I feel thrown to a point that is somehow very common to me in my practice, and that is not knowing. Not knowing is near, but often it's just that it's not knowing. And the moment has to do with the fact that I have the feeling that I am in my life, like a transition phase, a situation of change. And it hits you somehow from the field, I can't explain it, with this knowing before thought arises, and I... I think I cultivate a physical feeling of this knowing before thought arises. I think I can only learn about the body, otherwise I don't understand anything. And what I discover there is that it just feels so much better not to think than to think.

[01:22]

So it's just from my feeling, from my feeling of being. And that's something that I think it was actually three years ago when I was in the practice period and sat alone for quite a long time. And I came a little later, so I was really all alone. Then I knew, I can only do it now if I find something that feels good. So I can't do it with discipline. I have to find a way to make it feel good. And since then it's been like this. Yes, physically, but also in terms of body-mind-breathing. I can't really put it into words, but my body recognises it more and more, and at the same time it becomes more and more like a guideline in my practice. If this feeling settles down and comes to me, then it goes on.

[02:24]

And of course, this is also very practical, this not knowing, which is present in many areas of my life, not to hold it out, but rather to let it be there, to support it, that the approach to this state of knowing becomes traceable, and this not knowing, that this simply And that's why it feels better. That brings me to the question, when you say after not knowing, it's also something that interests me very much, but I think you need, well, I needed it for a very long time until I was at that point, to have a feeling for not knowing, or to have the courage to put this not knowing into it.

[03:42]

How do we? And I just remember what Roshi said yesterday, maybe it's quite easy to go back to the former Brahma-Biharas that we discussed yesterday. And maybe I'll repeat them again for those who weren't there yesterday. Unfortunately, I have to read it out. I'm not that fit. The first would be unlimited kindness. Now I could imagine that this could also emerge from not knowing.

[04:53]

I'll add to what Roshi said. Unlimited kindness, don't choose. The second would be empathic with joy. So it transforms you and it is a bodhisattva practice. It takes away who you could be. And then I asked myself in meditation today, can I do that? Mag ich mich mit allem und jedem mitfreuen. Also das wäre noch ein ziemlicher Praxisweg, bis ich sagen könnte, das kann.

[05:54]

Der dritte Punkt heißt Gleichmut. You settle in silence, says Roshi, and you are not shaken. This also comes from not knowing, namely to be open to everything and not to be shaken by it. Well, it would be nice to feel that there is no limit in the seven directions, as Dr. Gregg said. Yes. This is what I did this morning in meditation.

[07:01]

For example, equality. Am I equal? No. Why am I not equal? For personal reasons, because I have the feeling that I want to say something. I want to be someone who has something to say. and which are perhaps in contrast to each other. I can tolerate him equally if he has a different opinion, which I always discover here, that this is not the case with me. Well, good.

[08:09]

And these are all high goals. Compassion, equality, empathetic joy and infinite kindness. It all sounds so kind of loose, but it's not. I didn't quite understand what he was saying.

[09:12]

If I were to listen to every speech here, I would hear so many different opinions, so many different perceptions, not opinions, perceptions, how the person who practices or feels his life, recognizes and practices. So you're going a completely different way than I am, for example. Yes. Das stelle ich immer wieder fest. Aber wäre ich das zu beurteilen? Das wäre not knowing. Ich weiß es nicht. Ich kann diese Vielfalt nicht wissen. Und was mache ich dann damit, dass du eine andere Vorgehensweise hast, sagen wir mal, der Praxis als ich? He said yesterday, we should take care of one thing.

[10:18]

hat er zu ihrem Geber gesagt. Ja, genau. Stimmt. Ja, gut. Einlesen. I would like to add something to what Hama Bihara said, because yesterday Nicole just dropped something on the table during dinner. And that's right, that's exactly what I'm practicing right now. That's the most difficult and limited friendliness for me. And she talked about it and said, Also es ging um Missverständnisse in der Praxis, die in unserer Kultur und unserem Denken auch liegen und wie wichtig ihr das ist, das zu klären. Und hat dazu gesagt, naja, wir müssen immer so aufpassen, zum Beispiel bei den Brahma Viharas und Empathetic Joy oder Unbegrenzter Freundlichkeit, dass wir das nicht auch als ein Ding, als ein Etwas begreifen. Fixe Vorstellungen. Yes, not just a fixed idea, but something at all.

[11:36]

That's what it's all about to me. And that was like that for me. That woke me up so much. That's why I just wanted to put it in there again. And she said one more half-sentence to it, how much it can only bloom out of every moment. So she didn't say to bloom, I said. I don't know exactly what she said. But that was more, it's very precious to me. And since yesterday I've been working on it. That's why I wanted to do it. Maybe you can say that things that seem so easy become more and more difficult in the course of practice. It's like you take, you use. You could use these things, you could deal with them.

