threatened with death or situations of dying. And experiencing aliveness with others is when you completely give consent to the place, the role you have in the group. And part of it is feeling certain resonance with at least one person in the group.

[01:12]

Yes. And to the third question, at first there came things like if you would be a magician, not things you could really give, but if it would be possible. and then this discussion developed whether it's possible to give something to somebody and whether the other person can take it or whether and whether you three were in the same group yeah yeah okay

[02:39]

That's good. It somehow reminded me of, we asked my little daughter Sally, who's now 40, when she was four, she wrote a note. How did she write a note when she was four? When we first got to Japan, She must have been six. But we left Japan when she was seven, so I don't know. Anyway, so probably six. She wrote a note to Santa Claus and said, please, dear Santa, please give me a wishing wand. Yeah, like, you know, you can get what you want. And a machine that tells me what I don't need. Right. If you have such a machine, you don't need a wishing wand.

[04:04]

So something else? And we found a common ground in saying that we wouldn't like to give something, but we would like to offer something. And then things came up like offering two hands. Or a glance. Or a gesture which says, I'm here, you're here. What society seems to have decided is to say hello or good morning or how are you.

[05:10]

What society seems to have decided is to say something. It's a nice day. Buddhism has decided to, the main things are a bow or a smile. And you see it in Thailand, in places where they really emphasize the smile. Okay, someone else? That's three. That was it, huh? Oh, okay. But is there anything else anybody would like to say or bring up for our discussion?

[06:21]

She wants to add that there is ecstasy but also instasy. Oh. Very good. Which can be blissful or something. How would you define instacy? Like experiencing the meaning of... No, ecstasy would be in English, out of your state, out of... She means experiencing of fullness and seeing. Okay. Meaning. Sense. Okay. Okay.

[07:57]

Okay. Yes? Yes. We looked at the questions and we saw that it's a succession which leads from the I to the you. And the first one is when you yourself felt most alive, it seemed to happen, just happen. And then comes intention.

[09:07]

Like when the question is to give something to somebody, there's intention put into the picture. And a second point was also that the people who had the shadows at the beginning had cut out the sides where it was possible to see joy. And that we had the feeling that the world was not accessible. And we also noticed that the examples that came up first were like joy and competence, the positive side, and there were no shadow examples. And we excluded like anger or aggression or something like that.

[10:10]

We talked about how important it is to have a body and to be able to live these energies or forces, but also to be able to live them out and to feel good about it. And in addition to that, we then talked about how important it is to have like a frame where you can also experience that kind of things and let them be alive. What do you mean by a frame? A structure. Like in the martial arts. Okay. Okay. Or like in a discourse where also you have the feeling of a fight or something, or in a game. Yeah, okay. Well, I noticed for me that the feeling of being alive with myself or with others is connected to a certain kind of self that is not present.

[11:49]

And it has a liquid kind of quality, a little bit like swimming in the world somehow. Es hat so eine flüssige Qualität, so wie wenn man in der Welt schwimmen würde. And I'm fascinated how different I can experience myself. Differently, yeah. differently. And I'm fascinated by how different I can experience myself. Okay. Anyone else? I'm surprised no one mentioned or maybe did mention insights or some turning point where you feel clarity in your life and you make a decision or something like that. Yes.

[13:01]

What about being in love? Doesn't that make you feel alive? At least for a brief period of time. Or making love. Or making aliveness. Yeah, I think for me it would be, there's lots of times when one extreme is like two weeks fighting a forest fire without sleeping. The other end would be just feeling at ease. And the other end would be just feeling at ease. Mm-hmm.

[14:17]

Well, I think we've had a long enough day and I would, let's sit for a little bit and then we can start. I think I'm looking for words to express what I notice. But I'm actually, I would say, looking for the, I'm looking for the distinctions that allow us to notice something. And sometimes in looking for the distinctions, I actually have to Because I'm looking for the distinction, I think I don't get stuck in words.

[15:59]

Because the distinction is clearer to me than the words. So that's fine for me, but if I'm talking with you, I have to find some words that point to the distinction. And we, you know, we, distinctions, once they're made, become almost a kind of vow. I've told the story a number of times of Sophia liking to build towers. And I think maybe she's a tomboy. A tomboy is a girl who acts like a boy. A sissy is a boy that acts like a girl. Anyway, so, because at least I've read, I don't know if it's just one of these ideas someone has, that boys build towers and knock them down and girls make spaces and protect them.

[17:19]

It sounds too obvious to me. Anyway, she loves to build towers with me and maybe she thinks she's satisfying my boy side. But she knocks them down faster and I can build them almost. So she hands me a wooden animal, a sheep, to put on top of a rhinoceros, a hippopotamus, in three blocks. You know all these words, that's good. Well, I built towers too. But you built them in German.

