You know, I'm enjoying our happy discussion. But maybe I would be useful if perhaps I added something into this field. Again, I've expressed my astonishment last night, and I'm expressing it again, at the different, not just noticing things are an activity, but noticing things are an activity in contrast to emptiness has become a revolutionizing phenomenon. recognition for me and for practitioners, I think, too.

[01:04]

I have already expressed my astonishment yesterday evening and I will do it again now. How much this, not only to recognize things as activity, but how much things as activity in contrast or in contrast to One of the categories of knowledge in yogic thinking is knowledge that can be practiced. Or we could say knowledge which is likely to evolve through practicing. So practicing the insight that we can use everything as an activity effectively when it's contrasted with entity-ness,

[02:14]

Very simple example. It seems that many ancient peoples independently of each other, decided to create words or terms like psyche, soul, anima, spirit, all based on breath or wind. It seems that many ancient peoples, regardless of each other, created words for psyche, soul, spirit and so on, spirits, which were all related to words like wind, breath or air. Okay. But what, I don't know, I can't say it's unique.

[03:46]

Unique in contrast to our view is that breath as a manifestation or expression of a representation of spirit or soul or psyche, In yoga culture, it is practiced by breathing. You are breathing and it's a sign of life and your life starts with the breath and will end with an exhale. Du atmest ja und das Leben beginnt mit einem Atemzug und es endet mit einem Ausatmen.

[04:53]

But in between that first breath and this last exhale, first inhale and last exhale, you can practice... Breathe. Attentional breathe. So the observation that life is connected to breath, when it's practiced, transforms our life. Die Erkenntnis, dass Leben mit Atem in Verbindung steht, wenn das Atmen aufmerksam geübt wird, das kann das Leben verändern. And it's kind of very interesting that Stan Grof's holotropic breathing, which you were speaking about last night, the galater, angela,

[05:57]

I mean, I know Stan Grof quite well, pretty well. And his emphasis on holotropic breathing was in a way to a response partly, I never discussed this with him, a response partly to his, that LSD and psychedelics became illegal. So he substituted holotrophic breathing for psychedelics. Psychedelics. And it took this big California, primarily California, which itself has been, or was, an experiment in living.

[07:08]

That it took California and psychedelics to get us into holotropic freedom. And it is somewhat known, maybe, that we could say the whole Silicon Valley and computer and coding and all that stuff was much inspired by psychedelics. The entrepreneurship and openness of Steve Jobs, who I didn't know but he used to practice at my center, And many others were persons inspired to feel there's another way by psychedelics.

[08:25]

I'm amused and touched really by her. Angela's shirt. Because it's clearly based on Jasper Johns. And Jasper Johns is a, excuse me, I'm old enough, he's also somebody I knew slightly. Extremely nice man. And he, you know, what he did is he put a lot of straight lines together. How is that a design? It's not planned.

[09:45]

He does something that looks planned, but each one he does differently. So he's functioning from his body. So this image, which has many paintings and now fabric design, Clothing this wonderful person. The design itself is integrated by his body. So when you do say, okay, breath and all this stuff, a first and last experience, let's give some attention to it.

[10:47]

So what comes about is when you are nourishing aliveness, the breath is nourishing aliveness. But its nourishing is enhanced by attentional breathing. What does that lead to? It leads to the recognition, oh, yes, breathing itself helps a lot, keeps us alive, and... But attentional breathing transforms aliveness. And then attentional breathing transforms attention.

[11:48]

But you don't discover this unless you do it. And a kind of mistake I made for some decades I gave attention to breathing, but not really specifically to the inhale and exhale. And it's the... attention to the exhale, and the bodily movements that accompany the exhale. I've said this so often, but I think we have to keep saying it. So it's not attention to breathing, that's a generalization. It works, sort of, but it doesn't have the power as attention to the specifics of breathing.

[13:08]

So the specifics of breathing are not just the inhale and the exhale. But the bodily movements and bodily energetics, physiological dynamics that accompany the inhale and then differently accompany the exhale. And that's... And that is... Discovered by doing it. And it's really up to each practitioner to discover these things.

[14:23]

The teacher, he or she respects you, wants to tell you as little as possible so you make the discovery yourself. Then it belongs to you. And I was told it was inhale and exhale, but I didn't get it. I still was in a world of generalizations. And it's the separate attention to each hail, which turns the physical posture into a physiological posture. And then the further dynamic is discovered that it's uninterrupted intentional attention that is most transformative.

[15:27]

And I say uninterrupted, intentional attention. Oh, intentional. Thank you. Okay. Okay. Because nothing can be uninterrupted, but the intention can be uninterrupted. And it's the uninterrupted intention which teaches you stillness. So all this comes just from saying, well, if breath is spirit, let's practice breath.

