Sometimes near the end of a seminar I've been accused of downloading. I don't do that anymore. Unless it's out of my control. But sometimes I just add things that are kind of irrelevant. But my experience is that you're all so nice and you're sitting here we might as well add something. While we have the chance. Who knows when surpassing affinities will allow us to be together again. But anyway, there's a few things that are useful to what we've said, I think.

[01:05]

Then there could be a few anecdotes, you know. For example, Annetta just told me that my Polish pronunciation is much better than my German. German. I know, I'm just teasing. Don't be so serious. So she said, I say Annetta, not Annetta. Oh, and that's more Polish. And she asked if I'd been in Krakow. Krakow? How do you say it? Krakow. Oh, Krakow. Okay, so I accepted an invitation to do a kind of new age hippie conference in Krakow one day. It really was rather New Age.

[02:24]

There were a lot of magical American Indians who didn't know much around and so forth like that. And one German shaman engaged a hotel room and had a ceremony in it with a bonfire. And you could see the flames coming out the window. Somehow it was stopped. But it was actually kind of great. I met the whole Wiener Bande there. It led to the Vienna gang. They came for Sufism and ended up with Zenism. And it was sort of like San Francisco in the 60s.

[03:38]

As far as I could tell without the LSD. And people really were walking in the streets and scattering flowers. It was kind of great. But I accepted the invitation. Because it was one of the last things I did with the Frankfurter Ring, I think. Anyway, I accepted the invitation because I'd had this experience with the town of Krakow earlier. And perhaps Martin knows this story.

[04:42]

Anyway, so when I was a kid, my father had built, we slept in the basement, my brother and I. And my father had built two bunk beds, which had a ladder going up to the upper bed. And I had had... This is all a true story. And I'd had a small Buddha. I didn't know what a Buddha was, really. My mother told me a couple of times it was a Buddha. I had a great uncle who used to sail clipper ships to China from Boston. Those are those big ships with square sails that... And he brought back various Chinese things that kind of floated around the family.

[06:01]

And my mother ended up with this little Buddha. So I'll continue the story because I don't think most of you know it. And I know Annetta doesn't. So for some reason For some reason I had the idea that I could find, I couldn't remember the name Buddha, but I could find it on a map. I had some strange idea. This was where I lived. I must have been about 11. Anyway, I looked on this map and there's Paris and then there's Berlin and then there's other Prague and way over here, kind of with nothing around it, was Krakow. And it sounded like the most remote, mysterious place.

[07:17]

And of course I, being an American with not much language ability, called it Krakow. You know this story, do you? Yeah, you must know it. No, you can't remember it. Okay, anyway, so I called this little Buddha Krakow. And believe it or not, you know, I'm very... Atheistic and very anti-religion, as you might have gathered. I wear robes, but you know, it's, you know. Anyway, go ahead. But somehow I put this little Buddha on one of the steps of the ladder going up to the bunk bed. And I got a candle and I put it on the step below the Krakow. And I lit it. And then I got all the kids in the neighborhood to come in and stand in the line.

[08:33]

And we all walked and we said, bow to Krakow. And we made a big circle. We went around several times, bow to Krakow. And I've been doing it ever since. And some people say, oh, this proves you had past lives. I don't know. All I know is... Okay. So, you'll know when I'm really getting elderly when I do a sashin and we bow to Krakow. Yeah. Okay.

[09:57]

So that was the anecdote that we can, you know. I know. I told you I had an anecdote about, you know. One of the reasons that turning word practice is such an effective and powerful practice is especially working with and unlocking world views. As I said in the Hanover seminar, I agree with, I don't know, not everything, but I agree with John Searle, the American Berkeley-based philosopher, that the entire edifice of society

[11:06]

of culture, governance, and so forth, are all language agreements. We have a base of atoms and molecules and things like that. And then, you know, there's sentient life. And then human life. And then we start having language agreements. As I said the other day, do not steal. It's a language agreement that establishes boundaries between people. If you violate these language agreements, you end up in a dark room with small windows.

[12:25]

And you have limited access to the outside. So these language agreements are seriously reinforced. And these language agreements are in their most meta form are worldviews. Und in wirklicher Metaform sind diese Sprachkonventionen Weltsichten. Okay. So, because basically our entire worldview, system, language, governance, our language agreements, weil nun also all unsere Weltsichten und die Regierung und all das eigentlich Sprachkonventionen sind, the most effective way to kind of

[13:28]

unlock these language agreements this linguistic conditioning is with language that unconditions. Okay, so if you say something like just now originating And you repeat it, and you turn it, it begins to turn the lock of the world is more or less permanent. And it turns the lock, which frees you from the idea of a ground of being or oneness or something. Now, as is well known, I mentioned the other day, Wittgenstein, his first proposition in the Tractatus, the world is all that is the case.

