like what I'm doing and some people do, but I know this is what I have to do, so I'm doing it.

[10:40]

But I feel quite a big responsibility. What if anybody takes the book seriously? Yeah, you know, I mean, I'm leading this life. I'm not sure anyone else should lead it. But I'm presenting it as if, I mean, you know, I don't know much how to do it otherwise. I'm presenting it as if this was real and made sense and so forth. But I might be misleading people. Yeah. So that's why I'm here, for your help. Yeah. I'm a person who has received a received teaching.

[12:15]

Okay, but this received, it's a little bit like, you know, if you take milk and you pour it in cocoa, in boiling, you know, hot chocolate. It does one thing. It does something. And if you pour it on lemon juice, it does something else. It curdles. So, you know, I've kept this, you know, as much as I know, I've received this teaching. And now I'm pouring it onto Western culture. And I don't know whether it's curdling or... Yeah. But it's never been poured into Western culture before. So something happens when you do that. So for me, the teaching comes back to me by interacting with it within the paradigms of our culture.

[13:59]

And Maybe the idea of pouring is not such a good metaphor. Because it's perhaps more of a cooking process. It's something that, well, we speak of the lineage as being winter branches. And winter branches means, I even consider calling the book Winter Branches.

[15:01]

That in the winter, the branch looks dead, but when spring comes, it flowers. And so when Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, came to the United States, he flowered. And part of the flowering was his relationship with people he practiced with, including myself. So the flowering occurs in the transactional process, in the cooking process. So that process continues when I'm with you or with anybody I'm practicing with. So to the extent that I have continued to find the shape of my life in our culture, and to continue the shape of his life in my living,

[16:10]

That process continues with you. That might not be your interest, but in fact that's what happens. And then there's also this sense that winter branches not only do you receive spring branches, blossoming branches, but you receive winter branches that may not bloom for several generations. That makes sense. Do you understand? Yeah. So also there's kind of, from my point of view, there's kind of winter branches happening here, things that... I don't mean just here, but people I practice with, that may appear, that have not flowered in me, but might flower when I'm practicing with you.

[17:35]

Maybe I'm getting a little too philosophical here. I hope not. But I'm sharing with you my thinking about what it means to put this book, publish this book. What I've discovered, just to go back a bit, why I'm just sleeping and writing... Is it if I'm giving lectures regularly, which is something like every other day? As a friend said, it's the same machine as the writing. So I don't have the kind of energy I need to do the writing. I'm trying to be as clear as possible because the sentences belong to everyone.

[18:55]

Now I read a certain amount of philosophy and contemporary philosophy. Not in any particularly organized way. So I couldn't say to you what's really happening in the contemporary scene. But much of what I read seems to be a mixture of philosophy and sociology. One of the things I see a number of people trying to deal with is how do we establish what's important in life or valuable in life if there's no outside reference point? How can we justify what is valuable in life if there is no reference point that is outside?

[20:16]

No kind of, like the European Enlightenment period had an idea of some kind of pure reason that could work things out. But most of the people I'm reading don't buy that anymore. They say there's no such pure reason somewhere to figure out what's going on. There's no sort of Archimedean point where you can move, moral point from which you can move things. So it seems to come down to, for people, to really discussion, discourse. What we're doing here. But can we really decide what the world is like in our discussion this evening or this week?

[21:20]

An acquaintance of mine who comes to Crestone has written a book on Jacques Lacan I haven't read much of him, but what I have read is interesting. The impression I have from this book, though some of you may be able to correct me, is that he thinks that the purpose of psychotherapy Und mein Eindruck, den ich habe, und vielleicht kann mich jemand korrigieren, ist, dass er denkt, der Zweck der Psychotherapie... Is to create wise human beings. ...ist, weise menschliche Wesen hervorzubringen.

[22:20]

But he doesn't seem to think the psychotherapist has to be wise to do it. Aber er scheint nicht zu denken, dass der Psychotherapeut weise sein muss, um das tun zu können. That somehow the process produces a wise human being, even if the therapist is less... Ignorant, I don't know. Now I'm not trying to present this as what Lacan believes or says, but just I'm trying to bring up some issues for our discussion. And the general feeling is that there's no outside, again, no outside reference point. No particular moment that's privileged as the truth. So this brings us back, you know, the title of my book is Original Mind.

