Well, it's nice to see so many of my friends. And obviously, I should do last seminars a couple times a year. Yeah, but probably people get used to it. So this seminar is somehow about time. Not only its title, Here and Now, but obviously semi-retiring from usual teaching. So that's about time. And of course it took you time to get here.

[01:22]

Yeah. Now we have this time together. And what can I bring to... Hi, Andreas. Thank you for making this happen. Thank you, too. Yeah, you're welcome. Why is it summer? It's supposed to be winter or autumn. Why is it actually summer? What can I bring to this topic of time? If I can bring anything, it would obviously be from my yogic looking at the world.

[02:25]

Yeah, and from my Zen practice of some decades. And somehow, I guess Andreas will blame me, of course, that somehow we, there's somebody coming, blame me, of course, for the title, Here and Now. But I probably did suggest it. Who knows? I do. You did. You suggested it. I know you suggested it. You know I suggested it. You're supposed to be down there. But I don't like the words here and now. But what could they possibly mean?

[03:36]

You're here, but what does that mean that you're here? Well, we can imagine in yogic terms, there's maybe something like a fully attentional here. But if there is such a thing as a fully intentional here, it sounds like troublesome. Isn't it easier just to be here? But I think with a shifting worldview, a fully attentional here becomes more natural. But because if there's anything that Zen practice is about, it's about immediacy.

[04:46]

And so... There's no way I haven't been concerned with immediacy from decades ago. But I've been particularly trying to find ways to speak about it in the last year and a half or so. Aber es ist eigentlich erst seit den letzten eineinhalb Jahren, dass ich ganz spezifisch nach Wegen suche um darüber zu sprechen. Yeah, and I think for us, here and now are so obvious.

[06:22]

How could there be a difference in worldview? Any worldview has to have a here and now. And for us, here and now is something so obvious that we ask ourselves, how can there be any worldview in which here and now are somehow different? There must be a here and now in every worldview. But if you are at a Japanese railroad station, and you were going to say, Castle Yama, or Castle, that a man, the announcer, train announcer, would say, Castle Yama, well, Castle, departing is arriving.

[07:26]

He wouldn't say, the train is arriving. And here she wouldn't say, it's arriving here, where else is it arriving? So this may seem like not a very big difference, but actually it's quite a big difference. So... I'm going to live in Kassel. Angela lebt in Kassel. And I'll see you there soon. So, Kassel departing is arriving.

[08:28]

Also, Kassel abfahren kommt an. Okay. If you were a buzzing fly. Wenn du eine umherfliegende oder eine umhersummende Fliege wärst. I don't speak. None of you are, but if you were a buzzing fly, when does a buzzing fly have a now? The buzzing fly's now has no alternative to now. It's always a buzzing now. There's lots of them in my office at Johannesburg. The buzzing fly doesn't think, geez, this is mine now. Yeah, or the buzzing fly maybe sometimes... He or she, I've never decided which is which.

[09:44]

He or she is sitting on my lampshade because it's warm. So it has a here, this is a warm here. And I like being here now, says the fly, but I doubt it. So I'm just trying to find ways to suggest that now and here are rather interesting mental postures. The fly, in order to have a sense of now, I mean, there's no alternative for it, but now-ness. It would have to have some sense of history.

[10:59]

Now, I suppose this fly could think, well, I used to be that kind of fly, and now I'm this kind of fly, and so my nowness is a little different than now when I was in that other room. But flies don't write history. Yeah. So if you imagine then a fly, if a fly had a sense of history... It would have to have a sense of accumulative time. So it would have to have a sense of, I've been accumulating some history buzzing around here, and etc., etc. So now, I mean, that little example suggests there's such a thing maybe as a cumulative time

[12:31]

And karma, or whatever we call it, or guilt, or shame, etc., are all feelings, concepts, related to accumulative time. So each of you have arrived here. And we now share a now-ness. Und jetzt teilen wir ein jetzt. But when each of you arrived, you arrived in the midst of your accumulative time. Aber als jeder und jede von euch hier angekommen ist, da seid ihr inmitten von eurer eigenen sich anhäufenden Zeit hier angekommen.

