Good morning. What a wonderful fire and song fest we had last night. Thanks to Elko's... Is that how you say your name? Elko? Elko's guitar and all the songs he knows. So it's absolutely required that you come next year. And you can bring yourself too as well as the guitar. Or Julia can bring you. Thank you. And he kindly started out with all these English songs from my generation. And I looked at the fire.

[01:13]

It got completely burned up. Did someone tend it afterwards? Just burned up. Or Jack just stayed there all night, sort of tending the fire and singing, whether anybody was there or not. Okay. And I've never seen, I mean, I'm so backward, I've never seen all these cell phones out with song lyrics on it. I don't even know you could do that. Yeah, my smartphone is not smart yet. I need to have a younger person help me find songs. Now, I presume some of you had a chance to look at that letter I sent, that Siegfried sent to you, the letter I sent to the... I will send it.

[02:43]

What? I will send it. Oh, you will send it. You haven't sent it yet. Oh, okay, I thought you'd all, half of them, read it. We'd have questions. All right, anyway, even if you had received it and read it, we don't have time to answer your questions. But I like alternatives, even though they're not possible. Yeah. We just had this morning, and I think we disbanded lunch. I was thinking of Sangha yesterday, and it made me think of Thomas Metzinger, who was at Johannesburg recently. We were the host for a Mind and Matter Society seminar, started by an old friend of mine who's a physicist.

[03:46]

And it's mostly scientists, but some business consultants, and the philosopher Thomas Metzinger. And I'm mentioning this partly because this evening in Vienna we're going to have an Austrian sangha meeting. And the big question for me in general is, yes, we seem to have created a contemporary sangha, But can we create a generational Sangha?

[05:03]

And in other words, in a larger sense, can a practice which is going to be primarily lay persons, become a generational sangha? In other words, can they become enough of a sangha to pass the teaching over what's happened now, 2,500 years. I think that generational Buddhist Sangha is the oldest ongoing institution in the world. So somehow I inherited this tradition from Suzuki Roshi.

[06:15]

And I inherited this cold from somewhere. And my chest isn't entirely happy, but it's happier than yesterday. So, you know, I'm wondering, will it, how can it, and what are the dynamics of... and probing intelligence perhaps, that can perhaps establish a new sangha which continues. Conceptually, I think it's impossible. But I don't care.

[07:37]

And I care with all of my life. But I don't care. I mean, I'm not in charge of the world, so the world's going to do what it does. I'm going to just be as good an observer as I can be. Und wenn ich sage, es ist mir egal, dann meine ich, die Welt kümmert sich um sich selbst. Und ich werde einfach das so gut beobachten, wie ich kann. But as I said, I like alternatives which aren't possible, so let's do it. Okay. And I thought of this in relationship to Thomas Metzinger. Because meditation is, he wrote a book, Ego Tunnel, is that what it's called? I don't know. It seems like almost everyone's read it that I meet.

[08:40]

And he's, I don't know what it's called in German. He is German. It's a bestseller in America. Anyway, he's a very intelligent person who really thinks there should be, and he and Stephen Batchelor talked about it, be a secular meditation center. You know, mentioning this, it's a little bit of a side. I won't go into it too much. But I mention it because you are not all practicing Buddhists, but there is a feeling of Sangha here in our seminar and in our Songfest last night.

[09:48]

Here I would define Sangha. I mean, everything all at once is Sangha from cosmic sense, but practically speaking, it's those people who feel a resonant field with each other. And to some extent a shared vision of what life might be, could be, ought to be. So Thomas Metzinger said the other day to me, a couple weeks ago, that he goes to and thinks people should go to regular 30-day, I think, Theravadan-style retreats.

[10:53]

But these retreats are just people sign up from all over somewhere, and they all come together. They've never met each other, and they practice together 30 days, and then they separate. And that's not Sangha, in any way. It's a shared meditation practice, but it's not Sangha. like Erich and Christina, what it's been some decades, right? And many of you, we've been here almost 30 years together, right? And I will jack a few years' list. Not many. And you took an interim or a vacation for a while.

[12:29]

I'm just teasing you, of course. And I don't want to, I can't even, as I said to you yesterday, can't even teach in any other circumstances. And as I said to you yesterday, I really cannot learn in other circumstances. And this new intellectual star, Yuval Harari, the historian from Israel, the Hebrew University. And he is very, you know, it's great to read his books. They're very clear. They don't have enough fuzziness for me, but they're very clear, and you feel, you know, so it's right by me. Yeah, and he goes to... He says specifically, he goes to two 60-day silent retreats a year.

