I'm not interested in explanatory theories. I have none or very little interest in explaining the world. Yeah, and I feel that explanations, whatever they are, fall far behind the mystery and subtlety of appearance. But But theories sometimes help, at least help me.

[01:05]

The kids are fixed there and wondering what's going on. But theories help me sometimes, often, to look more carefully at something. I knew some important people were missing. Well, that's a good excuse. That's clear. So I said earlier that wisdoms and perhaps all kinds of negative things too lie in wait for us, wait for us.

[02:13]

This is related to the idea of the alaya-vijnana, which is quite a different idea than the Freudian unconscious. The alaya-vijnana is where all of our experience waits for us. It just doesn't wait to become conscious. It is a dynamic in itself happening out of sight. Now, right now I'm not speaking in any way to be useful to you. I'm afraid you're listening in on me trying to be useful to myself. Okay. Yeah, so at the dead, we can see it in the constellations we've done, the dead also wait for us.

[03:49]

Sometimes I think we should just let the dead be dead. We can't do everything in this life, and there's a lot of dead people. But you know that there are actually more people alive today than have ever lived. We outnumber the dead. That of course causes a problem for theories of reincarnation. I'm a reincarnation of Sam's left shoulder. Or five of us are the reincarnations of one person.

[04:53]

You know, like that. Okay. Sam's left shoulder, yes. But on the other hand, sometimes we have to as we see, acknowledge the dead that wait for us. And in particular, when we have such a tragedy of the destruction of much of Europe in the war, we don't really want to let the war win. And the war wins, no matter what side wins or loses, the war wins, if we forget it. War, constant war,

[05:55]

as Europe especially has had, is not necessary. It's, you know, what our societies have done. It's not, anyway, I won't say more. So war, especially like in Europe, such relentless wars or relentless wars, is not necessary. It's simply what society has done. So what I said is to find out what's in the waiting room, the wider sense of being which we are, we do not want to limit our life to our consciousness. Our life is bigger than our consciousness.

[07:17]

In every way, in many, many ways. Okay, so we create a bodily space which allows us to feel the presence of the waiting room Also schaffen wir einen körperlichen Raum, der uns gestattet, die Gegenwart dieses Warteraums zu spüren. And with a, let's say, a knowing, noticing mind, let's not call it a self or a person, let's just say with a knowing, noticing mind, mit einem wissenden und einem bemerkenden Geist, jetzt nennen wir das nicht selbst oder sowas, sondern diesen wissenden und We can sometimes go into the waiting room with this knowing, noticing mind. Still, there's an implied self here, but let's stay out of that.

[08:22]

An implied self is forced on us by our mental habits and by language. And sometimes it's forced on us through our mental habits and by language. Because language assumes a subject-object relationship. Yeah, and sometimes we illuminate or we participate in one part of the waiting room and sometimes in others. And much of the early years of practice are spent off and on in this always changing waiting room.

[09:24]

And I would say constellation therapy allows us to look into or let some of what's waiting come into enactment. Can I say that again? Yes. Oh, thank you. Let's not assume I can. Consolation therapy allows us to have some access to this waiting room primarily through enactment. Darstell, körperliches Darstell.

[10:38]

And we make almost a, not just a bodily space, but a bodily nest. Wir machen nicht nur einen körperlichen Raum, sondern so wie ein körperliches Nest. A nest where we can feel safe. I don't know if we feel safe in a nest full of hatching crocodile eggs, but anyway. But it's a kind of nest where we feel safe. Now I think of Magritte's painting done in 1926 called The Lost Jockey. And he says this is one of two or three pivotal paintings for him. A lost jockey, painted ten years before I was born. And this lost jockey was painted ten years before I was born. Okay, and he says there was no aesthetic interest in painting this painting.

[12:02]

He said aesthetics had nothing to do with it. He said I had this mysterious feeling. Some causeless anguish. Isn't that a great phrase? Causeless anguish. Angst? Your qualm. Was pushing against his consciousness. And he also called it a call to order. That's like in the army? Well, a call to put things in order, to give order to things.

[13:06]

And he says this guided him all his life. And I would guess, you know, who knows, throwing big words around, that it's not so different than Socrates' Daimon. Which you probably know became demon and devil in Christianity. That your own inner call to order was distrusted in much of our Western culture. And he said he only could in effect enact this mysterious feeling, this causeless anguish. And he says he could indeed express this mysterious feeling or this cause-free torture by painting it, by depicting it in physical objects.