[13:48]

So, and again, in recent months I've been trying to get some traction in immediacy. And in the last few months, again, I have always tried to get something like an adhesion, a friction, an adhesion in and out. So I, because, you know, we're sitting here, we're in some sort of time, I mean, some sort of liquid or we're all in the midst of time flowing or time, yeah, whatever. But I think one of the first rules of yogic practice has to be that we're not in a Newtonian world. As brilliant, extremely brilliant as Newton was, Isaac Newton, he still imagined that we lived in a container and that time, that container was universal and time was universal.

[15:00]

Dennoch hat er sich vorgestellt, dass wir in einer Art Behältnis leben und dass dieses Behältnis etwas Universelles ist und dass Zeit darin auch etwas Universelles ist. Now it's almost impossible for us Westerners to completely free ourselves from a Newtonian worldview. Und für uns Westler ist es fast unmöglich, uns vollständig aus einer Newtonischen Weltsicht zu befreien. Yeah, and contemporary physicists who know by experiments and teaching, clearly there's no universal time and space. Still function partly, at least, with, yes, but it's kind of universal time and space. You go to bed at, say, 11 o'clock. And maybe you get up at 7 o'clock.

[16:14]

And it seems like eight hours have passed while you were sleeping. But it's a kind of abstraction to say time has passed. What's actually happened is you went to bed in the shadow side of the earth and woke up probably in the sunny side of the earth. So it's quite useful, particularly if you have to get to work on time or something, to call that time. But it's, I think, worth sort of wondering about it and saying, well, geez, why do we call the shadow side of the earth and then the sunny side of the earth time?

[17:38]

It's just turning. Aber gleichzeitig können wir das hinterfragen und uns fragen, warum ist das eigentlich so, dass wir die Schattenseite der Erde und dann später die Sonnenseite der Erde, dass wir das als Zeit bezeichnen. And the turning creates what we call time. Denn sie dreht sich ja eigentlich einfach nur. Und dieses sich drehen, das erschafft das, was wir Zeit nennen. Okay, so what does that mean? The implications of that mean when you arrived here? And what does that mean in its implications for the moment when you arrived here? You arrived here and your activity was time. So you're manufacturing time as you're arriving. And we're each manufacturing time And getting here, and each of our time is slightly different.

[18:41]

Speaking about time, I'm the early warning system for Andreas. Andreas, samadhi. There's somebody arriving. Now, I mean, when the Japanese train announcer says, castle departing is arriving. Basically, he's in the East Asian yogic worldview, which is also what Zen is part of.

[19:48]

that the train, the physical object, the train arriving, is really just an activity we call a train. That the activity of it is. The train is just an activity. And the people who are planning to go to Kassel, they know they're not going to Berlin, so they know that their departing activity is arriving. Und die Leute, die nach Kassel wollen, die wissen ja, dass sie nicht nach Berlin wollen. Und sie wissen dann, dass ihre abfahrende Aktivität jetzt ankommt. Now, again, this seems like just a bunch of words. Das klingt wie einfach ein Haufen Worte.

[20:57]

But I think if when you arrive here... Aber ich glaube, dass wenn du hier ankommst... Your experience is... let's call it sequential time instead of accumulative time. Now the implication of what I'm saying here, I'm trying to say, is that we're here in the midst of this, I don't know, flow or something we call time. And the word time is an abstraction. But how do we get some traction in time or immediacy? So for me, I'm trying to sort this out over the last few years, has been to give some definitions to time that lets me... Would you like the curtain pulled?