[13:48]

No, I don't know if this is with the feeling of sauna or it's just people who happen to come together for that time. So this isn't just a general interest in mindfulness in both Thomas Metziger's practice and Harari's practice. They are actually a practice. And then I have a son-in-law, Jason, who's part of the kind of Silicon Valley folks, California entrepreneurs. And they, according to Jason, they share one thing in common.

[15:01]

Which is that they all think they should meditate. But they don't have time. So they micro-dose psychedelics and amphetamines. He says it's everywhere. I don't even know how you do it. I can't believe it. Anyway, so what does all this mean? Is this a Lai Sangha? Is this a micro-dose Sangha? Are we ragtag bunch of Austrians or something? Ragtag. I hope so. I didn't know if you could translate that. Okay, that's enough on that. But... For me, it's always like, how can we practice together?

[16:18]

How can we continue? I think we need Elko's guitar. Okay, so several of you yesterday afternoon, before we parted, said you were confused. So let's go there. I'm waiting for confusion to appear. You're first. My confusion is of that kind that I don't even find an entrance. And what was the unknown in this hour, that was an unknown in this hour, and that was the time when we spoke together, that there was no resonance in my experiential field.

[17:51]

I'm sorry. Yes. I had the same experience that I couldn't connect it to my, usually I have a feeling, but I couldn't connect it to my experience. Okay. And what helped me was talking with Christine. That's me in that case. And I also told her I wouldn't even know what to ask.

[18:55]

And then during our talk, I found a question for myself. You talked about Christine's seeing the window up there. Yeah. Presentness. And you talked about immediacy, consciousness and presentness, I see. I did, yes. I confess. And as far as I understood you, you said there was immediacy and consciousness, but not presentness. Well, let's sort through this again.

[20:13]

And I ask myself what has also to be there so that presentness happens. Okay. Any other matrices of confusion? Two back there. Okay, we've had two women, so why not a gentleman? I would like to describe my process. During the seminar, there were some terms that somehow jumped at me. One of them was consciousness. And the first question was, what is my consciousness and how do I feel it?

[21:32]

And in meditation, I repeatedly dealt with it. And the first image or word that came up was that consciousness is a word, shell, or something, simply a container of any kind. As you are reading this here, And I saw it as what I would like to do, to put as much as possible into it. And this container turned into a big bag. And if I reach into it, many different things come out and also very astonishing things that confuse me.

[22:57]

And then I decided for myself to accept this confusion. And this meant that when listening, I didn't feel the need or the compulsion to understand. The last one? And there was somehow the hope that it sinks in a subliminal way. And this... And it ended with great joy simply listening and receiving the words, just hearing the succession of words.

[24:32]

This is my man here. I will take this big bag home with me and I will work with it. Like Santa Claus. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I hope we're all on a subliminal path. Like Christa? Maybe following up on that subliminal. Sometimes I have the feeling that out of this subliminal something Meta-liminal arises.

[25:40]

Meta-liminal. Above, you know, the sub and the blah. And it's very difficult to give trust to this. If you're... If you perceive something that actually cannot be perceived, then there arises the problem of perception, because you have to differentiate consciousness and perceiving. But several examples came up about what you were saying yesterday. On this emergency ambulance

[26:43]

work I did, I developed the practice when on my way to the emergency site. . to develop a feeling for that what is there, whether there is something that has to be turned, or whether what is happening there just can be left as it is and is something good. And when the situation there gets aware in everyday consciousness, everyday situation, then very often I felt concerned. But there always was also a mistrust about this confirmation.

[28:24]

Because it, again, was a way of confirming a concept. Okay. Nevertheless, it was very, very helpful. Okay. Thanks. Someone else, there was someone else over here. Yes, go ahead. In spite of that, I understood something or heard something. It is that you said that the dynamic, how consciousness forms itself, is immediacy.

[29:40]

Yeah, that's good. I'm glad you got that. And being part of this process is presentness. And presentness, there is a differentiation between presentness and consciousness. Yes. But how is the, what is the relationship between immediacy and presentness? Okay, what else? What else? Yes.