[23:24]

So in Buddhism, there's definitely a sense that there is not an outside point, but a point of reference that's not the same as just discussing things. It's not an outside point, but it is an originating point of reference. It's not the same as just discussing something and coming to an agreement. Now, there's a woman named Selah Ben Habib who teaches at the New School of Social Research in New York. And she makes a strong point against a consensual way of looking at things.

[24:52]

Like everyone together, you kind of average things and figure out in statistics and you come to, this is what people think, this isn't what people think, this is not a real process, she says. She has some idea of a kind of conversation with embodied persons and embedded in society with each other coming to a mutual agreement. To a mutual disagreement? A mutual agreement. a self, an embodied person embedded in society, having a real conversation with each other. Something like that, right. So, again, I thought maybe it would be useful or interesting to speak about this sense of big mind or original mind or enlightening mind, things like that, in relationship to psychotherapy or what we understand a human person to be.

[26:18]

And I thought it would be interesting to talk about this great spirit, about the original spirit, the enlightened spirit, in relation to psychotherapy and what we think a human being is. I've just taken it for granted all these years, but I'm aware that it's quite a radical idea if you take it seriously. So that's one thing I'm willing to see how we can speak about it, if you'd like. In other words, do I go back to my childhood and say, yes, I had this and that happen? I had an interesting conversation the other night with Norbert Meyer, who's written a bunch of books. I haven't read them, of course. But he teaches at Johanneshof quite a bit.

[27:37]

And I've known him for years. I went hiking with him in the Andes and stuff like that. But he's got some idea now that he says is corroborated by medicine. That 50% of us or 70% of us, there's extra embryos in the womb. Sometimes they die and shrivel up, and then you've got this dead brother beside you. And he has ideas that these leave permanent psychological patterns that you have to work with. But I listen to this and I think, maybe it's so, but I don't know. What about original Original embryo, I mean original mind.

[28:51]

So do I look at what happened in my family or do I look at when I recognized original mind? And if, if I simplify it and create this entity, original mind, for the purpose of the discussion at this moment, Does the recognition of this original mind change the way you work with your own psychology? Anyway, it's those kind of questions I'm bringing up. And... But of course, some of you I don't know. You're pretty new to me. And so I would like to know what interests you in all this.

[29:56]

What establishes value in our life? If you satisfied all your desires, or didn't have any, what's the point of staying alive? We started to ask such college-type questions, but do we have answers? So, and I also need to know how much you'd like to sit, or would you like me to, for those who are not familiar with sitting, would you like me to say anything about it?

[30:58]

So now I'm going to wait and see if you have something to say. Four or five times sitting a day is a suggestion. Four or five times sitting a day? For ten minutes. Okay. How long would you like to sit each of the four or five times? Twenty years. Well, that's a suggestion. What else would you, anybody else? We had a sitting in the beginning and the end of our... Meetings, yeah. We had a sit in the morning, and this weapon was so very nice.

[32:05]

Okay. Yes. I'd like to sit for some minutes between the beginning. Yeah. Just formally or just have some silence? Either way. I would like to hear something about sitting that can help me in my practice.

[33:08]

What's the problem you're having in practice? Please. . Am I feeling it? Is it something comfortable which I can do daily? It's something I'm missing if I don't do it. But still it's not an essential part of my personality Your personal life or your personality? OK, I hear you.

[34:14]

Yeah? About the relationship of . then a little bit ambivalent feeling on the one hand. I think it's quite different because for me, psychotherapy has to do with consciousness and this split and how to stabilize the kind of split in existence and the vulnerabilities which come out of this kind of existence. And the original mind is, for me, a not-too approach of not-too-ing. Not two or two of oneness. Oh, yeah, okay, not two. So I thought about this in my room, and I tried to keep it quite separate, what I do in psychotherapy and in my own meditation practice.

[35:22]

And then I started trying to do meditation with patients, and I was quite amazed how often very disturbing. We had quite deep insights and given some natural meditation experiences. People with personality disorders and bulimia and borderline personality and so forth could use this as a resource. So this made me a little bit confused about how should I work and make this tool. parts, so they are not so separate as I saw them. Psychotherapy on the one hand and kind of meditation experience. . Meditation or Buddhism, as I said at the beginning, is relatively direct. It deals with psychotherapy, with consciousness, that is, when you are in a split, you observe the injuries and instead of the syrups that you need there, you are concentrated on this area, so to speak, and that Buddhism deals with this, so to overcome this split into such an area that does not divide.

