Oh, good morning. Guten Morgen. And we're honored to have Myokin Roshi here from Budapest, Bucharest, France, Paris, the piano. He's a very good pianist. Pianist. And we have the honor that Jokin Roshi is here from Budapest, from Bucharest, from Paris, and from piano. Jokin Roshi is also a very good pianist. And show me. Show me. Hello. And you're Hungarian? Yes. Thanks for coming. Oh, my goodness, hello. Okay.

[01:03]

You're also Hungarian. Yeah. I'm Hungarian. No. So, of course, I want to know something about your discussion yesterday. It doesn't have to be detailed, you know, fully detailed, but what was most important or interesting or what stuck with you? Yes. Yes, to bring us back a little bit to the words and the concepts themselves.

[02:11]

first we struggled painfully with already the beginning with the words we were using which we could use like self or selfness because there is no real German term for selfness there is no English term either there is no English word for it I don't remember that. Well, but we didn't come very far because Erich started a fundamental discussion on the basics, how to distinguish the selfness from ego, but I don't remember that. And then we came to a discussion in a discussion how self in different ways is structured, reinforced, emerges in different religions.

[03:42]

And why some of us in our group somehow turned their back against their original religion and somehow approached or turned towards and some of us are living in a kind of hybrid state living between two kinds of religions or in between with an electric engine and a gasoline engine with an electric engine and a combustion engine For myself, the term self is pointing more towards an entity. Whereas the term selfness more points towards a process.

[04:57]

Maybe you could use also the term to emphasize even more this process character to use a term like selfing. Like treeing. Maybe it's a good idea. And I have exhausted my memories with this. Okay. Yes. Yes. For me, this Friday afternoon, small groups... Saturday.

[06:16]

I mean, maybe Friday you were doing, I don't know. For me, in the last years, this was always a very fruitful and lively exchange of experiences. Yes. And yes, for me it was a kind of dry and also very tiresome and difficult process or undertaking. And yesterday, late in the evening, I got the idea that maybe this was subject to the subject we were discussing. And for me, I came to the idea that also this self, this subject of self, is somehow a kind of dry construct.

[07:25]

that is very useful and that you can hang it anywhere, anywhere in the room. that it's a kind of construct where you also can put it, it's a useful concept, but also a trial concept, but you can attach certain or like hooks, like memories and so on. Yes. And then I got this image, or an image emerged, this kind of, where you put your clothes, how do you call it? Clothes or closet? Not a closet. Clothes rack? Yeah, a rack. Yeah, a rack. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Which is kind of useful to have a rack but a rack in itself doesn't have any strength or force.

[08:52]

And some years ago we were talking or working on a certain koan And if I remember it correctly, one line was, to study the self means to forget the self. And this sentence goes on, but in myself I have the feeling that there is a kind of dawning for this forgetting. Okay. Okay. That's a good point to stop when you're forgetting yourself.

[10:10]

That's from Dogen. A very famous statement of Dogen. Okay. So I had a similar experience with the discussion yesterday as Hansjörg just mentioned So because I had the feeling when we were discussing the self or the selfness as if we would discuss some kind of management theory, some kind of theory of science,

[11:17]

Okay, because it was somehow, everybody talked a lot, but in the end there was nothing left because it was somehow, yeah, by talking about it, we somehow lost it. And I also thought, well, maybe that's quite okay and good and helpful because, well, he let the self be itself and that's okay. Yeah, okay. This is a very sophisticated group because self is dry as dust. Well, the most lively memory I'm still occupied with is that when you talk about the self, that you somehow reify this as if it would be an entity.

[12:44]

And therefore I somehow played around with language, which nevertheless always seems to be kind of too clumsy to talk about this kind of stuff. And one way out a strategy to avoid this reification and to have this kind of entity or substance of a self is to use a word or a sentence, a phrase like, I'm selfing myself. Oh, okay. I'm going to try it. Okay. Yes, Tara. And we talked a little bit about what meditation, where meditation makes a difference when you look at the self. ...

[14:30]

And the answers to these questions were on the one, some said that it gives you the opportunity to see, to start to see the self. Or you feel connected with everything, the boundaries of the self start to lose during meditation? I have asked myself the question, and I share my experience as well, but the question is that there is still a non-observed self. And I'm also sharing this experience, I have this experience as well, but still nevertheless I have also the experience that there is always, there still remains an I, or a me that observes the self.

[15:47]

So I'm observing and I'm also expanding, but still there is always this I and me. And I ask myself, this I is also myself. Yes, it is a function of the self. And the question is, this observer which observes, is it part of the self or is it not? In my own experience, it's more not that an observer is created which would be out, outside the self, but that the self extends, which now includes also an observer.

