At the break, the troublemakers, Angela and Norbert, asked me if I'm not going to do any more seminars, but I do this one. In other words, if I was going to do a seminar in Hannover, could I come here for two or three days again? On the way home, or something? Yeah, and... There's space for you here. And... You know, it's... I don't want to do more public seminars, and this is sort of a public... But if I could really do something that was useful to psychotherapy, I would consider it.

[01:14]

So I have to... You guys would have to talk about it, decide whether this is... Kind of nice, maybe, but not useful. I know my wife will oppose it, but sometimes I have a little bit I can say. She's trying to get me to do nothing. Okay. Nicole, who studies... Frau Baden. You don't use first names. Nicole, who studies psychology and mathematics and life and other things in Oldenburg. Nicole Baden, who studies psychology, mathematics and other things in Oldenburg. Saw a movie similar to what I just mentioned.

[02:16]

So could you tell them your... has seen a film that is very similar to the one I just talked about. Yes, we did an experiment in Oldenburg and I took part in it. It was a very similar film, but only a basketball game and not a football game. And we also had the task of counting the points. There were three rounds, one where we had to count the points, which was much more difficult in basketball. It was almost impossible to count, so we had a pretty impossible task. The second time it was a task that was similar to impossible, but a little different, and the third time it was just looking at the wind. The task was easier, but... The task was just easier, the third task. And I noticed that during the first pass I got a bit... I don't know, a bit hectic.

[03:18]

I just counted and didn't notice that there was also a kind of gorilla. It was a little orange girl that ran through the basketball court and always did this and waddled her head. And I didn't notice that the first time. I was already there and, apart from counting, I was still paying attention to my breathing. And that's when I noticed her. But then I was the only one who noticed the girl during the second round. I just told her that she was asking for it. If there were a Buddha among us most of us wouldn't see it. There's a lot of teaching just on that point.

[04:35]

Yeah, somebody else wants to bring something up. Anything else we're going to wind up now? Anything anybody would like? Unwound. Und da wir jetzt zusammenfassen, gibt es etwas, das jemand noch öffnen möchte? I realized when we were talking about dying and death that you very rarely speak about death itself. Me? Or the whole time? The whole time. I had an association with Woody Allen.

[05:52]

I had an association, I saw an interview with Woody Allen. With Woody Allen? Woody Allen, yes. He had a new film, Melinda and Melinda. I gave him an interview and he said that the only topic that actually concerns him and what he believes that concerns all of us is actually death and the impossibility to accept death. And he says the most important thing that interests him and interests everybody here is death and to accept death. The impossibility, yeah, the impossibility to accept death. The difficulty, yeah, to accept. Yeah? Yeah? I just was thinking about death And I thought death doesn't exist because death is not an area of experience

[06:54]

Death is... There was something and something is collected and restored and there are certain expectations and there is no answer for these expectations. So my experience is birth and dying but not death. So if you say someone is dead, it sounds as if there was someone who was dead. alive, something being alive or having life and then suddenly this person has death or is dead.

[08:23]

And this is not correct. The decaying person is What's decaying is also life in a different form. And I thought maybe there's only life. Yeah, you're alive up until you die. Sickness may be a problem, but death is only less a moment. Krankheit kann ein Problem sein, aber der Tod dauert nur einen Augenblick an. Und Dogen sagt so etwas, was ähnlich ist. Er sagt so etwas, wie du gerade gesagt hast. Er sagt so etwas wie, niemand besitzt den Tod. But you do have to get, I mean, there's old age, sickness and death.

[09:29]

Yeah, Red Skelton, who was a famous American comedian. You're mentioning Woody Allen, made me think of him. And on his 90th birthday. Red Skelton. He said there's three ages of man. Youth. Middle age. And you're looking good. Still a comedian. So every now and then people come up to me and say, oh, Roshi, you're looking good. That's what I was afraid of.

[10:32]

Well, there's three practices I think one can bring into getting used to the fact that we're going to die. One is I'm... Certainly going to die. You remind yourself of that, I'm certainly going to die. I mean, we sometimes think an exception is going to be made in our case. Certainly work with, I'm certainly... going to die. And yet gladly I remain alive. So first you just get very used to I'm certainly going to die.

[11:49]

It has to be a view that's part of your thinking. Mm-hmm. And then you begin to work with, I'm willing to die. And I think we could say that Jesus and Buddha were both persons who were willing to die. So you work with, I'm willing to die. I think each of these two takes some years. It's just an awareness you bring in, an attention, an awareness you bring into your thinking. And I think Yeah, after a while you really get so you're just willing to die.

