Who's going to be first? Who's going to be second? You can fight if you want. Who's first? No. Okay, go ahead. I shouldn't say too much about the Eightfold Path. In general. In general. I should reduce my speaking, my talking. Really?

[01:03]

You haven't talked much yet. You can't reduce zeros. In everyday life, for right speech and right posture, it's seldom that I get at that. I should probably leave most of what I'm saying away and be in my breath and to be connected and a posture. And in general I have a feeling that too much is talk, myself but others probably too.

[02:09]

Well, you could stay home. We're a gathering of future Buddhas, not present Buddhas. So now you have to be the kind of Buddha you are. Which doesn't look too bad to me. Krista? This is not a hot question. It has been bothering me since yesterday. Since yesterday, what you were talking about, moving from Theravada Buddhism to Mahayana Buddhism to Zen.

[03:15]

The Anagarika Govinda writes about the four noble truths. And Govinda writes about the four noble truths. And now it occurs to me that he describes this a bit as a development from the first to the second, and because then you recognize the cause, and from that ultimately results the Eightfold Path. And it seems to me that here it describes a sort of development. You see the causes and then you sort of proceed to the actual path. The first part. The first segment. Yes, the first point, yes. He calls right view. Samadati. Samadati, perfect view. Yes, and... For him, because of the deep insight into suffering, he got the perfect you.

[04:57]

The Buddha never wanted his disciples to just follow rules, and therefore he put it in the first place. So that one should, out of recognition of suffering, just proceed in that path. And my question is now, this is all a bit logical, and the consequences and the cause. This all seems a little logical and consequential. Logical, somehow, and consequential. And my question is now, is this a view, is this the Theravada approach, or... Is this the Theravadin side or the Theravadin approach?

[06:26]

What difference does it make what approach it is? What is the difference? Which approach is it? This is what Govinda says. What do you find in your own experience? Yes, exactly. What do you think, Sarah? For me it is like this. I then thought about it. For example, from my point of view, I certainly have the feeling that I have found my way through suffering. For myself it's principally I came to the path through and by suffering. I think that many of us, it's the same with many of us. But this is not conscious. You think, oh, I suffer, and therefore this is a marvelous effort path. It's also simultaneous. What is simultaneous? Well, let's put it this way.

[07:48]

I believe that it is much more unconscious to walk the path than to choose the path from this cause, from this experience, from this understanding. I think that it's more that you do this subconsciously, that you, instead of out of a sort of cognition or recognition of suffering and consciously treading that path, it's more sort of unconscious or subconscious that you're doing that. It was in your case. It was in your case. Perhaps I ask because the non-logical is I like better. But at some point... I don't know if it is called Mahayana. You want to be on the right side.

[08:54]

I know that I'm on the right side. Boy, the two of you are good. So you want to be with the irrational Mariana. No, not irrational. But at some point, while it might have started subconsciously for you, at some point it became conscious. Yes. Okay, so that's where Lama Govinda starts. But of course we proceed in practice consciously and Dogen in fact says that's about all the conscious mind is good for.

[10:01]

From the point of view of practice, the conscious mind helps us make the decision to practice. But the processes and the ongoing But the process and the ongoing development of your practice is not through consciousness. Now you feel okay? So, someone else? Or, how was the discussion yesterday? I read your chapter in bed last night. It made me very happy.

[11:04]

The succession and the all at once-ness of the way to read and to understand in that way. And for myself I notice, and this relates to what Anita said, about talking. Since years when I come here and go and leave, in the time here I was, without knowing it, not unconsciously, but not knowingly, on the Eightfold Path. And the time being here, I was sort of put, without knowing it consciously, I was put on the path. Oh, really?

[12:27]

Being here. Also, ich meine das ernst. I'm serious. I'm quite serious. Yeah, I understand. Weil durch Achtsamkeit und Sitzen I was here when you were being put on the path. I saw you. Achtsamkeit und sitzen. Mindfulness and sitting. Right views. Intention and speech. And I speak less and less. More from the truth body. And when I'm back in everyday life, I lose it again. And up until now the Eightfold Path was a little for me like the Ten Commandments.

[13:50]

Shorter. I didn't study them, explicitly. But through your writing, I noticed that in fact I did it. So I'm really happy. I think that I'm going to have... at the top of this little praesis, a summary, it says, this text should be read initially in bed. It seems to make people happy, even in bed. One of the first books so recommended. Yeah, in a way that's what the point I make, that it actually starts with mindfulness.