[36:36]

And that was, I then started, although I was very separated in the work, to experiment with meditation. We were very surprised that the most difficult patients had intense experiences in a natural way, which they also used as resources. That, so to speak, sometimes asked a question again. Well, let me say it, and some of you have heard me say this before in these meetings. of the various seminars I do, quite a lot of them here in the United States, and the more traditional ways to practice.

[37:53]

For some reason, this little group of us has been unique for me. And in recent years it's become a little more Buddhist than it was in the beginning. And I actually miss it when we had more discussion and... We said we could talk about the 12 realms of being. Oh, yeah. Okay. And also about development of virtues as a possibility to deal with emotional pain.

[39:20]

And I have the idea that, I don't know if that's really the case, but I have the idea, when I talk about these binaries, that maybe there is a possibility to bring the concept of pseudo-therapy, or at least systemic therapy, and then have a conversation about it. And I have the idea that if we could talk about these 12 realms of being, there could also be a discussion and ideas coming from the point of view of the therapy. Okay, yeah. No, no, it's a good territory, yeah, for this. So I should maybe tomorrow then at some point present that so everybody knows what it's about. Okay. Now, if I just, you know... Um... To find the points, like in what you said and you said, that is common for having a discussion here.

[41:06]

There's many aspects of what you said. What you said was rather long. But I can't respond to all of them, of course. But... Anyway, but it feels good that how you're working with this overlap. Now... I'm responding to your saying it's not part of your personality. And again, I'm speaking about this to bring into our discussion this dimension which is new to us in the West.

[42:22]

This dimension of life which is unfamiliar to us. Now, I just took a walk over the hills here and back down for about three hours this afternoon. And a nice walk. And there's a lot of plants up there. And all the plants are sort of competing with each other. Trying to get a little space and light and so forth. And the mountain side is just soaked with water. And they all, but all those plants, they're doing all kinds of different things, but all of them have to have water.

[43:29]

And if they don't have water, there's no plant. And the plants probably don't pay too much attention to whether they have water or not. They're busy looking for enough space and sunlight and stuff. But if we imagine... I'm sorry, I don't know if these examples make any sense, but I'm trying to find a way to say something, obviously. Imagine the plants... said to themselves, well, the most important thing is to have water, not to have all these other things. I suppose, in fact, that's what the plant is doing. But we human beings are a little bit like this. If we think of mind as water, Buddhism really rests on this point.

[44:52]

To shift from the contents of mind to the field of mind. Now you can say, well, big deal. contents of mind, feeling it's all fine, what difference does it make? Inhalte des Geistes, Feld des Geistes, wo ist der Unterschied? So we could talk about that a little. But clearly, this whole teaching of Buddhism rests on what happens to you when you emphasize the field of mind rather than the contents of mind. As if the plant really knew that it was the water that all the plants need, which is what was their main reality.

[46:01]

Charlotte Silver, who was my, really, actually, sort of officially my first teacher, She was the founder of sensory awareness. And I saw her the other day. She's 97 and still teaching. So I went to see her. She was teaching in a little town near south of Freiburg. And she, although she teaches sensory awareness, she's got a great sense of language. And she said, I don't want any of you to relax. She said, I want you to be at rest. Have you ever gone into a florist and wanted to buy some relaxed flowers?

[47:15]

Anyway. So, practice it. I mean, she has a sense of language where she gets at something that's hard to speak about, the difference between relaxed and being at rest. Okay. You can introduce practice to your life. And to one's clients and so forth. And it can be something you do some of the time. In between the contents of mind. Well, I'll... Most of us work out our life in terms of our society and our personal psychology.

[48:38]

And our personal psychology. That is a truism of our current society. And I think in some ways it's the biggest obstacle to practice. Und ich glaube, auf gewisse Weise ist das das größte Hindernis für die Praxis. Unsere Gesellschaft hat uns davon überzeugt, dass sie die beste aller Gesellschaften ist. Und sie mag vielleicht Schwächen haben, aber sie kann nur in ihren eigenen Begriffen verbessert werden. But at some point, when you begin to know the field of mind, you see that you don't have to work out your life in terms of your society and your personal psychology.