[14:34]

So he painted, and this is a kind of white magic square. Maybe this is our causeless nest. So in the frame of a paint like something like that canvas, he painted these strange chess-like wooden pegs. And on the sides of the wooden pegs, which look like the chess king and queen, or bishop, they have chic music on them. Okay, so he has... These posts are more like cones.

[15:43]

They have a shape, a bit like a king and the queen of chess. But they have... On the outside, they have music on them. And they're sprouting branches. And so they create a little forest. And they make a little forest together. which this strange little backlit jockey is riding through. And it disappears into an infinite space behind the square. And the objects have no everyday relationship to each other. Nor is the light related to any time of day. It's very much a presentation, a demonstration of a timeless realm.

[16:54]

One of the expressions in Zen for a timeless realm. It says so and so hung the sun and moon on a shadowless tree. To hang the sun and moon on a shadowless tree. When you, and I also can suggest you, when you notice something, notice its stillness. Here's this glass. So when you look at the glass, you notice its stillness. And even if I move it, the water is returning to stillness.

[18:24]

Watch it. So every object you look at, look at this rug and notice the stillness of the rug. Not a stillness of a dead object and entity. But a stillness that's ready to be moved. Or to have something placed on it. It's always even in its stillness, is ready and part of an inter-independent activity. Okay. So I think that I've, this morning and now, I've made clear at least that that I think the sense of our accumulated experience as time can only be known sometimes through enactment,

[19:48]

I know the word enactment is very hard to translate. Maybe we can just use the English word. Okay. Now... I'm not talking about surrealist automatic writing or automatic painting. But rather... In other words, what modes of mind enhance... this bodily space. And enhance the enactment of this bodily space. Now the one word I'd have to use is talking about constellation is empathy.

[21:35]

So a word that I have to use when I talk about the exhibition work is empathy. Do we have empathy and compassion as two words in German? We have the word empathy is virtually compassion in German. Yeah. Well, the word empathy was coined by a German named Lotze, I believe, in 1858. I think Lotze, L-O-T-Z-E. Anyway, what's interesting to me is, you know, what did they feel before 1858? Did they not even know what empathy was?

[22:52]

Or was empathy so taken for granted that they didn't need a word for it? I find, at least in my noticing, that words come into existence sometimes because there's something that needs to be identified. Something to be identified. But sometimes words come into existence when there's a sunset effect, something's disappearing, and at the last minute you want to give a name to it before it disappears. So, empathy. Now, when we meet somebody, I think immediately we have some kind of connective feeling. Yeah, I think our consciousness tends to pretty much immediately categorize it as like or dislike or danger or attraction or something.

[24:07]

Okay. But I've been trying to look for a word, you know, Heinlein and strength in the... Heinlein, Robert Heinlein in a science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land or something like that, coined the word grok. Yeah, grok. It was used a lot in the 60s, but nobody but elderly gents like myself still use it. Gents, of course. Anyway, but I don't like the word grok much. Oh, to grok something, to get it, right? Ah, so this understanding or something, I don't know.

[25:12]

What? Was there grok in German? No, no, no, he invented that. Okay. Okay, that's what Guni says. Okay. It's a book of my age, too. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. But I think the word heed is good. H-E-E-D. I don't know how you translate it. What does it mean? It means to... It actually means to... to attend to, to protect and take care of. I mean it's used nowadays, it's not used much nowadays except in expressions like take heed, take heed of my warning.

[26:14]

So that means take my warning, right? Yeah, well, I'm translating heed to mean to accept and protect. To accept and protect. What would you say? Yeah. And it's actually related to the word gaze, which is an old, very close word in the Middle Ages, meaning something close to grok, to gaze, to hold someone in your gaze.

[27:43]

You said gaze means also? To hold someone in your gaze. That's a word related etymologically to heed actually. What I'm trying to do is find language for things that happen in Zen practice and happen in... in constellation practice. So now without getting into looking at this too mysteriously as sort of dousing at a distance, we immediately know quite a bit about somebody when we first meet them. And I think if we can heed them, have a feeling of accepting and protecting them, and I think that's clearly the atmosphere and mind that Guni establishes,

[29:04]

And this is very clear, the atmosphere in which the spirit builds up the Goni. A person you know, it's sort of been part of constellations over some years. It's a person you might think, oh, what a goofball this guy is. Now, where I have observed exhibition work over many years, there is even a person where you think, such a... But when the atmosphere is to accept and protect this person, suddenly you feel this is also me. I like that too. So, in other words, what I'm saying is, is that we create this bodily nest or bodily space in Zazen, for instance, and then we have to bring certain kinds of minds to this bodily space.