[16:57]

So that's my experience. What do you mean? It sounds good. We don't know, but it sounds good. Yes. Which was in a way, you know, funny. Because the more I became frustrated with what they were talking about. And then I got so tired that I slept for five minutes. I was really... While I was talking, right? No. It appealed to me that all I was interested was in the shift from this centered poet from observing into a way of... And then the question came up, who is it that is waking up within somebody?

[18:05]

Because it appealed to me that... I was asleep, and I didn't realize anything. And there is another possibility in that kind of space, but there has to be a shift. Yeah, I cannot expect to wake up in a different way. Yes. So that was when it was evening. That was, yeah. away from this central way of observing, eye of observing, eye. I'm getting frustrated with this. Okay. Deutsch, bitte. Ja, da habe ich meine gesprochenlose Beobachtung in der Praxis, und ich habe gemerkt, dass ich ziemlich frustriert werde,

[19:09]

And from that point of view, it was very interesting, I looked into it, I was away for about 14 minutes or so, I talked to him, and as I was there again, it became clear to me that what really interested me was this step from self-centred perception to perception, Thank you. Thank you. Yes. Yes. I was in the same group as Hanna and Hansjörd. Something I realized something in this group is that we have the kind of very fixed or very solid ideas of what it is, what the self is. And I think we didn't understand each other on two long stretches of this conversation.

[20:38]

And slowly I get the feeling that the self is only here because of, or only exists because of, Somehow, the only reason that it exists is somehow that you not try to overcome it, but somehow to use it as a vehicle to reach somewhere else, at a different point. And this morning I came to read a haiku and this was very comforting to read this poem. And the haiku is like this. Although not being a Buddha, yes.

[21:53]

Steht sie da so selbstvergessen? She stands there so forgotten about herself. Die alte Kiefer. The old pine tree. And this makes me feel good. Okay, thanks. Yes? Also ich erinnere mich auch an dieses Wort selbstvergessen, was in der Kuh vergessen wird. I also remember the word to forget oneself, which we also used during the group yesterday. And what I remember is that we experienced different ways of experiencing the self.

[23:10]

For instance, to learn an instrument, to sing, to learn to sing or to paint. And also what I learned in medicine, first to learn the necessary steps in emergency medicine, And then there is a certain moment in all this experience you come to a certain moment where you somehow forget yourself And that the self which always has a kind of reference point now loses this reference point and just exists in itself.

[24:16]

Okay, thanks. Thank you. Vielen Dank. Vielen Dank. In our group, several descriptions have been given of events that seem to have aroused themselves or that a connection would have occurred in the object. In our group, several people described experiences where the self expands and dissolves and also merges. And the descriptions, these states are very similar.

[25:19]

You can add certain attributes or describe it relatively exactly, how it looks. I was surprised that it is very similar. And these descriptions, I got the feeling, I realized are quite similar, and you could really somehow put them together and put certain attributes to it, and I really was amazed that it's that kind of similar. For example, to say that there is a great clarity, that there is a feeling of penetration, So that there is clarity, then there is penetration and this widening. And I got the impression that actually it doesn't matter who is making this experience, these experiences are very similar.

[26:37]

And wouldn't it be, or I got the idea, is this an objective mind? Couldn't that be the basic or the underlying or couldn't we say that this is an objective truth? We're going to sneak this underlying ground in sometime. For me this is very comforting because it gives me trust to enter into this.

[27:52]

In other words, because the persons in your group and in general people's experience Well, they're different people. Their experience is often very similar. Does that mean there's a similar mind we all share? Is that something like you're saying? Well, that's also parallel to, or the same as virtually, the idea of original mind. Do we all have an original or fundamental mind? Yeah, it's a rather important topic for me because in general I'm practicing Zen.

[29:02]

And this book I think I'm close to finishing is called Original Mind. Original Mind. the craft or practice of Zen in the West. But if you understand original mind as a prior mind, then you have a problem. Yeah, but anyway, this is another rather soft subject to talk about in the context of practice. But people all over the world can pretty much have babies together if they want to. So obviously there's something very similar going on.

[30:12]

And I think probably all over the world maybe people fall in love more or less the same way. But surprisingly, I would say people's relationship to death is quite different. So there's definitely similarity and continuity. But how then do we project meaning on those two experiences of similarity and continuity? And how we do makes a big difference.

[31:19]

And I'll try to speak to that. It's kind of hard, you know, actually, because as you've all discovered it's very slippery these things. But we've had two days now to get to the point where maybe we have enough refinement in our shared thinking that we can speak about it. Yes, please. I have the impression that over time, as far as we have access to the spiritual processes of people in history, the same topics And I got the impression that when we look at history that people in different periods somehow were dealing with the same issues.