[12:39]

I think, over all these years, I've slowly understood for myself, if I choose an intention, just like I am now practicing with the ten directions. If I just assume this, then something will change. If I were to decide with this Brahma-Vihara, I would probably assume an intention, I am now practicing with the infinite friendliness, then I would probably notice At the moment, as you said, it wasn't like that. You know? So that's how it starts. Do you notice it at all? And what do you notice? What is friendly at all?

[13:42]

It's not so clear either. So it's like an activity that has a direction due to the intention can bring any change at all that you notice, otherwise something just happens. You said yesterday, Agatha, that it is important that you don't focus on the directions, but that they come to you. I didn't have this feeling yet. That was a very exciting aspect. Can you say something about that? Do you have that from Roshi, or is that your own experience? I have that from Roshi, or from a Pohan, I think. And he has already spoken about it. In the first Dost, he himself spoke of the Feier, his daughter something, that he visualized there, all Buddhas, ten directions, three times, how they come to you. During this Feier, he practiced that, he told that.

[14:45]

He has already spoken directly. And what did you want to say? How exactly is it? Yes, for example, if you practice with hearing in the Vijnanas, then it is already so that something comes. Yes, but you feel your hearing from what it has triggered. So this dynamic is with the direction. Just try something. I think it's a completely different feeling when something comes to me than when I try something. Yes, yes. But it can also be oppressive, right? It can also be scary. But I thought yesterday that I could also try it in other directions. It would be easy. No, you know, with this pulsation. Try it. What is it then? Inhale and exhale. In this direction. Hi.

[16:10]

Sorry, I stopped the conversation. It's warmer.

[17:33]

They're supposed... Usually we heat up the room two or three, as I said, I think, two or three days in advance, but it's actually less, but it was somehow overlooked. Yeah, normalerweise heizen wir diesen Raum zwei, drei Tage vorher und irgendwie ist das ein wenig untergegangen. Thank you for getting started. I assume we'd start with some, as we did yesterday, with some description of what are hooks and turning points in your own practice.

[19:27]

By a hook I mean something else. A hook is something that you... You know, it's used in theater and things like that, where it goes along as text, but there's something that stands out and then makes you take a new notice of... of the text or the teaching or the practice. Quite a few of you arrived yesterday, I guess, from Leipzig.

[20:30]

And they are calling their budding center a Zen Lab. which is much how I have thought about what we are doing and I'm doing from the 60s. So still, after 60 years or so, this is a work in progress. And you can see that, you know, it just happens that this whole schedule happened, it's a kind of style.

[21:38]

It happened just before I'm leaving and also when the yesterday's ashes internment ceremony was and went doorsteps in and how many Jukais were doing, I don't know. Yeah, and... Yeah, and I bother you with this question every time we meet, is what should I do with with the time I have, now that this is probably the last doorstep then. In any traditional time, of course, you'd be here because you walked or rode a horse or something. So, you know, in the next years I might give a lecture once a week or something like that.

[22:58]

But I don't think any of you are you're not going to come for one lecture all the way from Leipzig. Maybe. No, no. I wouldn't like that, actually. There'd be so much pressure on me to give a good lecture. Oh, God. Yeah. So, also, always there's a question of... Well, from my side and your side, what can I do? Presumably, I'll be coming back in May 18th. Also, da ist immer wieder diese Frage, was kann ich tun?

[24:01]

Ich werde wahrscheinlich am 18. Mai zurückkommen. I don't know if we need anything, but it's good for me to be able to meet with you. I was... One of the themes of my recent visit to Leipzig And one of the topics of my recent visit to Leipzig was... And the name Zen Lab implies that it is not a religion, but rather an experiment. And I was just reading just quite recently a piece somewhere in which Kant, Immanuel Kant, do you say Kant in German?

[25:11]

Immanuel Kant was an Austrian woman wrote him a letter and said, this and this happened, and so I'm really feeling terrible, and et cetera, and Kant wrote back, well, we have to distinguish between a lie and a just being reticent. Well, this didn't seem to help her too much. Reticent is what? To hold back, not... And then she wrote another letter a couple of months later, and... And he didn't answer, he just gave it to someone else to look at and then she committed suicide.

[26:13]

And this essay or piece I was reading asked, was asking, can you go to a philosopher with your troubles? Well, I think if I was a philosopher at a university, no one would be asking me much, except questions about, you know, why. But I bring it up because we did this ceremony for A dear Peter Zipzer yesterday.

[27:19]

Yeah, and it's, but is that something, you know, that's more than a laboratory, that's doing something that looks at least religious. I was talking the other day to my Korean dermatologist. And she's... extremely accomplished medical professional. And she said, I did five extra years in addition to all the other medical attainment she has, I guess, to learn surgery.