[14:44]

Yeah, I like this statement. Why not? Yeah, it's a good logical place to begin. But it's certainly a generalization about world. Yeah, it's a generalization about all. And it's only an idea. All can't be experienced. I think Kant and other people pointed out that the totality, whatever it is, can't be experienced. We can have an experience of all-at-onceness. And I think an experience of all the onceness follows from developing the field of mind. And there are no boundaries to the experience of all-at-onceness. However, it's still within the realm of your experience.

[16:10]

And one can have an experience of oneness. And it's so convincing and intuitive that many people extrapolate it to the world. And then other people extrapolate the experience of oneness to the world. And say it's all one. Which is a comforting idea. And it relates to what you said earlier. So I'm going through this again because of what you said. And I would agree that on this experience of oneness which we project onto everything,

[17:37]

It's very hard to relate to oneness. So it's much easier to project an anthropomorphic figure on it. like deities or a deity, and then we function in relationship to the deity, which I think is a projection from the experience of oneness. And it's so deeply needed. It's so thoroughly and psychologically and emotionally useful that it's been the glue of most cultures all over the world.

[18:51]

But in the end, again, it's a language agreement. rooted in experience, though. Okay, now, although the experience of relatedness, which you can have doing sports with people, it's wonderful, this experience of relatedness. And the experience of relatedness that we have sometimes, like after 9-11 in New York, many people don't remember the buildings and the dust. They remember the experience of relatedness that New Yorkers had. And one can, for example, also have such an experience of the relationship as after these terror attacks in the USA.

[19:59]

Not so many people remember the actual crash, but how then afterwards all people felt connected and related to each other. I think usually the more they can experience relatedness in a positive way with the world and with others, the more they can experience relatedness. the more they themselves will feel integrated. And that's, you know, let's not go into it further than that.

[21:01]

It's just apparent. Okay. Now, If we view the world as static, as an entity, then we can imagine there's something called the total, the totality of everything. But if the world is an activity, if the universe, the cosmos, is an activity, you don't have all. You always have all plus one. Du hast immer alle plus eins.

[22:02]

I mean, emergence means it's always creating something new. Auftauchen bedeutet, es entsteht immer etwas Neues. If interdependence is not parts adding up to a totality, wenn gegenseitige Abhängigkeit nicht bedeutet, dass es Teile sind, die sich zu einem Totalen addieren, then whatever all things are, they're constantly, the boundaries constantly expanding, changing, differing, and so forth. So if we want to give a name to then this totality, which is not a totality because it's always increasing, Then we can call it, the best words I can find in English are something, two words, divergence and convergence.

[23:18]

So the fundamental vision and view of everything in Buddhism, that Buddhism has, can most... usefully, from a practice point of view, be described as a pulse of convergence and divergence. So we can have the turning word just now originating. And at each moment, everything is absolutely new and unique. Maybe only slightly, but still new and unique.

[24:32]

So all plus one or plus many is not oneness. Now what is the biggest word for Buddha in Buddhism? Which is also happens to be a word meaning the cosmos. It's Tathagatagarbha. Which is four words. Coming, going, womb, embryo. Embryo. Yeah. So the world is coming and going and simultaneously embryo and womb.

[25:43]

Okay, now Norbert and Angela brought up the idea of constellations earlier. And I always find constellations have microcosms of everything. But they seem to me to have a macrocosmic kind of presence as well. So you're doing a constellation. So here's several people occupying the something or other of someone else. And then you have several of these people kind of wandering around with a little assistance trying to find their location.

[26:52]

Like Castaneda trying to find out where to sit on the porch. So finally, you know, they feel comfortable in this place. But every little movement shifts the consolation. Every impression that is verbalized affects the consolation. So sometimes I feel the practice of just now arriving. At every step I'm arriving in a constellation. So we're constantly constellating whatever we're doing. Yeah, what's the line in the koan?

