You know, I would like your help or suggestions. In what proportion of what I speak about? Could be practice related to your practice. Buddhist practice, Zen meditation practice. And what proportion ought to be, as much as I can, related to your practice as a psychologist or a therapist

[01:02]

Of course I know not all of you are your psychotherapeutic practices constellation or systemic psychology, psychotherapy. But as you know, in my mind I try to imagine a relationship, and I've been imagining this relationship for some decades. But I really feel fairly ignorant. aber mir kommt es immer noch so vor als ob ich nicht viel weiß. I appreciated Norbert's comment yesterday. What I was saying was too complicated.

[02:13]

And I can sort of understand it. But from my point of view, I don't think it's complicated. I think it's more a matter of unfamiliarity. Perhaps not in your case, as you've been practicing a long time. But in the context of one's work or ordinary circumstances, many elements of practice are unfamiliar to us.

[03:14]

But in the context of one's work or ordinary life, things we know through practice, we don't necessarily articulate them in ways or identify them in ways that we can bring them so easily into our work or ordinary life. And I also feel it's perhaps not necessarily too complicated. Because I feel much of what I'm talking about is

[04:18]

is actually our experience, again, but it's not an experience we initially, we do it, but we don't actually notice that we do it. Because I think that what I'm talking about is our experience, but we don't necessarily notice it. No, I have some feeling about some things I'd like to see if we can talk about. But first let me say, does anybody want to bring something up about yesterday or now or whatever? Yes. Yesterday you asked if we wanted to do a constellation that maybe has to do with our Buddhist topic.

[05:29]

In what has come up so far I've noticed that this area or territory of imagination is something that's relevant both in practice or that we use both in practice and therapy. And I want to give two examples, please. I am practicing Aikido and I went to do some practice. I'm not going to argue with you. And the Aikido teacher said when we did a particular kind of practice which is doing certain steps

[06:51]

And the teacher said we should move as if an attacker would be right in front of us so that we move with a certain kind of wakefulness. Yeah. And I remember how you spoke about the bodhisattva ideal in several ways. Yeah, and I've noticed that that's been always inspiring for me to develop and now I want to bring up this idea or example about a constellation that we are imagining in the constellation a row a sequence, a row of ancestors way back to the

[08:08]

Ancient ancestors. I don't know if you've seen that in a constellation, but most of us sitting here probably have witnessed that in a constellation. Your actual genetic ancestors. No, the imagined ancestors. But you're imagining the real ancestors, are you? Oh, okay. So they're the ones I know. And then there are ones I wouldn't know and those are clearly just imagined. But it can be anybody who has influenced you deeply or might have influenced you. It's genetic. I think it's a world of imagination where you make a connection.

[09:31]

with your ancestors as resources of power. So here's my suggestion that we could constellate the Buddha ancestors from you back to Buddha. There's 90. Supposedly. It's kind of shaky back a thousand years. You want to do a constellation of my ancestors? So I'm not imagining your genetic ancestry.

[10:55]

I'm imagining the... Dharma ancestry. Dharma ancestry. I'm thinking of this because we're also reciting those names. So that's just some kind of suggestion. I'm okay? Great. All right. Somebody else want to say something? So in connection with the constellation work I'm trying to get a hold of or imagine, grasp this element of chaos that you presented yesterday. Is this new or already included?

[12:00]

And I've And I've been wondering if this is something new to me or something that's already part of my Constellation work. . That's too much. You have to break it up at some point, otherwise I'm kidding.

[13:01]

This initial chaos, when the constellation makes some progress, when the constellation makes some progress, this initial chaos, from this initial chaos, some order emerges, right? Some order emerges from this initial chaos. Zen Geist. And so in comparison to what I know of Zen or comparison to the Zen mind that I think I know, then images of solutions or order that emerges from the constellation

[14:11]

Those are satisfying on the one hand and on the other hand they're just one section of what's possible. And so I'm thinking I want to in my imagination place all the infinite number of possible other solutions next to this one solution that emerges.

[15:33]

Okay. You look at me expectantly. So, you know, I'm kind of ignorant, so you have to... I don't know how much time we should take, but how do you establish chaos at the beginning of the constellation? Okay. Through non-expectation or not having expectations. Yeah, okay. For concentration, our focus just on the body and what's going on there.

[16:56]

Okay. And then there's somehow out of that proceeds some sort of constellation that feels like one of the possibilities. But you don't want to exclude the other possibilities that could have emerged. She said no, but there's a gestalt emerging or the... the sense of a story. And at the end, things are well ordered.

[18:06]

And there's... A thought that appears in myself, it's like, it can't be that way. It can't be just that way. It can't be that order. Do you want to stick some more chaos in? Yeah. Well, I think that's, I don't know if I really understand you, but that's a legitimate suspicion. Mm-hmm. Okay, someone else want to say something?