[32:37]

And I ask myself whether there is a kind of development maybe some kind of progress, or whether it's always again and again dealing with the same issues. Because quite often, quite ancient or old statements read so similar and are so close to our own experiences. Yes. As we are now discussing in total other language systems out of science or Western philosophy.

[33:52]

Yeah, I understand. I prefer not to comment on the discussion as we go along, but this I won't come back to. So let me just say now, my own feeling about that is... Is it... Yes... Ancient India, ancient Greece, contemporary, etc. Very similar questions come up. What is it to be in love? What is it to... Think, what is it, you know, that's it. And because we can write and share over generations speculation, speculation develops. Yeah, it does develop. I think we have to assume that although it looks the same in previous times, it's probably not exactly the same.

[35:27]

As Ivan Illich said, and I quoted the other day, if you imagine seeing as You have the same eyeball. But if you imagine the process of seeing differently, you probably actually see differently. No. Although, and this is I think the last I'll say about this, although we've had several thousand years of speculation in several simultaneous parallel cultures, maybe the total speculation

[36:40]

Maybe the total speculation isn't thousands of years, but 50. Okay, how old are you? 56. So it takes a certain... During your 56 years, it takes... during your 56 years you spend most of that time just discovering what it is to be alive and these more subtle questions of what really is going on happen maybe between 45 and 55 or I don't know what So it probably takes the lifetime of a generation to get to about A week of really good speculation.

[38:04]

But you know, I'm reading, I read quite a bit in Buddhism and Asian and Hindu, etc., literature. My feeling is there's a handful of people alive today who have absorbed the tradition well enough, the Indian and Chinese tradition well enough that they can even understand it, let alone add something new. And they add something new to the little bit that Kant added new, etc. It takes time.

[39:23]

And it's a human maturing time, not chronological time. Things are lost too. Yeah, I noticed that. We should have a break soon, but I always can't forget you. One side chain of our discussion was... Hyperlink? ...was whether self is acquired. A constructor acquired, yes. Okay, a side chain of our discussion was whether self is acquired. and this brought us to the field of bringing up children and also what you brought the example of the with a watch which is just a phone for a baby and when you learn it's a watch and you have more background and yeah so in that way with with learning so yeah as soon as the mem sites are added then self uh appears medium yeah

[40:50]

That's one good theory. Who's translating this? Yeah, I realized he speaks English, so he speaks German as well, so he can translate. Well, that's true of almost everyone here. Your job, you just lost your job. I'm fired? Yes, go ahead. The question is whether... whether it is self-learned. And that brings us to the topic of child-rearing, that it is self-created over time. And again, this is an example from Roshi, that the clock for a one-month-old baby is just a pure form and then it becomes a clock. And above all, it is self-learned Okay. But there's such good friends that he's not used to translating for me.

[41:54]

Okay. So let me just say one sort of one thing. First I'm I'm somehow rather pleased you found the self boring and dry and so forth. I can't say exactly why it pleases me, but anyway. Okay, but why is this topic so important? So let's again just start with the most basic. Everything's changing. How do we notice that? How do we notice that each moment is in fact unique and not a repetition? It's simply not easy to do.

[43:01]

Lots of reasons. Just the way our senses work and so forth. Okay. Now, even though you may intellectually understand it. Your experience of the self. Now we have to look at what is the primary experience of the self. Unity and continuity. Okay. Now I will maybe after the break go into that more.

[44:04]

But if in fact unity and continuity is the primary, the overall, the wider experience of self, in fact without the experience and the assumption without the assumption and experience of unity and continuity, self doesn't work. Our ability to know the world doesn't work. We have to assume that the person who did something five years ago is the same person as now. If you don't have that assumption, it's hard to function. I mean, certainly the legal definition of self is the body. We try the body which did the act.

[45:22]

We don't try the mind which did the act, except special circumstances. And we keep the person in jail, the body in jail. So because we assume Unity and continuity. In order to function. It continuously undermines our sense of momentary. So we have to reconceive how we experience unity and continuity.

[46:25]

and experience in a new way, unity and continuity. Okay, one way I do it is I have a little phrase, the yoga of each moment. So I have that feeling in my mind. And when I walk, each step is a kind of yoga of each moment. It's not the same as the previous step or the next step. I still am walking continuously. But the continuity is a series of links. rather than, you know, a, yeah, anyways, it's a dream.

[47:51]

And right now, there's the yoga of this moment, being with you. And the yoga of the next moment is feeling Eric translating for the guy who knows, needs it. Yes. And I feel the presence of each of you in the yoga of this moment. Okay, so let's have a break.

[48:34]

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