[30:43]

I'm learning with you, Roger, and with you all together, as long as you stay in this difficult exercise, Slowly, with you, Roshi, and with all of us, I learned this difficult practice of trusting, but this difficult practice of constantly pulling the rug away beneath myself. And sometimes it has the feeling of easiness. And sometimes it's a hard fall on the last bone in the spine. Oh, where is that?

[31:47]

Oh, yeah. Okay, thank you. Marco? On the first day, there was a resonance with an expression you had of this foil. Foil, yeah. Do you remember... And it reminded me of something that I have formulated a few weeks ago, as if there was a kind of, what was it, pergament, bitte? paper, kind of thick paper, old-fashioned writing paper, between myself and myself. Oh, okay. And myself and the world.

[32:50]

And, yeah, myself and the world. Yeah. Yeah. The second image was of this ferret, or the bigger thing is called, I don't know, Marder or something. And as I'm not so... close with Buddhism, I would say. I felt like this animal. So I felt like this is going through the river, to the kelp. To the source. Oh, you mean like otters. To understand what was the meaning of this subplot.

[33:55]

Yeah. And I think I got a... Taste. The taste of it. Oh, good. Until the last 50 minutes. For you again. For you. Don't stress me. What did you request for? Yeah, right. Okay. Yes. Yes. When you say that consciousness is formed out of immediacy, I didn't say that. The dynamic of consciousness is more than amazing. But we have all kinds of historical elements and so forth. Is this another sentence for the five scandals? No, but the five skandhas are, as I said, a way to put presentness and consciousness into high relief or into more articulated relief.

[35:18]

So we're in the midst of a real mystery. And I think because we're... I think... some sensitive, acutely sensitive young people, for instance, may, as I think... Nicole implied in her talk with Andrea, that if you take consciousness as an out-there-ness,

[36:23]

And already established out there. And if, as a Buddhist, or if as the person happens to feel, recognizes that's not, somehow intuitively recognizes that that's not quite true. And if they find out at some point through someone else, through their own intuition or enlightenment experience or something like that, if they find out that the externalized phenomena The externalized phenomena, as it is, It's so hard to talk about these things because the words don't want to cooperate.

[37:54]

So we have, again, the word phenomena, the etymology means that which is seen by the senses. But in English, it's lost that sensitivity. And it's now considered an out-there-ness that's in place. Okay. In fact, in my opinion and experience, it's not an out there, it's in place, it's constantly being created, it's constantly under construction, and you're a participant in the construction. And I meet young people who feel intuitively that what's presented to the senses is objectified by the senses, is not them.

[39:03]

But they assume that sanity, being sane, is to assume that it is really there. But in a more fundamental and perhaps not very conscious level, they know it's not true. So they feel they may be a little crazy because they can't adjust themselves to this objectified world, which is not actually real. Okay. So we should have a break soon.

[40:43]

And so what I suggested in the, I don't know, when, the last hour or the last 15 minutes, which, whatever, yesterday, is when your pace... When you're faced with something you know must be true, but you can't see how it could be true, the practice is to trust the subtlety of a question, of a probing or investigatory question, which is repeated in the details of your life.

[41:44]

dann ist eine Übung der Subtilität einer Frage, einer prüfenden oder erforschenden Frage zu vertrauen, die du in die Einzelheiten deines Lebens hineinbringen kannst. And it's a little bit like the question of enlightenment. Und das ist ein bisschen so wie die Frage der Erleuchtung. you may know that you have a lot of obstructions in your life and various kinds of anxiety, so you're not enlightened. But you know that the dynamic of enlightenment is to accept yourself as you are at each moment, no matter what you are. And any seeking of enlightenment or hoping for it is already not accepting yourself.

[42:54]

So you completely accept yourself and completely accept you're not enlightened. And you accept that enlightenment is not in the past or future, it has to be here. The ingredients are here. But somebody reorganized them, or they did something to them where you can't put them together. So enlightenment practice is a complete acceptance of yourself as you are. Complete acceptance that you're not enlightened. And a complete acceptance that enlightenment is at every moment present. The yogic skill is to keep all three of those present at the same time.

[44:21]

It's that particular chemistry of those three attitudes which make the possibility of enlightenment likely. Okay? And Dungschan's Enlightenment poem is just that. Okay, so let me go back to the cellophane. What do you call it in German? Cellophane? Cellophane is a commercial name, but it's become the general name. Anyway, my point there is saying that there's an invisible surface is that we can't see the present, as George G.E.