[28:35]

And she got her diploma, when she finished after five years, in the mail delivered by the postman. And she thought, you know, I did this for five years. I have no contact with the professors. They don't know that. I just get this thing in the mail. She said, I like American colleges better. Yes, so that made me think about, you know, what happens in American colleges. Well, you get your diploma, you know, in a ceremony with all the other students. But the ceremony requires a physical location. Because if it's a communal ceremony and there's a few hundred people or more, you need some kind of place.

[30:01]

And if you need some kind of place, the place has to... have a place in the minds of the students as well as just big buildings and pathways. So there's actually a... semi-conscious or conscious decision to create certain buildings that are so memorable that they stay representative of that place of UC Berkeley or Harvard or Stanford or something like that. Yeah. I mention this because, of course, I find myself doing this, and I kind of absorbed this way of looking at the world.

[31:27]

Yeah. Which... I feel very funny saying these things. Because when I was in college, I was such a problematic student. I basically didn't go to class for four years. And you're supposed to wear a tie in order for the college I went to to get into the dining room, and I refused to wear a tie, so they refused to feed me. And since I had no money, I had there on scholarship, I was trying to eat in local cafeterias, which I didn't have money enough to do.

[32:30]

And finally they agreed I could wear a scarf. And now look at me. I wear scarves and all kinds of things. But I did learn that a certain kind of actuality has to be created that stays with you, it's just not outside you. And that's part of my motivation in the background of trying to develop Johanneshof here. You know, one of the reasons to do the Zendo

[33:33]

the way we did it, is because it becomes a bodily memory of sitting in that zendo. And how we take care of this building. You know, there was no connection with the building above because this was a wood shop originally. And so, because the Wolfram Graubner's family lived upstairs, they didn't want all the sawdust coming up, so there was no way to get upstairs. You had to go outside and... So one of the first things we did was to create a staircase that fit in with the rest of the building and had some real attention to detail. This same thinking is, for me, approach, thinking, view, is exhibited in the ceremony we did yesterday.

[35:09]

And the same thinking or view or approach was present in the ceremony that we conducted yesterday. Here we walk in a procession and ring a bell, you know. But we have to do something that has to do with our emotional life as well as our realisational life. So if you Leipzigians, is that the right way to say it? Leipzigers. Leipzigers. I like Ziggians. You like ziggers.

[36:25]

Continue, and there's a sense of physical location with this gate to nowhere in the middle of the room. I didn't quite understand. There's a gate in the middle of the room for no reason at all. Like we have a gate here. This is clearly supporting the building above, but we don't know what the gate in the middle of the Leipzig room is doing. So I suggested they call it after the... Book of Koans, Amulmon Khan, The Gateless Gate, Zendo. But maybe it would be more subtle to call it the middle gate zendo.

[37:29]

Because it implies the gateless gate, but it's a little more, you know, right in the middle, a gate. So I'm sure in the next year or two, if you practice there regularly, there's going to be coming people to you and saying, my brother just died, will you do something to help me? And you'll have to figure out what to do. Because if you have any practice with power, people will want to it'll affect people you don't even know who'll be happy you're there in the middle of Leipzig and they've never even visited you, but they're happy you're there.

[38:45]

Yeah, okay. So the same applies here. To what extent do we... How do we continue this place in a realistic way in which we're really practicing? This is the practice of actuality. And the same applies to this place as... If I tried to make a shorter description as possible, I'd say this is an individual practice of actuality with others

[39:46]

That means the others are inseparable part of your practice. So with others, within an inseparable, that's not the word I want to use. Untrenable is not the word I want to use. Anyway, I'll say inseparable now. An inseparable spectrum of phenomena. So that you actually feel like walking on our procession up to Peter's stone. Peter's stone. Peter means stone, right? Peter's stone. You're walking within your own body.

[41:08]

That's really what Dogen meant. It's not some philosophical statement. The entire earth is the true human body. It means you really feel This is on the same spectrum of aliveness. Okay. So I stopped. Would anybody please benefit us by telling us something about your practice?

[42:10]

And I think as a sangha, it's helpful for us to Generally, only the teacher knows what each person's practice is. But as we develop and mature as a sangha, it's helpful if we have a feeling for our shared practice. Sorry to give you such hard things to say. Okay, yes. I think you should speak a little louder because I can barely hear you here.

[43:17]

It's over there. I had to leave early last doorstep then because my father was dying. Yeah. And I was very glad that I found him still being conscious Friday and Saturday. I was able to talk to him. Achtung. And on October 8th, Tuesday night, he died.

[44:20]

And since then, I practice the taking refuge for him, and I want to continue that for 49 days. That is what Dogen said, and what you can also find in Tibetan Buddhism. What Dogen said and what you find also in Tibetan practice and also Heart Sutra. And I hope that I can do something for my father in that sense. I really wish for it and I'm doing this, that I'm doing this for him.

[45:27]

Okay, yeah.

[45:29]

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