[15:20]

That's what I mean. In other words, when we start practicing mindfulness, even without knowing much about or anything about the Eightfold Path, It leads us into the Eightfold Path. But then it's very important, and that's where teaching comes in, in the garden host from the past. is that when you actually then study it and make it clear, that's a big change in practice. But if it's already there, it's deeper when you study it. When it is already there, it is when you study it deeper, so to speak.

[16:28]

Yes? The Swiss and the... texts I'm trying to study now gave me a different approach to practice, and at the moment I'm trying to figure out how to combine this practice, how it worked for me before, and how these lists come, and my feeling is that It puts more emphasis somehow on consciousness in the sense that I have these lists and when I'm reading I try to make a mind map or to combine things or remember them more consciously. But on the other side I have the feeling that it's very limited and I can't go further thinking or connecting things. I have to go into this other kind of practice all the time again to make the picture more complete.

[17:47]

And what you suggested in your text, I tried in Zazen to sit and to... tell myself this list and I didn't, I said the words and nothing really followed it and I realized I probably expected words to come up and texts more consciously and then I realized this is probably, this is my question, is it the words and the lists and then I go into an area that is much wider and deeper than the word itself and that doesn't really need to come anything. Deutsch, bitte. Words. Ja, ich habe gemerkt, dass durch die Listen und diese Texte, die wir jetzt hier studieren, meine Praxis, so wie sie vorher war, jetzt noch einen Zusatz oder sich verändert hat.

[18:52]

The lists or the texts, they bring more awareness into the... and what I put more consciousness into the practice I then notice that I, for example, do the mind maps in my head or try to connect things in consciousness as I experienced them but at the same time I have noticed that I can't go much further that my consciousness creates a connection but that the practice as it was before so that the picture becomes complete. Then I tried what he suggested in his text, that you call this eightfold path as a list during the sitting and I also noticed that I was right-sighted and there was not much about words or language.

[20:02]

My question was, is it so that at this point you just allow the whole practice to come and connect it? Can you describe the best you can the way you were used to practicing? I try to be present moment, noticing with my senses and which is very much without... And that naming comes in, but it doesn't go very far. It's just what is, and then... Of course, when I'm thinking, I try to notice this, but there's no effort to...

[21:10]

to combine it or to move. For example, in Zazen, for me this was a very active practice to name this listening. Usually I just sit and listen. I don't do much. The difference to my practice, or the practice I did before, is that I tried to be present and in the sense, and I named it, but it didn't go much further, it didn't connect me with any other practice. And also that, like now in Saas, this list that I have set up for myself, it is more active than I normally have. Well, first of all, practicing is a craft and it takes us time to learn the craft. And I think you've learned pretty well from when you were a teenager.

[22:35]

How to make practice work for yourself and how to bring it into your life. And now we're trying to, you know... Find a new relationship to the tradition. And that takes a little time to learn. And you don't want to sacrifice your earlier practice to this somewhat new way of approaching practice. Now, when we first do Zazen, As a beginner, one of the most common of all instructions is to count your breaths.

[23:39]

Counting your breaths is often an experience of counting to one. Sometimes you get to two or three, but then, you know. And if you force yourself to count, you end up in consciousness. So part of the problem in counting your breath is not that... you're too distracted or you can't stop thinking, etc.? The problem is that I think it's good to think there's two, overall, two minds, consciousness and awareness, as I always make this distinction. And when your parents, I mean, we have a good example here, because your father's here, and he remembers teaching you to count, or say the ABCs.

[24:59]

When we teach a child to count, before that to begin to identify, the world we live in has a structure. But our mind doesn't have that structure. It has its own structure, some potential structure. So when we take here and there as natural, but actually it's a mental structure. What's here and what's there and what's near and far, the mind has to be structured to make these distinctions. So that you can hold things in sequence in your mind.

[26:21]

And you can watch an infant develop a conceptual ability to distinguish things and make sense of things. I wouldn't say that's just a matter of, in a simple sense, getting more information and learning. It's first of all developing mental structures that then let you learn. I'm responding to what you said in more detail than you need, but anyway. So basically what we do and the way we develop a common world we share is we train our consciousness to acknowledge together a common world.

[27:35]

Now, this consciousness has learned how to count. Awareness hasn't learned how to count. So one of the problems is not just that you're thinking about things, but actually awareness, you haven't trained it how to count. And if you train awareness the wrong way, and some practices overemphasize stages, so basically what you do is you train awareness to be like consciousness. All the Zen advice, like don't invite your thoughts to tea, This means don't train awareness to be like consciousness.