[27:58]

Borrowing temporarily. He enters the gate and gives birth on the spot. That's close enough anyway. That's close enough anyway. So borrowing temporarily At each moment, certain ingredients I borrow. They're actually a gate. And through it, you give birth on the spot. And then you release it. This is from, what, 1,000, 1,500 years ago, this statement, but it describes a constellation. Falling temporarily. Entering the gate. giving birth on the spot.

[29:18]

This is also a version of just now originating. Okay, so the last riff I'd like to go through avoiding downloading is to put the present, as I did in Hanover, under the microscope. And I throw it out, not as a gauntlet. Do you know that expression? But just... Yeah, why shouldn't it be part of our thinking? You can wonder about it as I'm wondering about it. But what is the main object of attention in Buddhism?

[30:24]

Breath is one of the threads. as is all kinds of all turning words and so forth but the main object of attention is the present itself but what is the present? we have an experience of the present but it has no actual duration Now it's past, now it's future. How can the present be an object of attention if it has no duration? Well, it has a sensorial duration. It has the durative present. We create and we can affect, expand, contract this durative presence.

[31:42]

It's not only the mind because you're borrowing the ingredients. But you're borrowing the ingredients in a way that gives you the sensation of a durative present. So that's one aspect of the present. Another is the fact that we know the present primarily through consciousness. And as most of you know, the job of consciousness is to make the world predictable. And so consciousness gives us a sense, reinforces the sense of duration by noticing the aspects of it which are predictable.

[32:46]

consciousness reinforces the sense of the durative present by selectively noticing the aspects that are predictable. And third, we create Yeah, we establish object permanence. Now, objects are not permanent. Even mountains are not permanent. But we establish them as relatively permanent in relationship to ourself. And then we treat them as if they were permanent. And we create then the subject-object distinction.

[34:00]

So we create our sense of ourselves as a subject within an objective world. and we create, we create a feeling that we are the subject in a world of objects. And this sense of object permanence is one of the ways we also establish a sense of continuity. Okay, and the fourth and last aspect of this particular analysis of the present

[35:06]

Und der vierte und letzte Aspekt dieser Art von Analyse der Gegenwart ist das, was Jeannette heute Morgen erwähnt hat, ist diese implizierte Unified relatedness. Vereinigte Beziehung? Bezogenheit. Na gut. Whatever. Vereinigt, unified. Unified is difficult to translate. But maybe if you go on I can. get it clearer in German. I always am amazed when somebody says, it's hard to translate unified. And I start thinking, nothing is unified in Germany.

[36:10]

Well, maybe not. Yeah, it did take a lot of years. There were all these little principalities and they finally unified. And then you had a Kaiser. Okay, in that case it's for Einig, but I'm not sure in this other case. She's a PhD philologist. She makes problems where there aren't any. No, that's it. Okay. I'm making some of the problems, I have to admit. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. We are both in it then. Yeah, absolutely. So unified relatedness. in fact there is interdependence there is interemergence so we are in the midst of relatedness and we feel united we feel healed, cured, helped recognized by this relatedness.

[37:25]

And many Zen practices are meant, including the practice of non-self, are meant to define ourselves through relatedness so that we more deeply experience this connectedness or relatedness. I didn't get the last part. So we can feel more deeply this connectedness. Now, also these four aspects of self, four aspects of the present, also parallel the ways we define self and experience self.

[38:28]

Because we experience the present as durative, we also tend to experience the self as also durative. And it is to some extent. And as consciousness' job is to make the world predictable, the medium of consciousness, excuse me, the medium of self, excuse me, The medium of consciousness is where the self is formed. So the self is formed from the medium of consciousness, which job is to make the world predictable and self.

[39:34]

And object permanence makes us clear that we're a subject. Except that we don't think we're subject to objects, we think objects are subject to us. Say that again, please. I'm just using a kind of pun. We don't think we're subjects of objects like the king and the subject. We don't think we're subjects of objects. We tend to think objects are subject to us. But objects have the last laugh. At my age, I know this.

[40:52]

This object is beginning to, you know... Anyway... And the last aspect of the definition, microscopic definition of the present, Und der letzte Aspekt dieser mikroskopischen Definition der Gegenwart ist dieses Gefühl einer vereinten Bezogenheit, das dem Selbst das Gefühl von Transzendenz gibt. Das ist genug für heute. What was that? Horns? Smoke is coming out. Smoke is coming out. Rumi has a poem where he says, You complain that you've been burned by love?

[42:05]

Do you know anyone, he asks, who isn't a little smoky? Charred by love. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me? No. Okay. Me? No. Me? No.

[42:40]

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