[30:42]

And then we have to bring different kinds of spirit to this physical space. So a kind of spirit that is similar to the surrealist automatic writing and automatic painting. And also, from what I understand, Gestalt psychology and Gestalt therapy, which are somewhat different, tried to do. And part of this is, I think, is to learn to think in gestalts. Again, the German kind of, created by Germans, this whole Gestalt stuff. I seem to be in the right place. But I don't know if I tried to find some other words for it.

[32:12]

A locus which creates a focus. Or a locus, not hocus pocus, that's from the Catholic... That's from the Catholic service. You know that, right? Yeah? It's a phrase from, you know, in Latin, blah, blah, blah. So a locus which is an activity which creates a sense of a location. Now one of the kind of ideas that floats around in gestalt thinking is which comes first, the gestalt or the parts? Do you see the parts and then you add the gestalt?

[33:13]

Or do you see the gestalt and then you see the parts? Well, I think you could say it's a kind of mixture. It's a flip back and forth. But I would say actually it's different modes of mind. Okay, so I'm running out of time and we're getting hungry and etc. Gestalts are only so nourishing. Maybe if there's more of this I should come back to it tomorrow if I'm allowed to speak tomorrow. Do you overhear me thinking, you know, speaking? All right, if we go from the particular to the field, if I go from the particular, basically this is a percept-only mind.

[34:17]

Is that a percept only object? No. A percept only mind. I'm not thinking about it. I'm just seeing it or proprioceptively sensing it, etc. Yeah, and then I go to the field of mind. That's not a percept-only mind. But it's also a kind of non-comparative, non-discursive mind. But I can bring this non-comparative mind to the glass... And then sense it, know it differently than I did by just in a percept-only mind.

[35:33]

And I don't have time to develop this because it's not exactly very clear what I'm saying. But my point is that when you see the field of mind you're seeing in the way I'm speaking now, we can call it a gestalt. And you're not seeing a part which is a part of a whole, you're seeing a part which is independent of wholes. So if I say this is a part, maybe I should say participant, if I say this is a part, it implies that there's a whole of which it's a part. But if I'm thinking that way, then I'm explaining things.

[36:45]

I'm looking for explanatory theories. And the way I'm thinking, there's parts, but there's no whole. So it's the adventure of everything changing and moment after moment new possibilities created, being created that can't fit into any hole back there, H-O-L-E or W-H-O-L-E. Can you say this again? Change means everything is actually making new all the time.

[37:56]

New possibilities are emerging all the time. And we can't grab all those and force them into a hole, because they're always beyond the edge of any hole. Spelled either way. All right. Now, if we learn to... If we develop the habit of thinking in gestalts or in patterns... In patterns that are not fixed. Dicing with reality. We're at the edge all the time. Things fall apart and come back together. Okay. if we get the habit of thinking in patterns, and we develop non-comparative modes of mind, non-discursive and non-comparative modes of mind,

[39:34]

we can then know more about a person sometimes than they know about themselves. When you're in this kind of mind, which I think a Gestalt therapist tries to kind of nudge us into, It's a little bit like if I look at somebody. I have an immediate feeling about them. If I don't think about them, that immediate feeling almost becomes my own body. And I would know something like, I could say anything to that person. Or I'd know, I better not say that to that person. I think we had that sense of a person when we first meet them.

[41:03]

Have you ever noticed when you're feeling at ease and, you know, without feeling deeply at ease and etc., that's enough to say? And you're walking down the street and one person after another smiles at you. Jeez, all these guys think I'm great, you know. But as soon as you think that, they stop smiling. But sometimes people just smile at you and sometimes they don't. The people can feel you coming down the street with this accepting, protecting feeling.

[42:06]

So all I'm saying here is very simply, we create a bodily space And we bring minds to it that allow a kind of empathy or heeding to occur. And we very quickly, even immediately know what this person can accept or not accept. Well, this would be part of this person. This would not be part of this person. Now, this way of thinking whether it applies to constellation theory practice or not.

[43:11]

It's part of the development of Sangha practice, particularly in a monastery. Where you try to create a space between and among and through and through people. That is not at all social space. I mean, the whole thing, as soon as they need social space, I mean, if you take them seriously as a practitioner... You take the need for that social space away. And the space is one of connectedness and concern, but also a kind of ruthlessness, a kind of, this is just the way it is. Now, what's that? you take away the need for social space.

[44:33]

And it's replaced by an assumed and in fact connectedness. It's replaced by a connectedness where there's no doubt about feeling connected. which is at the same time tremendously independent. Ruthless is almost too strong, maybe too strong a word. Whatever happens is the way it is and that's just the way it is. Living and dying. Okay.

[45:25]

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