[16:49]

And then we find out that the real dynamic is not the breath, but the attention you bring to the breath. So then you recognize that you don't want to just bring attention to a breath, you want to bring attention to attention. And it's the skill to bring attention to attention which then transforms the world into undivided activity. And Gauguin has a fascicle called Zenki, which translates as undivided activity.

[18:25]

And really, if you read it, if you don't read it with wisdom, it just sounds a little kooky. Okay. So now, by practicing the recognition that our life is a first breath and a first inhale and a final exhale, The real dynamic is not soul in connection with God or through others, but simply your connection, potential connection, to aliveness through the breath, through the hails.

[19:41]

But your attentional relationship to hailing. Yeah. So if you understand that and you get that, you understand an immense amount about the difference between Western culture and yogic culture. then you also understand a whole lot about the difference between the Western culture and the yogic culture. I would like to add to the observation of his observation. I also think this little pause in between is so important, whether I can say something about it.

[20:46]

I wanted to ask, in addition to how you just spoke about inhaling and exhaling, that to me also the small pause in between each seems very important, and whether you could say something about that. Well, there's the upper pause and there's the lower pause, and then we could go into more several forms of breathing practice. But let's leave it like that for now. You can discover that on your own. And the relationship to spatial experience on the breath and so on. Micah? To speak about breathing. Just to say that as a running gag, it also makes me happy.

[21:48]

It's not a running gag, this is serious. We're not gagging anyone. It's a running happiness. As some of you know, my husband just died. Yeah, so surprising. And what we did together in the end was breathing. And that was all that was there. We just breathed together. And it was just this very process that was complete attention to the breath because that was all that was left. And it was the only thing I could give to him. Not me personally, but the breathing itself.

[23:19]

The main teaching about being with a dying person, in Zen Buddhism at least, is how to sit next to a person, how to breathe with them, how to touch them in two or three different ways, which allow you to connect with their breathing. We did that for three days. The most important teaching in Zen Buddhism about how to be present with a dying person is that the teaching is about how to sit next to the person, where you hold the person, and how you breathe together with the person. How's your beautiful little daughter doing, who's run around this room a few times naked? She will do again. She's getting too old. But she's still undressing. In that sense, Joachim taught me a lot. And it became very clear that everything that's there is this breathing.

[24:25]

And then this moment in between, the pause has expanded. What is your daughter's name? Julie. Did Julie sit with you at all or be with you during this time when you were breathing with him? Was Julie with you? The physical change was so strong. I didn't want to expose this to her. The bodily transformation of him was so strong, I did not want to expose her to it. Yeah, I understand. Okay, thanks. Thank you. And what was wonderful to observe, Joachim came from a very strict Catholic background, where this term, which we now call entity, became very commonplace.

[25:57]

where this term, what we're now calling entity, was very strongly embodied. With this reason, it dissolved. It dissolved. Yeah. Thanks. So, Yeah. So attention to attention and uninterrupted intentional attention. And the practice of bringing attention to attention is what opens us into the way everything we perceive and see is simultaneously mind or simultaneously attention.

[27:18]

So you actually experience mind appearing on every perception, not just an idea, You start with an idea and it becomes that you feel the mind arising on each perception. So this is basic yoga practice you can develop on your own anywhere. Because it's just a fact of being alive, and you can open up, peel phyllo dough.

[28:30]

Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, please say. It's like phyllo dough, layers of, you know. Okay. You can peel phyllo dough. you can use attention to open the layers of aliveness. Okay, so maybe, I mean, I kind of try to restrain myself from giving you anecdotes. Ich versuche mich immer zurückzuhalten, euch zu viele Anekdoten zu erzählen. But anecdotes are part of conceptual thinking. Aber Anekdoten sind Teil des konzeptuellen Denkens. Anekdoten sind Teil des metaphorischen Denkens. And an anecdote is a metaphor, really. And when you really look at metaphorical thinking, every word is a metaphor.

[29:41]

Because it's not really the tree, it's a metaphor for the tree. And this koan 52 in the Shoryu Roku, which I probably want to relate to again in this seminar, Starts with those with wisdom can use metaphor to go beyond linguistic thinking. Beginnt mit der Aussage, diejenigen mit Weisheit können Metaphern verwenden, um jenseits des To go beyond? Linguistic. Linguistic, yeah. Um jenseits des sprachlichen Denkens zu kommen. Then it says, but what about when there's no possible comparison, no similitude, how does knowing proceed then?