[18:21]

So similar. Yeah, similar. So she hands me the sheep and I say, that's a lamb. And she said, that's not a lamp. I said, it's a lamp. It's English, it's a lamp. No, she said, not a lamp. And she points over to a goose and she says, that's a lamp. I said, no, that's not a lamp, that's a goose. And then I look again and the goose is a nightlight, it's a lamp. Yeah, so I say, oh, suddenly it dawns on me. And I say, yes, you're right, that's a lamp, and this is a lamp with a silent B. And once she's got it clear, she feels fine.

[19:24]

She says, you know, she says, Papa, lamb. She hands me the sheep. Okay. It's very important for her that the distinctions are precise. So we make distinctions to point something out. We have to be careful with the distinctions that we don't give them too much entity meaning. We make just simple sasana instructions. Don't invite your thoughts to tea. This actually points to the fourth skandha.

[20:24]

when thoughts are just floating up and you cannot invite them to tea. And it allows within the fourth skanda the shift to the field of mind. Because if you don't invite the thoughts to tea, you can sort of notice the room they're walking around in. And you're also implicitly making the basic Zen distinction that occurs in all the koans of guest and host. The thoughts are guests and somehow the room or the field of mind is the host. And guest and host are also ways of saying relative and absolute form and emptiness.

[21:51]

So in a simple instruction, like don't invite your fuss to tea, you're actually right in the middle of Buddhism, right straight through from the beginning to end. And you're in the middle of what Zen and characteristic Dzogchen teaching, which is not to suppress thoughts, but to look past them or suspend them. Another basic instruction is don't scratch. And that's really after a while it becomes unimportant, but in the beginning it can be pretty important.

[22:58]

And what do you do when you have an ant in one ear and a mosquito in the other? You can use both hands. Convenient. This is an enlightened person right there. No hands. I could come up behind you and use both hands. But it is annoying to have a fly in your nose or something like that when you're trying to sit. But often these itches are actually acupuncture points. You scratch them one place and they appear another place. And you think it's a very fast ant. But Don't move is to, I mean, don't scratch is to still the body-mind, because the body-mind itself tends toward distraction and need excitement, just like the mental mind, the conscious mind does.

[24:21]

und nicht kratzen das richtet sich darauf auf die Stille dieses Körpergeistes denn der Körpergeist selbst ist unruhig body mind is it can be distracted too er kann auch abgelenkt werden genauso wie der like your consciousness wie das Bewusstsein abgelenkt werden and don't look around und schau nicht herum is the way the body initiates consciousness. So don't look around means to really not, instead of what's going on over there, what's going on over there. And it's... Don't look around also means to keep your eyelids in a position, either slightly open or lightly closed.

[25:24]

So if when you're meditating you tend to look around, then you're really not meditating, you're just sitting there. Because meditation is a similar kind of shift, but even a bigger shift. similar kind of shift from waking to sleeping. There's a bump you go over into meditation. And you're physically in a different place, just like you can tell when somebody's faking sleeping.

[26:30]

You can walk in a room and your kid is pretending to sleep. Yeah, you know it's pretending to sleep. Because you can feel the presence of consciousness, of voluntary, there's not an involuntary feeling in the breathing. And when I come in a room like this, I can feel a couple areas of consciousness and several areas of non-consciousness. So if the distinctions are well tuned, And you just follow them, you know. They are usually several levels of teaching.

[27:31]

So... Now yesterday we... spoke about restorative practice and transformative practice. Yeah, and I chose those words because they're similar and they actually do Make clear two different ways of practicing. And maybe I think that... Probably most of us are doing restorative practice.

[28:34]

Perhaps we want to do transformative practice. But transformative practice is really based on restorative practice. Or they, of course, work together. And this process of becoming fairly familiar with yourself is restorative practice. But when we spoke about putting all your eggs in one basket, the existential demands of the decision to practice That's transformative practice. Okay. So I'm asking myself the question for today. Why does Buddhism make a distinction of non-self?

[29:59]

I think it's my language and my distinction, but it's distinction that's fundamental in Buddhist practice. But here I'm trying to work with what English offers me. Yeah, I would guess that although within the Dharma Sangha the Buddhist language is English, many times I've been told that the German words are, for Germans, already leased out to other views, rented by various cultural... And English words seem easier. But I would guess if Christina, for instance, starts teaching Buddhism in German, she would eventually or pretty quickly begin to find German words which weren't a translation of my words.

[31:22]

Okay. So, we have non-self. Now, what really do I mean by non-self? What do I mean by non-self? I mean actually something like non-self-referential self. So if you're really talking about two kinds of self, I think non-self is a self. Otherwise I'd say no self. Or the absence of self. The absence of self or no self is something else than what we're talking about. Okay, so we have then, if we try to

[32:24]

be clear, we'd have to say self-referential self and non-self-referential self. Maybe we could call ego exclusively self-referential self. The ego we could define as only self-referential or something like that. Okay. Now, these are clumsy terms, non-self-referential self and so forth. Sounds like Heidegger and so forth. But we're talking about something that English doesn't have distinctions, doesn't have words for.