[49:48]

There's another territory in which you can work out your life. And when you feel that or see that, a process starts. Then it's part of your personality. And that process is like falling in love. And you can't sort of interrupt it. You can't get sort of halfway into falling in love and decide, I think I'll wait till next year. You can do that, but probably you can't fall back in love next year when it's more convenient. It's a process that takes you. And you kind of can't interrupt it. Most people introduce practice into their life as something that's part of their life, but this process occurs, doesn't start, which puts everything else to the side.

[51:11]

Strangely enough, it's also the case that borderline personalities and people with various kinds of disturbances. And I've often discovered very intelligent people who are very poorly or badly socialized. They are such people. that people like that. Yeah. Also, Ivan, okay, there's borderline personalities, people, certain kind of disturbances, and people who are intelligent but poorly socialized. All of us fall into one of those categories. No, I'm just kidding.

[52:22]

And often have a surprising access to practice. I shouldn't say practice because they usually don't have the skills to practice. They have a surprising access to the world that practice reveals. And my reaction to that is particularly with borderline types stop practicing. Because you have to have your basic life together in order to fall in love in this other way. So it's a rather complicated skill or craft to start working with people with practice who are also somewhat disturbed. But to go back to poorly socialized people, I've known a number of types, like street kids who are dying of AIDS and they sleep in the gutter and

[53:34]

They come to a koan seminar. Boy, they were real sharp, just what's going on in the koan. They kind of, I mean, their energy and sort of native intelligence and no interference from social things, they see something clearly. Anyway, so I'm presenting a complicated picture here, but I'm doing that on purpose. Is there anything else anyone would like to see us speak about in relationship to whatever is important to you?

[56:07]

I'm dealing with the postmodern theories, which also make relative everything. There's no Archimedean point two in these things. This is a similar point, like letting everything go which we create. And these postmodern theories, they don't see that you arrive at a certain field then.

[57:40]

Field. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I would be interested in this connection. Yes, I am too. Because many of the postmodernist thinking and communitarians and so forth, much of what they say about how they see the world is very similar to Buddhism. But they don't know how to carry it to the next step. And in fact, what I've been noticing is how many broken lineages bring us to practice. In other words, it's not just Asian Buddhist lineages that have brought me to practice.

[58:57]

If I look at myself, there's a lot in American transcendentalism and pragmatism and poetry and so forth that led me equally to coming to Buddhism. But if I look at William James, for example, he says things I completely agree with. But he had no yogic practice or yogic understanding to know what to do with, where he came to. So I feel that I'm in fact continuing what he started, but because I've discovered yogic practice, I can do something.

[59:58]

So I feel that must be true for all of us. There's very Western reasons why we're here, not just some kind of Asian idea, Buddhist idea. So then what? What is this next step for us? It's hard for me to really tell what's the point for me. But what I know of the reasons why I'm here. Fifteen years ago I had a very strong experience, mystical experience.

[61:10]

where I realized that everything, every existence is born out of a longing for existence itself. And we human beings have some sort of special role to play here. Because at least at this planet, we are the only ones who can ask these questions. Realizations like this. And this is something which really carries me also in my therapeutic work. where I work with a lot of people who are accessible to me. I always tell them what they should feel about it. And there is something that is right and that leads to solutions that make something in life go on or free something where you get so curious about what is actually going on.

[62:40]

And what I tell them is that they should listen to what they really feel and then something in their life opens up and becomes more open. And I know through my work and there is some truth in this. But between my experience then and between where my consciousness is now, where it rests, there is a quite big space.

[63:51]

I don't know how big it is. So I just don't know what I want from these days here. I just want to go on in this process, in this finding out. And there should be more connection between my daily work and that which is presented also in you. Yeah, okay.

[64:52]

Anything else? Yeah. I don't... Besides my practice of meditation, for some time I have been studying with a group of friends quantum physics. And this is very difficult for us, but we are there. It is really so interesting. I have to speak in German because it is so complicated. I hope I can do it. And just until the last time, we were damaged again. And last time, we did with a special problem, a question.

[66:00]

It's called double . Double divide, double split. OK. There is this question with the electrons. You have the electron and if you look at this electron. It's either a wave or a particle. Yeah, yeah. Depending on how you measure it. Yes, yeah. And that's really a big deal. It's been a big deal for Western science, too. Yeah, yeah, really. And going with this, also looking at this experience about what this really does mean for us if we let

[67:06]

this into our knowledge, into our diet. And this is, you know, also touching me very deeply. And in some ways, I'm thinking about something that's already there, what I've read and heard from you, and I've been Buddhist. what got feed in it. And if we are the wave, if there is nobody looking at this electron, then we are also electrons. We are the wave. So we are the wave. And if somebody's looking at us, we're going into this stuff of manifesting and coming form and going into. But you know, this is the science. This is not just, you know, not just this.