[19:13]

Yes. Something simple and practical. Yeah, it seems like this discursive thinking This discursive thinking the way we talk about seems to be something we shouldn't strive for. It's kind of negative. But when I think through what this discursive thinking has, the fruit of this discursive thinking, what it means in relationship to who I am, the profession I developed, the education I received, then it seems that it is an important part of being in this world.

[20:33]

And then the other hand, the discursive thinking is always, tends to always do its own thing, you know, go around in loops. So then for me it seems entering into this appearance only mind is an important element because from this Yeah, because from this level of the mind, clearer decisions can emerge. So insights from this mind seem to need discursive thinking in order for those insights to filter back into this life.

[21:48]

How often do you think through things that have already been decided and always drag things that you already know, that somehow you somehow get used to it So in a practical sense, how often do you think through decisions that are already made and you're thinking them through again and again in some kind of loop, and then once you've done that for long enough, then it's enough and it's done with. So my question, also as you told yesterday about these performances, eight months long, the individual person is almost the same, almost always turning again and again. When you told us about your process of six to eight months working with those imagined, you know, those presences in the space, that seems to be, you know, similar to that, going over it again and again in that way.

[23:24]

So my question is, how do you find the balance between... So the question I have is how to find a balance between this mind of appearance only and discursive thinking. First of all, do you consider that a simple practical question? Thanks a lot. I don't want to hear one of your complicated questions. We have to have a whole seminar just on our question. Well, since the word discursive has a spectrum of meanings, Maybe I should say self-referential discursive thinking, well looped.

[24:37]

Over looped. Yeah. or non-productive self-discursive thinking. And also speaking about the difference between, I mean, as I've very often said, why it's difficult to keep, have attention, rest in the breath? It's because we establish the continuity from moment to moment of the self in thinking.

[25:57]

And when you find you can shift the continuity of your sense of continuity to the body, to the breath, body and phenomena, You immediately find you don't do anywhere near as much discursive thinking. Your attention tends to rest in your immediacy, your immediate situation, and not in your thinking. Now, in relationship to what I described as this sense of

[27:01]

presence of various people in my bodily space. It's not the same as thinking something over. It's just over some months I kept feeling the presence and I felt what was happening. I didn't think what was happening. Yeah, and here's a kind of overlap of not maybe such a big overlap between thinking in psychotherapeutic or psychological terms and in dharmic terms. Is that The mind of appearance is not the only mind you can establish.

[28:31]

But it's a very basic kind of mind. You just let things appear. Thinking also appears. But it appears more like intuition. So your thinking is more a flow of intuitions than discursive thinking. It's like a flow of recognitions you don't have to think about. But I really appreciate this kind of question because It's a practical matter, these things, really, in the end.

[29:43]

It's not philosophy. It's a practical matter. How do you do this? And what do you call this? And how do you notice this? And so forth. And I appreciated the other day you bringing up the two truths. And yeah, I've given it some thought in the context of our seminar. But really, it's... I'm here, so I'm thinking in the context of the seminar. But it's really so much, the usefulness of the two truths is so much that I don't think it has much

[30:50]

It has personal psychological uses, but I don't think it has therapeutic uses. As a practice. But I can speak... But I can speak about one aspect of it in relationship to what Krista Rivula said. We can think of the two truths as the predictable and the chaotic. The conventional world which by the way is true also because you couldn't even imagine the non-conventional world unless you had the conventional world with its language, thought, and processes to think through the possibility of the non-conventional world and have a contrast to imagine a non-conventional world.

[32:18]

The conventional truth is also true because we can only imagine the non-conventional truth and think about it So we can think of the conventional world as the world in which we want to, since we're functioning through consciousness, want to and have to find the world relatively predictable. And we can speak about the fundamental or ultimate Truth.

[33:22]

As the relatively chaotic. Because it's unpredictable. And unpredictability is the edge of chaos. And the best... Emblematic example of that I can find is the thaw freeze point of water. It's in the midst of freezing and it's in the midst of melting. In evolutionary theory, that's the point at which creativity can occur.

[34:32]

You have the idea of a fitness landscape. If the fitness landscape is too unfit, Whatever happens stops or dies. If it's too fit, then nothing changes. There's no challenge. So we could call the second, the fundamental truth... a challenging fitness landscape.

[35:33]

This has never been said before in Buddhism, but most of Buddhism is pre-Darwin. So there's always the challenge if you feel everything is unique and appearing you don't know quite what's going to happen it requires a certain alertness like you said your martial arts teacher told you. Because you don't know what's going to happen. We say walk as if the floor might not be there.

[36:37]

That may sound too complicated to walk, but actually you get used to it after a while and you find yourself Your foot seeks the floor and the floor seeks your foot. I'm sorry. I see these things as practice, right? Right now I'm imagining a therapist coming into the room and the client says, why are you walking like a panther? I have two things.