[33:51]

If it had words for it, we'd be able to make the distinctions and we wouldn't even think they were complicated terms. Yeah, I mean, I was struck by the rapport, to have rapport. It's difficult rapport. I feel a rapport with you. That's not difficult at all. Oh. You must feel rapport down there, all of you. But rapport means port is like seaport or porter, something that's carried. And rapport means again, so it's to carry together or to carry again.

[34:55]

But refer means to carry again too, re-ferry, ferry is to carry. But we have these two words, to refer and to rapport. You can see that they're similar, but we don't see their similarity anymore. So there's complex ideas and simple words, but you just use them, you don't. So we're at the stage, unless we use Sanskrit terms or something like that, which don't have any coinage in our culture. We understand what I mean by coinage. You can't spin the word. It just sits there. It has no fuzziness. Mm-hmm. Okay, so if we're going to use English words and German words, we have to make these... At this stage, we have to kind of like try to find a group of words that make the distinction.

[36:27]

Okay. So let's just say we have two selves then that I'm speaking about. One called non, for short, non-self. Which means it functions as a self, but it's not self-referencing. And self, which by self I mean self-referential self. What happens, you make your personal history and so forth. And refers to your future and so forth. It's time sequenced. Yeah. Now, why does Buddhism want to imagine non-self?

[37:51]

To answer that question, I think we have to look at what is the territory of self. Because if we also look at self as a function, Then we have to look at self as, in what territory does it function? Okay. Now, you all know that I, most of you do, that I, it was on the flip chart from this last seminar, but somebody removed it or changed the flip chart. But most of you are familiar with my emphasizing self as a function and not as an entity. And the main function of self is to create separation, connectedness, and continuity.

[39:07]

And once you make that distinction, those distinctions, you can also practice in relationship to those distinctions. You can notice when you establish separation, when you see somebody or see something. Du kannst bemerken, wann du diese Funktion der Getrenntheit erlebst, wenn du jemanden oder etwas siehst. And I ask you to work with the phrase already separated and already connected. Und ich habe euch gebeten, mit den Sätzen zu üben, bereits getrennt. So you can ask yourself, when you first meet someone, do you feel already separated? Before anything happens, do you feel separated? You have to get to know this person.

[40:09]

Or do you feel already connected? Well, Most of the time, most of us feel separated when we meet somebody, first meet somebody. But there's some cases where we don't. Yeah. Like when you, often we feel connected with babies. Or as I say, if you're lost in the woods out here for five hours and it's hailing in there and summer outside and you run into, suddenly see a person, you feel already connected. So what's the difference when you feel separated? What mind is connecting and what mind is separating?

[41:11]

What do you see when the person in the forest, you happen after five hours of seeing no one, somebody appears? What do you feel? What aspects of that person do you connect with? These are simple things. I mean, we all have these experiences. The bodhisattva is one, though, who, with everyone he or she meets, feels connected. So what part of the person or what way do they feel connected? It's not just that they're super nice guys. That would be an effort to be a super nice guy all the time.

[42:28]

No, they just function. A bodhisattva functions differently. And that's transformative practice. But there are transformations that are accessible to us. They're emphases we can emphasize. They're like the taste of sweetness or bliss on a sound at night. and to realize later that that's the surfacing of the Sambhogakaya mind. But without teaching or practice, you wouldn't either notice that surfacing in a way that was transformative,

[43:30]

was transformative. And without practice, there wouldn't be the medium of transformation. Okay. And restorative practice establishes the medium of transformation. To restore you to the fullness of your life. To your aliveness. To an almost continual feeling of aliveness. Sometimes we feel most alive when we come home, back in familiar circumstances.

[44:46]

It's nice to be home. We're actually alive. Come home. To come home. It's just a nice thing to come home. Mm-hmm. There's a poem by Paul Goodman, which is the sociologist Paul Goodman. He gets into a taxi coming from the airport. And he sees the lordly Hudson, the Hudson River, which is a huge river. The Lordly Hudson hardly flowing under its green-grown cliffs.

[45:46]

And he cried to the taxi driver, and the taxi driver didn't know what he meant. Home, home, he said to the taxi driver. But that's a great line, don't you think? The lordly Hudson Hartley flowing under its green-grown cliffs. Yeah. If you don't know, it's a big river like the Rhine or something with big dark cliffs on the New Jersey side. And it moves very slowly toward the Atlantic. Yeah. Or sometimes I've taken a plane, you know, in the middle of winter to Los Angeles.

[46:50]

And you get out and it's like spring. I'm very happy not to be home. It's different and fresh feeling and, oh my God, the possibilities.

[46:59]

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