[13:04]

It's no big deal. And the third step is you're ready to die. So that at any moment you feel I'm ready to die. I think in fact we die, most people die pretty well. I mean there's something that takes over and helps us die. I've been Then there's teachings about how you're with a person who's dying, and I've done that quite a bit. And a number of people, when I was head of the San Francisco Sin Center, decided to die there, including Gregory Bateson. But I think through these three steps, I think one can get quite comfortable with it.

[14:11]

Another way of practicing with this is on your inhale. You feel life coming in. Under your exhale you practice disappearing. And if you really get used to kind of just letting go on your exhale, disappearing on your exhale, there will become a point where there's an exhale and there will not be an inhale. And you get used to it. At least I haven't died yet.

[15:25]

At least not in my memory. But so far, I don't seem to have any concern about it at all. You know, it was interesting. I had prostate cancer, what, three years ago now. And for some reason, the eight weeks of radiation I did in addition to the operation. Somehow it made it much more difficult to sit. My legs are much less flexible. But it's getting somewhat better.

[16:33]

But other than that nuisance, I had no to the whole thing. It was just like this was something I was doing. It was not... I had no other feeling, it was just something I was doing. And it was actually quite nice in fact. I got lots of attention. I had a room full of flowers and people kept visiting me and the nurses were so nice. I can't say there was anything negative about it except I still have a little tattoo on my side here where they aimed the gun. And I can't say much negative about it, except that I have two tattoos here, two paintings, where they probably pointed the beam cannon at me. I don't know if that's interesting, but it really was just something to do, and it was a very, on the whole, very pleasant experience.

[17:44]

Sounds strange to say, maybe, but... Okay, someone else? When I look at my child... I can practice, I would be strong. I can practice, if I watch towards my kid, I can practice, I will die. And the other practice towards the kid is, you certainly will also die. It has a different charge if I look at a child with this sentence in the background. The experience of impermanence wakes me up and makes the moment very intense.

[18:45]

Sometimes it's horrible to really accept impermanence. It's a process, it opens up a lot, but the impermanence itself, sometimes it's horrible for me. But if I think of the alternative, if everything was permanent, oh, God, that is hell. What a terrible, boring world it would be. I think a thousand years from now, we'd all be sitting right here. Looking exactly the same. Does anyone have another question? You are the only one who survived. You are dying. You are the only one. You cannot die. Okay. You're still translating.

[20:00]

He says, do I have to translate another year? Okay. Okay. I was just thinking about a little bit along the lines we're talking. If I imagine a person, say, driving along, a person who's rather depressed and thinking they might want to kill themselves, say. It's say driving along the coastal highway or they're thinking of driving off the cliff or into a tree. But if they go around the corner and there's suddenly a big rock in the road that's fallen off the cliff,

[21:15]

Without thinking, they'll immediately avoid the rock. Ohne zu denken, werden sie den Felsen umfahren. Now, this is, to me, very interesting. Das ist sehr interessant, aus meiner Sicht. Okay. So, now we could say there's some kind of instinctual, you know, self-preservation. A baby doesn't want to fall, or so forth. Wir können sagen, es gibt eine instinktive, ja... But that instinct is joined by a decision to stay alive. I think we all make a decision to stay alive. I'm just speculating here with you now.

[22:26]

So, I think there's this decision we've made, we cross the street carefully and so forth, and anybody who's old enough to drive a car has crossed the street carefully many times. So it's not just instinctual to avoid the stone, there's also a deeply embedded decision to stay alive. So then you can ask what part of the person avoids the rock and what part of the person wants to drive off the cliff? Now, my sense is that there's... Oh, you're moving there.

[23:47]

I thought we were losing another person. Thank you for staying. So I would say there's, oh, Ivo left, speaking to him partly, that there's an, we could say an operational self. And a Let's say a personal self. So let's say the operational self, which has made this basic decision to stay alive, avoids the rock. Yeah, and why do I call it a self? Because it is a decision to stay alive. It's a decision, you know, there's decisions built into this establishment of the present. Now, we could say the...

[24:53]

The present moment is established by the operational self. But the definition of the present is established by the operational self. personal self. Whether you like it or you don't like it, etc. Now, one of the practices of mindfulness is, you know, we start out with there's pleasant, unpleasant, and neither. And pleasant and unpleasant can soon turn into like and dislike. And like and dislike are function of the personal self. And like and dislike can soon turn into greed, hate and delusion.

[26:41]

So part of mindfulness practice is to keep establishing yourself in widening neither, that's neither pleasant nor unpleasant. You resist getting caught in likes and dislikes. And there's many ways this is practiced. You're actually practicing something like this when it's particular and feel. Or form and impermanence. So you mean that this decision of the operational self has nothing to do with value, the situation?