[30:47]

Und dann heißt es aber, wenn es keine Ähnlichkeit gibt oder nichts, womit man es vergleichen könnte, wie funktioniert das bildhafte Denken dann? No, again, I'm using the word here just processive practice and not progressive practice. Prozessuale Praxis, ja. Processual practice, okay. There's no word in English, processive, but there is progressive. A progressive process is one which goes somewhere. A processive process is one that feeds back into the process.

[31:54]

It doesn't go anywhere. It just evolves the process. Yeah. I forget exactly what I was going to say, so I'll have to come back to it. Oh yeah, metaphorical thinking. Okay, so metaphorical knowing. So a question like this is the processive process process of opening a koan. It means that you stay, I mean really, as you said, our tendency is to want to go quickly.

[32:59]

So wie du gesagt hast, unsere Tendenz geht dahin, immer schnell sein zu wollen. You almost have to train yourself not to read the whole koan. Da muss man sich fast darin üben, nicht den gesamten koan auf einmal zu lesen. I did this with the Lankavatara Sutra. I read the whole Lankavatara Sutra. But I never went to the next line until I practiced and realized the first line. It took me about a year and a half to read it. Until I could practice it or embody it or realize I couldn't yet do it, I didn't go on to the next paragraph or line. And my view was, if I'm going to do this practice, I'm going to really do it, or not at all. Okay, so when you read a koan like this, 52, and I'll show you real quick. is you really stay with that first line until you've used it, made it as useful as possible.

[34:35]

What is metaphorical thinking? And what is the wisdom that's required for metaphorical thinking? And then you start thinking, when do I use metaphors? And in your conversations and thinking for the next weeks, you keep noticing metaphors. When do you use a metaphor and not use a metaphor? And in Gesprächen und in deinem eigenen Denken bemerkst du über die nächsten Wochen hinweg, wann benutzt du Metaphern? How did Einstein use metaphors to feel the mathematics which led to relativity? I mean, he literally did that. He did it to feel the mathematics. Und wie hat Einstein Metaphern oder Bilder verwendet, um die Mathematik seines Denkens zu begreifen?

[35:39]

Er hat buchstäblich die Metaphern verwendet, um das mathematische Denken zu spüren. So then you can notice when you use metaphors yourself. Und dann kannst du bemerken, wenn du selber Metaphern verwendest. Then you can notice, are they based on comparison and similar to? Und dann kannst du dir die Frage stellen, gründet das auf einem Vergleich oder auf Ähnlichkeiten? And then you can ask yourself the question, geez, what if there's no comparison, no similitude, no metaphors, what's knowing then? Dann kannst du die Frage stellen, also wenn es keine Ähnlichkeiten, keine Vergleiche gibt, Through a process of discussing a title for the last seminar we did last weekend, one of the possible titles, Undivided Activity, which Christina took as the subtitle for last week's seminar, has actually become the subtitle for this seminar.

[37:04]

I think it's a process. So now... Maybe the subtitle for this seminar is What is Knowing? But maybe we're going to That'll be the title of the next seminar, which we're not doing. But that's undivided activity. All right, okay. So, an anecdote. I wanted to ask Suzuki Rishi something about breath. This is 1963 or something, before most of you were born.

[38:04]

Maybe not Horst. Emmy. Oh, yeah. Oh, really? I guess. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, in 1963 about, Sukersi had... The Zen Center was located at 1881 Bush Street in San Francisco, and it had been a synagogue, and then became a Japanese Soto-shu missionary temple. And it had a little room where we turned into a zendo, and it had a hallway going down the stairs, and right in the corner of that, Sukershi had an office. He lived in a little Kafkaesque tower above that, which was really about as big as from Horst, not even as big as from me to Horst, round.

[39:19]

And he lived there all of the remainder of his life, 10, 15 years. And the latter part, his wife lived there with him. It was a little cupola, cupola. for the synagogue like a little tower and he lived in that little cupola and so in the office he had a desk and a couch and that's it that's all that would fit was underneath the cupola So I sat on the couch with him. We had to turn to face each other as much as possible on a couch.

[40:39]

And I said to him, I asked him some question about breathe. And he looked at me, and he was right there. I looked at him. He said, you know, there are some people, some persons, practitioners, who think they're really still, sitting still, but inside they're not still. Now, I'm presenting it this way because this is a good example of the ubiquitous use of shifts. And I'm bringing it up because I'm sure that in psychotherapeutic practice there are similar uses of shifts.

[41:48]

So I'm sitting there and he says, there are people, I think, You know, who's he talking about? Yeah, and why is he not paying attention to me and talking about other people? But he was also implicitly saying, you also have a responsibility for other people. Not just your own practice. He shifted attention from my question, as if he wasn't going to answer it, to other practitioners. So the message I got, and I would get often from him, you cannot ask me a question which doesn't include other practitioners.