[22:17]

Thank you so much. Someone pull the curtain for the young woman. Thank you. You came all the way from Munich? Yeah. And then the sun shines on your eyes. Thank you for coming. Oh, I feel sorry for you. Actually, all of you have to list all this time. Someone who's practiced with me for years came to see me the other day. And he said, you know, I like it when you give a lecture. He said, I hear you shuffle in. And then you arrange your Japanese robes, if it's a sashin. He said, and that takes about an hour. Und dann, wenn es eins erschien ist, dann ordnest du deine japanischen Roben und das dauert ungefähr eine Stunde.

[23:50]

Und dann sagst du so komplizierte Dinge, die ich zwei oder drei Jahre lang nicht verstanden habe. And then I said, well, then why did you keep coming back? He said, well, because I realized you were just saying complicated things because you were trying to stop our thinking. But he also said, there's some phrases you used entire being is entirely in front of you or something, which have been useful to me. He said, no, no, yes, I don't know, yes, but really it's all that stuff you said, just because we're all too complicated, you're intellectual practitioners, and so you're just trying to confuse us. Actually, I'm trying to do more than that.

[24:58]

Yeah, but, you know, I've been doing this Zen practice and yogic practice for a long time, relatively for one my age. And I realized the crucial difficulty and the crucial opportunity is the difference in world view. And if you can get that shift Much of Zen practice and the teachings opens up. For example, again, if you're reading a koan, for instance, or Dogen.

[26:01]

Dogen just assumes you are experiencing, creating time as you do things. Your activity is creating the time. It's not there before you got there. Early warning system. Early warning system. I taught him too well. He's in Samadhi all the time. He just tunes out. Back to Dogen. Back to Dogen. If you're reading Dogen or koans, Dogen and the Dharma ancestors who put the koans together, again, just assume you know and experience that your activity is time.

[27:10]

And you can shift your experience of time to almost like time you had as a child, time you have now, and so forth, somatic time, within your own experience. And Dogen and our dharmic and karmic ancestors also feel your presence assume you know you're making space also by your activity. Again, this was a farm, and before it was a farm, it was just a field, and now it's a room, and now it's a seminar house, etc.

[28:29]

And when you walk in here you're also participating in making this space. And when Andreas was accepting people making a reservation or something or other to come here. He had his calipers. Something you measure something very closely with. Yeah. Yeah. He had his calipers out or his ruler out, measuring the movement, saying, well, legs are this, folded legs are this. And there were 10 or 15 people whose legs were too long.

[29:32]

He said no. They're still on the waiting list. Now again, what's the point of this? Well, if you... I think you're walking into a neutral dead, a kind of dead space that's just here waiting for you to sit down in it. You just find a place in which you can fit. But if you have the feeling that you're making space as you're arriving, you're developing a different attentional dynamic.

[30:51]

Then you develop a different attentional dynamic. What you and I and the buzzing fly share is potential dynamics. So if your culture has changed, given you the feeling that space is kind of dead and you walk into it. It's already there. I mean, of course, practically speaking, it usually is already there. And our thinking, our mental posture called thinking, assumes, wants to assume that things are predictable.

[31:54]

geht davon aus und möchte auch davon ausgehen, dass die Dinge vorhersehbar sind. So when they're predictable, we feel, yeah, I knew the room was there, and I knew the platform wouldn't break. Und wenn sie vorhersehbar sind, dann kannst du sagen, ja, ich wusste, dass der Raum da sein würde, und natürlich geht so ein Podest nicht kaputt. Kaputt. I should never have brought this scroll. And this scroll is a Korean version of the kanji mu, meaning emptiness. Yeah. So I just somehow, just as I was leaving, I thought, oh, I'll bring that scroll. And who would I know that emptiness would break a platform? But these things happen. Oh, hi. You didn't get everyone to come on time.

[33:29]

Some of you I haven't seen for quite a while, and some of you are getting older. And that's why this is my last seminar. Oh dear. So what's interesting about this, you know, and what makes the Zen practice itself accumulative is if you use your attention differently sensitize your attention. You develop a different kind of attention.