[68:09]

And also, we are lucky, you know. There is one man who is bringing this up in two books and saying, this guy with this experience showing us that we are lucky. He has this experience with a hand. I think it would be nice if you could say that in German. For us. When I look at her, I see waves, and I'm the particle. My work with this quantum physics is this electron.

[69:21]

In contrast to the electron, if you look there, then it becomes a particle and if you don't look at it, it's in the forest, so to speak. It's not manifest. It simply inspired us to think about what it means. I think what happens there, through the observation and through the influence, simply because of the presence and being in contact. And that's what I mean, there is still no evidence of classical physics at all. I mean, you know that, that's how it is known. Yes, the experience and the feeling behind it, that's what got us involved. And also, such a wonderful connection, this being and this reality.

[70:28]

There is also a book by Ulrich Wacke. There are such tyrants in it, how they do it, how they make people crazy, but it's just a lie. And what that has to do with us, with our energy, and with what we have to participate in our manifestation as a human being. Because the connections to what is called Buddhism, with the concept of fat and this energy that is seen and so on, that just concerns me very much. I recognize and see individual milestones, but somehow I have the feeling that there is still a lot that could be done. You know, somebody asked Allen Ginsberg, a poet, an American poet, Do you poets teach younger poets the elements of prosody, of American prosody?

[71:50]

Prosody means the musical study of poems. The elements of prosody. And he said, no. We were bankrupt. And running around weeping and looking for love. He meant they were so bankrupt, all they did is look from younger poets for love rather than teaching them what poetry was about. And, you know, I knew Alan pretty well. In fact, his last... Anyway. But now that he's dead, as of this last year or so, I realize, you know, I really should have

[72:51]

you know, used the time I had with him to really get him to talk to me about what was, what poetry was about for him and what various things were about for him. But I was so interested in supporting him and being, you know, and, you know, just being supportive that I never took hold of the situation and tried to get him to say something. And, of course, when someone's dead, you suddenly realize, I should have used the opportunity to... Or I should have asked my mother or father or something like that. So we're all still alive, so let's wait till we're dead to wish we... You know, the kind of experience you had

[74:21]

There are many kinds of experiences like that. But one thing that's common to all of them is an experience of truth. You had an experience of truth that you didn't question. I think that's extraordinary. That we can experience something that is one of the things that characterizes various kinds of realization or enlightenment experiences. And they're fairly common actually. Is an experience of validity of truth. And once you've had that experience of truth that didn't seem to arise from your personality,

[75:30]

It arose from truth itself, which is somehow everywhere. It changes your life. And it starts a process in you, even if you never experienced it before, there's something happens in you that's different. And you can say with a conviction to a client, listen to what you really feel. And they hear you say that differently than someone else because they know you've listened to what you really felt. So what kind of world is that? That's not truth coming out of discourse and some kind of discussion of the embedded person with the embodied person.

[76:34]

This is something else. What is this? Where is this truth? And it's interesting, the more we move toward this feeling of completeness or truth, The more unpredictable our life becomes, because you're moving, and maybe I'll just leave it at that, it's strange, strangely, when you start having this experience of the validity of things, you can't predict what will happen next. You have to accept the truth. So now that we've decided everything is unpredictable, it may at any moment wave at us or become a particle. So why don't we sit for a few minutes?

[78:01]

We've talked long enough tonight, I think. These are ingenious arrangements you guys have. Is there anything cooking in that pot? I forgot my jumbo pillow. I had to improvise. And I have my camping person. You never have to leave the room. You guys did an awful lesson. and is the opposite of guided meditation.

[80:23]

The first step is to bring your attention to your body or your breath. And when you do that, you're also bringing your attention away from your thinking. It may go back or snap back into your thinking. But gently you keep trying to bring it, your attention, gently to your breath or just your sitting, feeling sitting. Once your sense of identification can be as easily with your breath or body as with your thinking, you've accomplished a great deal.

[81:57]

And you not just achieved a small skill, you started another process of being. What you identify with is the generative point. Allow your body and breath to speak to you.

[83:35]

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