[27:59]

Value? The decision of the operational self is without choosing? Oh, it includes the decision to stay alive. It includes the decision to stay alive. That is also like in this life. I don't think it is, exactly. You don't like to stay alive, you just are alive. The fact is you're alive. That's right. And there's just this aliveness. So I'm using the idea of suicide because... to kill the self, suicide actually, just to make a contrast here. Now, there's this incredible aliveness here.

[29:01]

Now, we can speak about, say, depression is a chemical imbalance, so then this incredible aliveness is out of balance chemically. Okay, now to what extent it's a chemical imbalance and what extent it's, you know, interaction of other factors in your life? Or to what extent you can work with depression without chemicals. Yeah, I'm not going to try to discuss that. So I've had a number of practitioners who are extremely depressed for years and got through Their education got through their life and they attributed it to practice primarily.

[30:19]

Okay, so right now I'm just trying to create one little picture. Okay, so... If I notice permanence and impermanence, or form and emptiness. Now, let's not... I don't want to make it too complicated, so let's just keep it permanence and impermanence. Okay. So, if you get in the habit of of perceiving, perceiving, noticing the absence of permanence.

[31:29]

in a habit of noticing the absence of permanence. This is actually in effect noticing neither pleasure nor displeasure, pleasant or unpleasant. Because if I notice you, And you know, you can... Just for you to know a little funny image. As I said, attention is the most valuable thing you have. And part of practice is to really... feel the physicalness of attention. And it is physical. If I say intention, if I say ak-tun, there's a physicality to attention. And if you notice, there's actually a physicality, a gesture to our words.

[32:52]

And that old days until fairly recently, and this is something that Ivan Illich likes to point out, though he's not here, in the Middle Ages it used to be thought that I-beams were going out. And the more you physicalize your seeing, the more it feels like this. Now, of course we don't with a scientific mindset for example the present superstition is you're not supposed to believe in ghosts it's more of a superstition to not believe in ghosts than it is to believe in ghosts

[34:11]

So we tend to, like Nicole brought up, she feels somebody looking at her whom she can't see. In general, science won't accept anything they can't explain. And I know lots of scientists who won't even believe that because it can't be explained. And I know some scientists who don't even believe it because it can't be confirmed. So there's quite a territory that Buddhism sticks and calls the intermediate world. things that you experience or sometimes you experience but they're not predictable and there's no explanation and I remember one example of that Suzuki Roshi was giving a lecture and there was some guy in the back who was quite full of himself

[35:37]

Full of himself. Do you have such an expression? Similar. And he was interrupting and talking about Zen and this and that. And suddenly, I mean, this was my experience. Honest to God, I'm honest to Buddha. I felt Suzuki Roshi's eye beams go over my head. It was like... And this guy went... And he shut up and sat down and didn't say anything more for the entire lecture. It was like a magic power. Now, okay. Now, all I'm saying is that right now is that you physicalize your seeing, hearing, etc. I'm not saying you can shoot I-beams around. But you feel the activity of the eyeball.

[37:05]

And you can feel whether your right brain or left brain is working. You can feel it and emphasize it. Okay. And you can pump up attention like with a bicycle pump. So I'm just trying to use images here to give you a feeling for physicalizing attention. Okay. So this establishment of the operational present, which is what I'm saying, we can consider in a way a kind of self.

[38:17]

And then we can think of... Emotions occur in this field, but they're not in the service of the personal self. So now I'm making a distinction between something I'm calling now the operational self and the personal self. And I say operational self because it's not just completely nothing. Okay, now again, going back, if I look at you, and I look at you, you're two different people. That's clear. But if, as I see the particularity of each of you, I also simultaneously see your impermanence or your stillness.

[39:34]

And your impermanence or your stillness. There's a kind of parallel... Sounds crazy, because we're trying to be non-dual. Parallel perception. Let's call it polar non-dual perception. knowing. So simultaneously when I perceive your difference, I also perceive your sameness, because your sameness is your shared impermanence. So the perception of difference can be simultaneously the perception of sameness. Okay, so this is a widening experience of the world in this neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

[40:45]

Because you keep feeling sameness. And there's a word in Chinese for the self. There's quite a number of words in Chinese for the self. One word for the self is a share of the whole. Ein Wort ist ein Teil des Ganzen. Now that's a very different idea than our idea. Our idea of the body is a brewing vat for beer. Das ist eine ganz andere Sichtweise. Für uns ist der Körper sogar etwas... and a brewing vat has a very clear inside and outside but if a name for the body in Chinese is a share of the whole there's no clear inside and outside that's a different world to kind of feel

[41:59]

There's another word for self, which means the extended body or a sense of peripersonal space. You know that term? Personal space. It's like if you have a monkey with a stick. If you look at the brain, the size of the body is where the stick is. I don't know that example. The monkey who holds a stick in his hand, so to speak, if you measure the brain, you can prove that the monkey itself has extended to the end of the stick, that can also be proven organically in the brain. So it's like you know the shape of your car.