[29:09]

Our uncorrected mind or non-thinking consciousness. Now many people, when they start to practice, they want things to do in their practice. If that's the kind of meditation teaching you have, which Zen is not like that. But if that's the kind of meditation teaching you have, then you have to be in a school which later corrects the problems that occur. Or you can draw awareness into being a powerful part of consciousness, and that's more what military training in Japan would do.

[30:35]

Or, you know, The Secret of the Golden Flower, this book that impressed... Jung so much, and what's translated, I think it must exist in German too, doesn't it? It's completely the reverse of Zen. It's about training awareness for power. The concept of Zen is to give consciousness into awareness so awareness has power. Okay, so what you're pointing out in your experience of this... this difference in practicing is this very line between consciousness whether consciousness is disappearing into awareness or awareness is being drawn into consciousness and it's partly a left brain right brain distinction

[31:59]

And it's partly a left brain, right brain distinction. We're getting old together here. Okay, so... So the problem with studying... The problem with studying Buddhism is that if you study it too much through consciousness, you seal the teaching off from awareness. And that's what happens to many scholars.

[33:13]

Even scholars that start out as practitioners, they end up being sealed off from practice. And you could say the scholar knows too much. But it's not really that he or she knows too much. It's that he's studied in a way that seals consciousness off from awareness. So there are practitioners who ask for I want more structure.

[34:28]

I'm happy to have structure in my practice. It gives me something to do while I'm doing zazen. I'm bored just sitting there. What they're saying is, I'm identified with the satisfactions I get from consciousness and I can't find any satisfaction outside of consciousness. And they don't find any satisfactions outside of consciousness. And our whole society is designed to make us this kind of person. And then most of us find all of our satisfaction in our careers, our relationship with other people, etc.

[35:38]

And we don't find basic satisfaction in simply being alive. So the problem that I face as a teacher of Zen, if someone wants structure in their practice, I can give them some structure. But this is not my way of teaching. And I don't know how to correct the problem later. That's not within my school of how to teach. Zen tries to solve the problem right in the beginning, and not get people started and then correct the problem. Anyway, that's the general picture.

[36:41]

So what you're doing, what you want to do when you... You want to start studying when awareness has been developed enough to absorb the teaching directly, not through consciousness. Well, the consciousness is more like a funnel. It puzzles it in, but doesn't process it much. So that's the reason I put that instruction near the end, suggestion near the end. As you can read about, you know, in this case, the Eightfold Path and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know.

[37:44]

But if you want to really enter into the practice of the Eightfold Path, you have to teach awareness to know the path. Okay. Now, when you count your... Sorry, I'm going on so long here. But, you know, you weren't here yesterday, so you have... When you count, you don't say, oh, I'm counting one, I wish something, a wonderful one would happen. Now I'm counting two. What's going to happen? You just count one, two. So you start out with right views, right intentions. What's next? Right speech, you know.

[39:17]

The eggs have arrived? Is the chicken with them? The chicken was left in home? Why did the chicken cross the road? Isn't there some expression? Why did chicken cross the road or something like that? Another language. Yeah. Not English either. Okay. To get to the other side, yeah. Isn't that the question? Why did chicken cross the road? To get to the other side? Yeah. Okay. This is a big deal. Lots of chickens. Eggs arise and we lose a dozen people.

[40:18]

Ten, I know. But it's hard to have half a ten. Because the package isn't... The next slide is six. Yeah. Okay. Mahayana Kirti. Hmm? Mahayana Kirti. Yeah, yeah, thanks. You've been trained to be Jisha for too long. So you just get familiar with it. That's all. That's basically what you're doing. And don't have much expectation. Where do the expectations come from? Because ideally if you learn a teaching in awareness,

[41:21]

Then during the day it will be present in awareness but non-consciously. Not unconsciously, non-consciously. You want to introduce the teaching to awareness. And you want to give enough conscious attention to it to kind of like get a feel for it, but not grasping it as understanding in consciousness. For many, it's very difficult for many types of smart people to practice. Smart people who are more like artists, they can practice. But smart people, very intellectual people, who have the experience of understanding things with their consciousness,

[42:41]

really blocks them from practicing. They'll understand, they'll read something and understand it completely, but have no experience of it. Understanding it completely fools them. So, for example, businessmen who can practice are usually businessmen who are in positions where they have to make decisions a lot, not ones who have to follow decisions. And the example of the people I know in business who most are engaged in practice are like venture capitalists or commodities brokers.