[34:44]

Like Dorothea's partner, Frieda, was in an accident which blinded him. And he's been clearly, the last few years, and he lives at Johanneshof sometimes, has developed a different kind of attention. So if you actually, over a period of many moments, which translate into years. Wenn du tatsächlich über mehrere Momente hinweg, die sich dann überführen lassen in Jahre, have a different kind of attentional sensitivity, you develop a different capacity for knowing the world. It's just a fact. Wenn du über diese Jahre eine andere Art von Aufmerksamkeitssensibilität entwickelst, dann entwickelst du dabei gleichzeitig eine andere Art, die Welt zu erkennen oder wahrzunehmen.

[35:59]

And if you don't have that kind of practice for some reason or other, your life requires something else, you can't even know you don't have this other contentional capacity because there's nothing to compare it to. And if you're smart, you're always satisfied with what you are, and why should you be any different than the heck with the rest? But sometimes it's useful, even if you're completely satisfied, I hope you are, enjoying each moment, as your shirt says, enjoy today and all the moments of today. You have the sense of, again, coming

[37:00]

making the space as you're coming into it, that each moment, it begins to give you a sense of the space almost as if you were, I don't know what to say, let's say getting into water. Das beginnt, dir ein Raumgefühl zu geben, das fast so ist, als würdest du ins Wasser eintauchen. And getting into the water, you could feel your body displacing the water. Und wenn du ins Wasser eintauchst, dann kannst du spüren, wie dein Körper das Wasser verdrängt. And then if you're in a spa, maybe somebody else gets in the water with you. And you can feel the presence of the other person in the water, not just as the water. So you begin to develop an attentional sensitivity to your own spatial dynamics.

[38:43]

I don't know, let's call it that. And you begin to feel the spatial dynamics of... of another person and a tree. Now I'll get a little ahead of most of our practice. And when you begin to have a sense of these spatial dynamics, the world becomes more and more vivid. And it's hard to say, I only have the word vivid. In English, the word vivid, the etymology is from to live.

[39:53]

So the word vivid refers to a certain kind of living. And there's, let's say... I don't know. I mean, you'll just have to take my word for it. There's Vivid 1, there's Vivid 2, then there's Vivid 3. And after a while you can say, geez, my practice must be developed. I guess this is Vivid 3. And then there's a shift to maybe we could say exponential vividness or multidimensional vividness.

[41:01]

And then after that, it's like you don't see the tree more vividly. You feel you're inside the tree, which is also looking at you. And then after a while, it's no longer about that you perceive the tree more vividly, but that you have the feeling to be in the tree and that the tree also looks at you at the same time. not separate from everything you look at, see. And that kind of experience simply develops from a shift from container space to always being created space. That's probably enough for now, huh?

[42:04]

And... And enough for some of your legs. Not yours, you just got here. But also, you have to kind of take these things... Look, I've been doing this more than 55 years. I kind of knew these things... from the very beginning almost. But I knew them in a kind of feeling way, but I couldn't articulate them.

[43:17]

And I had to, you know, as my own practice, I had to notice, well, yeah, there's all these probabilities, and I'm drawing, I'm I'm bringing these probabilities into focus. And then these things I kind of already knew, when I brought them into focus in some kind of articulation, They began to have another power because they began to articulate other things I hadn't noticed. So I can suggest these things to you.

[44:18]

And I'm suggesting you have to kind of ponder them and incubate them. Walk around in the midst of them. Think, live around in the midst of them. In various moments they kind of take hold and suddenly you say, oh yes, I can feel that now. But it takes patience and some kind of faith that maybe it's the case. But you have a chance to get a feel for something like this in a year.

[45:28]

Things that took me 10, 20 and 30 years to get a feeling of. I mean, really, it's taken me forever to get a feeling of some of these things. I'm trying to be encouraging. So let's have a break. Thank you for translating.

[46:12]

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