[43:10]

Yeah. There's a word in Chinese for the body which includes knowing the shape of your car is also your body. And there's another word for self which means thus so. Like thus so, just thusness. And thusness is another word for sameness. So thus so, thus so, just as it is. Okay. Now this phrase which I've given you quite often, just now is enough.

[44:14]

Okay, so just now for much of the time is not enough. And you can use such a phrase again, and I think we're wired to do so, direct attention through the phrase. And it's like the world is at the end of this wire. And if you keep saying having the feeling present just now is enough. Of course, just now, again, is often not enough. So, just now is not enough. We're hungry, we have to take a pee, or whatever. But in fact, just now has to be enough, because there's no alternative.

[45:16]

So what mind knows, what mind feels that just now is not enough? And what mind knows that just now is enough. Okay, this is one distinction between consciousness and awareness. Consciousness is always, just now is not enough. Again, I'm simplifying the picture, but creating a feeling, I hope. But just now also is enough and you can feel that. You can use that expression as the kind of wiring to direct attention to the world where just now is enough. And this is also sameness.

[46:36]

Or awareness. Or what we call thusness. Thusness is a word for emptiness. And as I said, one of the Chinese words for self is thus so. Thus so. Now again, we're not entities, this is a process. So every time I look at a person, I say, thus so. Thus so. Thus so. Something happens through doing that. Etwas passiert dadurch, dass ich das tue. Now, I would say that person The thus so person avoided the rock and the rope. It's the just now is not enough person who wants to drive off the cliff. And so the more you individually... or your client, or any one of us, can spend some time every day in awareness and not in consciousness.

[48:04]

So again I suggest, you know, ten minutes a day, or one minute a day, just paying attention, Bringing attention to the breath. And as I say, practice works in homeopathic doses. Small doses. It gives you a taste. And that taste makes a difference. So you spend a minute or ten minutes a day in... stillness. Or you spend a minute or ten minutes a day noticing that everything is mind. Every object to perception, every perception points at the object and points at the mind perceived.

[49:10]

You give yourself one or ten minutes a day with the sentence, everything is spirit. Everything you see is the spirit. So, if you get in the habit of every object of perception, every perception points at mind as well as the object. If you get in the habit of it. you are beginning to form another kind of self in awareness rather than in consciousness. And you may have in your conscious self a lot of anxiety.

[50:12]

Something terrible has happened in Your credit card company is going to destroy you or something. They're going to put a highway through your house. Yeah, and you... Naturally, you're going to be worried and concerned. I don't want to lose my house to the autobahn. But if you can also contemplate this from the point of view of awareness, of thus so, Yeah, I said enough.

[51:17]

It's interesting to me that one of the first things you mentioned in your list of things you sent me was no place to go and nothing to do. In contrast to self-improvement. But maybe the self established in the realm of no place to go and nothing to do is a kind of improvement. So I think that's a good enough point to stop. Is that all right with you? So let's sit for a moment and then stop. Absence of promise.

[53:24]

The not-existence of duration. That's so. So is it. You know, in relationship to this no place to go, nothing to do, practice, which I've spoken about in the past. Let me just mention a famous koan. Yunyan is sweeping. Dawud is brother-in-law. comes by and says, oh, too busy.

[54:43]

Yun Yan stops and says, you should know there is one who is not busy. This is a koan you can practice with. A phrase you can bring attention to. Like just now is enough. You can bring attention to a feeling, awareness, knowing the possibility. In the midst of everything you're doing, there is also one who is not busy.

[55:48]

Thich Nhat Hanh told me once that this koan was very important koan for him when he was first starting to practice. Dogen says you don't have to study for a long time or look for explanations. A single four-line verse is enough for realization. What kind of teaching is this? You don't have to study just a single verse is enough. Was für eine Art von Lehre ist das?

[57:10]

Ein Vierzeiler ist genug. What mind incubates such a verse? Welcher Geist bebrütet so ein Gedicht? The one who is not busy. Der, der nicht beschäftigt ist. I hope you all discover the one who is not busy. You should know it's possible. We also should know, can know, that it's possible for a Buddha to exist. Knowing that makes practice possible. Thank you very much, each of you.

[58:26]

Such a pleasure to be here with you.

[58:30]

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