[44:00]

Because they're out in the world. They don't know what to do. And they're betting a lot of money on things. And they have to be aware of awareness. to function. Wouldn't you agree? Absolutely. If you have the experience, if a person has the experience that the world is mostly what they find in their consciousness, very difficult for them to practice. They have to break through that. As I pointed out recently to someone, The basic way to study in Zen practice is in the image of wave follows wave, wave leads wave.

[45:14]

In other words, if you're reading any Real practice text. You read it as practice and not as something for the intellect. One of the things that modern versions of sutras do is they take out all the repetitions. And it's dreadful for us to read pages of repetitions. But the repetitions are about awareness, not consciousness. The repetitions are about awakening the order of mind. And the people who have studied oral cultures in recent decades still exist.

[46:35]

The storytelling and the continuing of the tradition is accessed through a series of repetitions. So for us, Ideally, what you want to do is you want to proceed no faster in the text than you've mastered the practice of the sentence you just read. Okay. So, in other words... I've tried to write this Eightfold Path piece.

[47:53]

So it partially forces you to deal with the practice of it, not just the intellect of it. I can't do it too much, because then it sounds like I don't know how to write, or it sounds like nobody wants to read it. So I try to write to trick an intellectual person into thinking this is an ordinary text. Well, for me, something else is going on. So, again, ideally what you do is you might read the whole thing and get a general feeling for it. That's fine. But then you go back Then you read a few sentences and then you spend the day seeing if you can realize those sentences.

[49:13]

As much as you can. And then you read the next couple of sentences. And in this way it might take a month or two to get through it. And that's the only serious way to read a practice text. So, again, we're trying to develop reading lists and so forth for our winter branches. Okay. And... Some of you say to me, you know, already in the winter branches there's so many practices, I can't do them all. I understand that. I'm sorry.

[50:14]

And then there's a lot of text. How can you read all these things unless you read them intellectually? There's a lot of text. And how do you read them all intellectually? The way to practice the way to read and as practice is you read one or two paragraphs, then this is a good way to choose a book to study. You read one or two paragraphs extremely carefully, deep reading. Until you touch the mind of the writer.

[51:17]

If you can't touch the mind of the writer, don't read the book. If you can touch the mind of the writer, if he's able to reveal his mind in the writing, then it's worth reading. If you can't follow that role too closely, you could never read a dictionary and look up a word in the dictionary. You couldn't check out the label of the mayonnaise in the store and when's the expiration date. So you reach the mayonnaise mind.

[52:21]

But in general, sometimes we read for information. But a book you're going to let into awareness and let into your practice. You have to... You want to find a book where in just a sentence, even one sentence, often the first sentence is important, one or two sentences or paragraphs, you can feel the mind of the writer. Da ist, wo man einem Satz, und oft ist ja der erste Satz ganz entscheidend, wo man in wenigstens ein oder zwei Sätzen wirklich den Geist des Schreibenden fühlen kann. Do you understand?

[53:23]

Yes. Grimace is very important to read the first sentence. Grimace? Killing her story. Oh, really? Go ahead. It's what I've started practicing, started dealing with Buddhism and started reading really what I could get. I find it so fascinating that you have a book, let's say, from 1,500 years ago, and it has been in Chinese written, and it all sounds great, to Chinese, Chinese, to I don't know what, or Pali, and to English, and then, and still, if you read it, you get really, it's not exciting in the arousing way, but it's, you feel the depth, and you feel really, through all these translations, still coming through. It's amazing, right? Yeah, it's fascinating. It's like miracles. Yeah. I used to try to get books at the beginning, and if you find an old text that is 1,500 years old and has been translated three times into three different languages with a thousand notes, and if it's real, you feel it, it's really exciting, it's really deep.

[54:31]

You feel it. Even if you don't understand it intellectually, you still feel it. It helps to have a translator. The texts that we have often were genius translators who somehow really was able to bring it from Sanskrit into Chinese. And many of the earlier translations, in Buddhism too, now there's some pretty good translators, but many of the early translators, what came through was Christianity. Buddhism didn't come through the text. Many of the early translators, from Sanskrit to Chinese, were really brilliant translators. And later translators partly simply translated and what came across, what appeared on the other side, was actually Christianity.

[55:39]

As they understood it. Meditation translated with caution, for example. What does caution mean in English? Like translating meditation into, in German it's like, not prayer, but... Contemplation. Contemplation, you know, these things. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So it's also good with a, if you're studying a text, to get a feel, but not necessarily something you consciously remember, but a feel for some few words, and bring it into your meditation. Now, one of the secrets of this kind of reading, although this shouldn't be the motivation, It shouldn't be the motivation, the secret.