[45:30]

Moore says. We can't see consciousness. Yeah. And I said you can imagine there's a foil over consciousness. The world that sensors present to us have an invisible foil over it. And I said, part of practice is just to sort of notice that's the case. And to find the little corner where it's made so you can pull up the corner and take the foil off. And several of you have noticed that, found that interesting image. And I said, half-joking last night, last afternoon, that you could pull that off and wrap it around yourself and make sure it's padded down and you'd look exactly like yourself.

[46:56]

And that was an image for objectifying yourself through the sensorial world. And as Sukhiroshi said again, and we need to look at these statements carefully, you are not the self objectified by the world. Now, such a statement is not meant to be, it's meant to be understood only from a certain point of view. And that certain point of view takes some time to find incubation and repetition before you, oh, there's that point of view, and then it makes sense.

[48:09]

Many years ago, I described practicing with a koan. The koan is a very particular kind of fish hook. You can't imagine what kind of fish could be caught on this peculiar hook. But there's the hook, and you sublimate it. Or subliminal-nated. And it's sort of there.

[49:11]

Everywhere you go, this hook is hanging in the air. And you're doing things and talking to friends, and somewhere you're at work, and then you're talking to friends, and suddenly this weird fish comes through the air. Yeah, like that. We say it happens every day. Yeah. Okay, so the basic, say that we're trying to look at consciousness. You've decided through the maturing of your practice not to look just for mind as the partner of appearance.

[50:11]

You recognize that consciousness, that's a different, it's of course related, but it's a different, I have the word mind, I have the word consciousness, I have my experience, how do I kind of like find the fishhook for that? Okay, so very simply, you say, what I'm looking at right now is consciousness. Ganz einfach, du sagst, das, was ich jetzt ansehe, ist Bewusstsein. But what is it? So, the Zen practice, particularly more than any other Buddhist school, is to bring questions into the detailing of your life. And I particularly like the word detail because it's related to tailor. So you're tailoring the world by the questions you ask. in the details of your life.

[51:35]

So you say, this is consciousness. So that much I'd like to get across to you, whether it's confusing or not. And then you see what happens over months or weeks or whatever, hours, What happens when you keep, really, and when I say, it's like the little riff about the craft of practice I gave you with this stuff. It's like the little riff of practice I gave you as a craft. Es ist wie diese kleine Spielerei über das Handwerkszeug, die ich euch gegeben habe, als wir darüber gesprochen haben. This works when you have the intentional skill to piggyback it. Piggyback? Ja.

[52:36]

You do that in Austria while I was in Germany? Yes. Okay. You piggyback that on top of every perception. When you're a kid, you call it piggyback. I didn't find the Austrian word. This is confusing. Did you ever carry your kid's piggyback? Of course. Yeah, of course. I've seen it, and I remember it. You have the attentional skills to attach something like that to every percept, and you're putting it as a view prior to perception, and it begins to affect perception. Okay. That's the practice.

[53:40]

Now, maybe it will open up the confusion. And as I said, practice develops through its application In this case, to confusion. And I'm sure after we have a break, you'll be equally, maybe, who knows what. Thank you very much. Do you understand that this floor is a gesture? Versteht ihr, dass dieser Boden eine Geste ist? It's the best way to describe the floor is it's a gesture.

[54:41]

Das ist die beste Weise, wie man den Boden beschreiben kann. Er ist eine Geste. What we think of is the there-ness. Wir denken aber darüber, dass es da ist, ein Dasein. But it was a gesture made by the lumberyard. And it was a gesture made by Giorgio's architectural pencil. And every time you step on it, it's a gesture. So the bowing done in Zen center or in Zen practice has nothing to do with gods or pleading or prayer or something. It's simply to remind yourself that everything's a gesture. And as I've often said, that gesture is pulled up through the chakras.

[55:50]

So if I bow to you, I'm bowing to the gesture the profound gesture of each of you in your lived life. And it reminds me that the floor is a gesture which my senses can try to tell me something else. Thank you for translating. You're welcome. I couldn't do this without you, Ulrike, and others.

[56:51]

Maybe I don't have to bow because the floor is doing it for me. You feel you're breathing. The world is small. That's a fact. It's outside of consciousness. outside of consciousness. But it is a fact.

[57:39]

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