[37:45]

So this is the first thing is something that came up when you spoke about the challenge or this edge. In Budapest, we also talked about this concept of flow. So in the concept of flow, you enter the flow through, I guess I can say, meeting a perfect challenge. So that your skills are meeting the challenges perfectly and you're always at the edge of...

[38:47]

This is interesting to me because this seems to be also a skill to arrange the environment in such a way that the skills are are fitting into the challenge. And when that happens, it's almost like you're making yourself enter into You're creating the necessity to enter into awareness.

[40:12]

But the other thing is a question I have in relationship to what Christo said. Which Christo? Christo. Okay. So in this bodily space, both in practice and psychotherapy, I think, I think this holding of this space seems to have an integrating force without interfering but giving attention that things come together in a way that solutions appear. That some higher level of integration can be reached that way.

[41:21]

And I'm interested in what does the integrating. God. God. That also has a lot to do with trust. I don't have to understand it in order to trust it because the bodily feeling already is clear enough. But I find it interesting to ask what is that and how do I notice it? Okay. Frank brought up the same point yesterday about trust, that it requires trust to be in a situation like this.

[42:39]

You know, I still don't have a real grasp of what the technical term flow means, but I appreciate the way you've described it. I have a better understanding. Sukhiroshi said a mind that's something like the only mind that means anything is a mind that's in flow. And there's a famous question in one of the koans. Among the three bodies of Buddha. Now that in itself is a rather complex idea which we won't discuss.

[43:46]

Let's just concentrate on the latter part of the statement. Which one does not fall into any category? And Dungsan responds, I'm always close to this. So how do you find yourself in a world without categories, where you don't establish categories? It sounded a little bit, from the way you described it at least, that the challenge wasn't much of a challenge if you can always meet it. I'd rather you said something like, I'm sometimes close to meeting the challenge.

[44:46]

I'm sure that's what you meant. Now, I started rubbing my watch on my head to see if my chakra would give me something to say. It only tells me the time. Ulrike says, I always do it, but I don't think I've ever done it before. I've done this, but I don't... But I don't know what I do. People say I talk with my hands and I hardly notice it. Giorgio's mother, who's 88 or so, was here during part of the last seminar. And she said to Giorgio, I couldn't understand a word, but what is he doing with his hands?

[46:13]

Are they neutrous? Keep them behind. Handcuffs. You know, we do a... Dr. Strangelove. You don't have to translate this. I'm close to sort of trying to imagine how I as a practitioner would conceive of constellation work. With the ingredients, resources that I have to imagine.

[47:15]

And Part of the sense of... I'll come back to that. We have a ceremony we do called the Segaki ceremony. I've never done it in Crestone. But I used to do it once a year. And in the Segaki ceremony, you try to create a space in which people can call forth in themselves and sometimes call out or mention uninterrupted lives

[48:34]

In other words, when someone dies, it's an interruption of their living. When a child dies or a young man or woman dies, we feel this interrupted life. And the feeling in the ceremony is these interrupted lives are still somehow trying to proceed. So the sangha, the participants in the ceremony, would beforehand give me the names of everyone they'd like mentioned in the ceremony. So it's interesting you have, you know, I don't know, as many people as here or more or less.

[50:02]

And it's amazing how many people, I mean among a group of people this number, how many people you know have died. And sometimes I have a list of 30 or 40 names or something. And you start out, you know, you have to come in and you have to come in in a certain way. There are certain robes you wear usually, particular robes. And you come in and there's sort of They're strange noises. Not the usual noises. Sorry. So you do things in a non-ordinary way. And it puts in a little bit of chaos.

[51:06]

And so I would call out each name. And the concealed part of the ceremony is it calls forth in you your own interrupted lives. Okay, so that's the hidden agenda of the ceremony. And it's a little bit like, if we imagine our life as a number of movies, There's movies in our life that somehow we lived part of, but we didn't see the end of. It ended somewhere else or in another person.

[52:36]

Or there's movies we started, that's almost we were making the movie, but it got interrupted and it never got finished. Or we made the film and then it was interrupted and never finished. And in our psychic space we're always trying to finish that movie or discover how that movie ended. The ceremony is explicitly about other people. Connected with you. But it's implicitly about as well or in a hidden way about your own unfinished movies. And it's a kind of scary ceremony.

[53:43]

All of these things are called up, you know. And they're characterized as hungry ghosts. And a hungry ghost is a being which is hungry for satisfaction of some sort. But its throat is only the size of a needle. So it can't swallow anything. Swallowing is kind of howling. And you feel in the room a kind of howling. But that's a kind of constellation. So let's have the consolation of a break.

[55:05]

Calm down. Thank you very much.

[55:08]

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