[43:16]

So he broke my attention. And then he was suddenly present sitting beside me and I suddenly felt his breathing. And taking my attention out of the question and then bringing my attention by pushing it into thinking, he took it out of thinking and we were just two bodies there. Then I recognized he was showing me the response to my question. So I knew enough at that point to locate that feeling of his breathing, not just the example of his breathing, but locate the feeling of his breathing in my imaginal body.

[45:01]

So this is another use of the term imaginal body. Okay, that's one anecdote. The other anecdote I've mentioned I think more often I was going home late at the University of California where I was program coordinator for adult education. I'm still doing it. Because I had to have a job. I had a a young wife and a new baby, and I had no idea of career or profession.

[46:05]

I didn't want to have a job. I didn't want to be part of society. And yet, I had a baby, so I had to do something. So I got this job. I started with the Pablo Casals Masterclass and ended up with me organizing many seminars for adult education. You see I'm emphasizing context of the anecdotes because much of the theme of what I'm talking about is context. So in the evening, later than I usually would go back to San Francisco where I was living.

[47:09]

I'd take the bus and then I had a bicycle at the bus station. Yeah, and there were all these people surrounding this one building, which I knew well because it was an auditorium building. So it was... You know, rather late, and, you know, nine or eight, something like that, late for the building being used. So I was curious, what's going on? And although there were 20 deep at the door, I knew I could go around to the side and climb in the window. 20 deep at the door?

[48:10]

20 people deep. Sukhi Rishi told me to leave the practice a number of times. Sukhi Rishi, in other contexts, had told me in Doksan I should leave or be expected to leave. Yeah, he said two different ways. He said, you came in by the door, but you may have to leave by the window. And sometimes he said it the other way. You snuck in the window, and now you may have to go out by the door. My reaction was always the same. I didn't ever say anything, but I thought that was his problem. I'm going to make him my teacher, whether he likes it or not. So I was amused to climb in the window here of this auditorium.

[49:33]

And there's this funny little Indian man speaking in British Indian English. With a couple of big Hawaiian ways, as they're called. Flowers, you know. And you could barely see his chin without his flowers. And I didn't know who this guy was. And he was speaking this Indian accent. And it was just finishing. So I was there, I don't know, four, five, six minutes or ten at most. And everyone started going out. And I went out with the group.

[50:54]

I just went out the door and sat at the window. And somehow, just by the push of the crowd, I found myself right next to this guy. He was like there, and I was here. And the crowd was moving rather slowly, and so I was there for a few moments, more than a few moments. And they were talking about how to get into Canada. He was standing by the back door of the car and I was, you know, two and a half feet from him or half a yard from him, half a meter from him. And I suddenly thought, he's pretty good.

[52:02]

And then I asked myself a question, how did I arrive at the conclusion that he's pretty good? And I realized without knowing it at all, I'd synced my breathing with his. And So I stood there a minute, I felt his breathing, I felt him breathing. I would call this our animal natures. And maybe I used the term for myself, animalis, to avoid the word anima, which also means breath. The word animal comes from an English animus, which is breath, a breathing critter.

[53:09]

Und das Wort animal im Englischen kommt auch von animus, was auch wieder atem bedeutet, also ein atmendes Geschöpf. So our animalist natures were present. Also unsere animalistischen naturen waren da, waren präsent. And I, again, non-consciously synced my breathing with his and felt, yeah, I felt his presence and then I walked on and went to the bus and fed. Okay. Why I'm telling you this is to say that this is an example of what's called in Buddhism inappropriately mind-to-mind transmission.

[54:21]

Because it's really not mind-to-mind transmission, it's body-to-body or body-mind-to-body mind transmission. It's maybe mirror neurons at work. That's why this big emphasis in real tent practice is you live together. And you have to make use of, if you don't live together, it's common for lay people, you have to really figure that one out.

[55:27]

But obviously, I'd aligned myself with Sukershi enough times that I caught this feeling, and without knowing what I was doing, related to the Maharishi that way, with the Maharishi. So this was a kind of knowing. And it's the way I knew him and then continued to have a feeling for him, the Maharishi, over the years and the Beatles and all that stuff. So this arose to the attentional breathing, the practice of breathing of psyche and anima and soul. As the practice of anima, soul.

[56:44]

So that's just some ingredients for our discussion. And we asked them if they could start having lunch a little earlier instead of 12. Instead of 1, they're going to do it at 12.30. I think that works better for the morning sessions. And so now he said he'd be about 10 minutes late maybe, so now we're 5 minutes late. Thank you for letting me tell you these anecdotes. Okay, thanks for translating.

[57:43]

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