[56:50]

It lets you read large quantities. Because once you've really got a feel for the mind of the writer, You can know almost in advance what he'd say about any topic. And you can turn to anywhere in the book, it's very clear. You know right away what he's talking about. You don't have to study it, it's just there, because you already know his mind. So when you're studying a text, you want to... Not all your readings this way, but a text you decide to study, you try to work with in the way I'm talking about. And although we've got this immense amount of material from Abhidharma,

[57:54]

You don't worry about the immense amount of material. You keep your practice of reading, whatever you do, read very, very carefully, not worrying about all this stuff. If you do that, then when you do encounter more texts, it opens up quickly. And then you have the problem of how to bring that into your lay life. In some ways it's easier in a lay person, in some ways it's easier if you're living in a practice center.

[59:10]

But as we've been talking about on the board, not a practice center, which is mainly a seminar house, it doesn't work. Okay. You can't come tomorrow because you ruined the whole seminar. Unfortunately, you are not allowed to come because you have ruined the whole seminar. Okay, so we have 10 minutes, but the last few days I've gone 10 minutes late. Maybe we should end 10 minutes early. We have 10 minutes, and since I've spent the last 10 minutes, we can start 10 minutes earlier. Does somebody want to say something? Okay. I would like to talk about this approach to practice. I would like to say something about the access to practice. We have a small Sangha in Göttingen We have a little Tanya in Göttingen and she gets better and better known and we have other people coming who just want to see what we're doing there.

[60:44]

And people with a Japanese background come, university teachers come, and people with an intellectual background. It's fascinating. These people come once and never return, never come back. Die meisten. Most of them. Die Leute, die bleiben, kommen aus dem Sender und sagen, das war ja eine tolle Atmosphäre. The people who stay come out of the Sender and say, well, this was a real, very good atmosphere. And they continue coming. And then later they get access to study groups and activities. And I'm always sorry for these people who are looking for something on their conscious plane and don't find it and sort of filter out what could be seen.

[62:32]

And then they don't come back. It is difficult to deal with it. I try to draw it on something everyday, on your everyday level, so to speak. And I try to keep them. It's difficult, and I try to draw them to an everyday plane, everyday activity. But it's seldom successful. Well, I mean, it's important to notice these things. But don't worry about it. I know, but even so, just do what you're doing and people come, they don't come for you. But maybe Evo would come and help put people on the path.

[63:34]

Yeah. I work as a team. You're welcome. When they come out of the Zendo and they haven't liked the atmosphere, you say, go see Evo. Okay. Yeah. Can you say that... Can you say that mind without structure is awareness? First of all, you can say that mind that's not structured by consciousness is awareness. Awareness has its own structure. But it's really hard. I'm always trying to find out how to define without over-defining.

[64:35]

But if I take this bell and throw it to you, and you catch it, it's awareness that made the calculation, not consciousness. So that's structured. Awareness figured out exactly the curve and where to put your hands. So that happened faster than consciousness could do. And sometimes you know when you throw something at a wastebasket, you know. And you have the feeling that you kind of will it to go in. It's almost not going in and then you kind of, it goes in.

[65:50]

That's because awareness has already figured out how it's going to get there. Consciousness has fallen along after it. And consciousness thinks it's making it happen, but awareness is already... So we think mind over paper, mind over matter. Mind over matter, matter over matter. There's, there's some... Let me present. It is, what's it called? Well, um, no, it's White Blonde Blues Guy. White Blonde Blues Guy. I forgot his name. He sings it. Mind over matter, matter over matter. It's really good. Okay. Got it. Yeah. The Abhidhamma Chorus. All right. Yes?

[66:51]

It's your turn. Muddy waters. Yeah, I like muddy waters. Johnny Winters. Very different. It's different, yeah. Well, you muddied the water a little bit when you said that. Okay, thank you for speaking. But I think still you're kind of in... maybe more than kind of implicitly depending on me to make it happen.

[67:56]

But if we're going to continue, this really has to continue from you and not from the activity of Johannes Hoff or me. And more it can continue from you. the more I can participate with some depth. And I think tomorrow we have a kind of four-nine-day type day. In the monastery you have five-day weeks, and the four-nine-day you do your laundry, take a hike, and things like that. And everyone knows this already, right?

[69:01]

We get up a little later tomorrow and blah, blah, blah. And tomorrow evening we'll have a kind of sangha meeting. But during the day you can walk around in the rain. Okay, thanks.

[69:09]

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