Well, I'm very even excited to be doing this seminar with you. And with Siegfried Essen especially. Because he's been a perhaps unwitting but willing participant in this experiment for years. Unwitting, excuse me. Unwitting means not necessarily intending it. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and those of you who are new to the way I talk, please be assured that nothing I say is hard to understand.

[01:35]

At least if you practice what I say. But if you don't have a feeling for the practice of a concept or a word, it just slides off our usual way of thinking, or slides into our usual way of thinking. Because in the early 60s, actually 1960, that's very early 60s, 1960, 61, I stumbled into the yogic worldview. I stumbled into it partly because I wasn't happy with the way the Western worldview was giving me an experience of being alive.

[02:51]

So I was willing to stumble into another worldview, but I had no idea what that could be. And so when I met Suzuki Roshi, my teacher, I found I'd stumbled into a new world view. And that was more than 55 years ago. And over this half century, every year I've become more aware of how different that world view is from ours. So my experience of practicing myself and practicing with others, practicing Zen and with others,

[04:28]

has been an exploration of how to discover these differences and then, because I'm practicing with others, expressing these differences. And I've been looking, of course, for ways in our Western worldview that approach the yogic worldview. And early on, not so early on, but after 20 years or so, I came across consolation therapy practice. And particularly articulated in my own life through Siegfried Essen and the others I've been meeting with for 25 years or more.

[06:02]

We're not that old. Yeah, I guess we are. In various places, in Graz and here and there in conference hotels, but most recently and for most longly in Rauschenberg. And what has been maybe one of the key overlaps between Constellation practice and Zen practice? And that which is perhaps one of the most important overlaps between the exhibition work and the Zen practice is... Is... Are you ready?

[07:37]

I am ready. Is what I would call now the unlanguaged breath body. Now, if I say this term, kind of word, metaphor, unlanguaged breath body... You can certainly understand the concept. But it doesn't actually make much sense unless you discover how it's already in your practice. Yeah, so, you know, this is a little bit of a diversion, but one of the main conceptual dynamics in the development of Buddhism, especially Zen Buddhism, over the centuries...

[09:06]

Over the centuries. Has been the term, you're already enlightened. Es ist diese Wendung, du bist bereits erleuchtet. Yeah. Well, now that requires us to know that in a yogic worldview, dafür ist es wichtig, dass wir wissen, dass in der yogischen Weltsicht, Everything is an activity. Nothing is an entity. Now that you have to get into your own bones, mental bones, bodily bones, etc.,

[10:09]

And if you're a yogic practitioner, it actually takes a few years before you change your habit from seeing things as entities to seeing things as activities. And for years I've been trying to express that as a simple example that there's no such thing as a tree. There's only treeing. And there's actually no even saying treeing is too limited. Because all treeing is an approach to foresting, becoming a forest. See, I'm a little crazy.

[11:44]

But in Crestone, we have all these small trees, fairly small trees, pinyon pines, and what's the other one? Juniper. Juniper. Don't worry about it. But they're short. They're not very big. They could be higher than the ceiling. But at one time, it had ponderosa pines and huge pines, and they were all cut down to make railroad ties and mining, to build tunnels for mining gold. These are small trees, maybe a few are taller than the ceiling, but about this height. There were a few different ones. There were the Wacholder and the Kiefern trees, different types of Kiefern. And a lot of them had to be cut down to make room for the mine vehicles, mine tracks and also for tunnels.

[12:52]

So many years ago, 30 years ago, so we planted quite a lot of Ponderosa pines. And most of them perished. But the ones that didn't perish get run off from the roofs of the Zen meditation hall and things. Now, if we make use of the runoff from the roofs, we get a few ponderosa trees, which then make another foresting. They're all trying to forest themselves. Make more space for other ponderosa trees and other things. It's kind of great to watch. And my not entirely obvious point here is in dynamic systems small differences make a big difference.

[14:14]

Yeah. That's called that observation, which is fairly recent in our culture, is the source of the concept of chaos theory. And I just suffered from this butterfly effect over New York. There was a big sudden storm in New York that lasted, I don't know how long, half a day. The wind was just strong enough because of a seagull's wing in Australia. The Grand Central Station was closed, the main train station in New York.

[15:25]

And because there were trees across the tracks in all directions. And all the planes coming into New York were diverted to Washington and Baltimore and such places. And so there were no hotel rooms in Washington or Baltimore. So I was put on a bus. from Washington. The plane was running out of fuel, which was nice. They landed in Washington. And then, so we landed in Washington and refueled, but that took some hours.

[16:26]

And then, because there were many planes trying to refuel, and then the pilots legally couldn't fly longer, so they put me on a bus. And to all the people who wanted to get to New York, this took a lot of buses. Und wenn man bedenkt, wie viele Leute nach New York wollten, kann man sich vorstellen, dafür haben wir viele Busse gebraucht. Ja, so they hired this one huge bus which had no name on it. Didn't belong to any company as far as I could see. Also diesen einen riesigen Bus gemietet, an dem kein Name stand und der, soweit ich sehen konnte, auch zu keiner Firma gehörte.

[17:32]

And they hired a bus driver who I don't think maybe had ever driven a bus before. So at this point I'd been mostly up for two days without sleeping. And I was hoping to get a nap on the bus. But I watched this guy, he didn't even know how to operate the dashboard or get the windshield wipers going and things like that. He was trying things. So people kept saying, can't you put the heat on because it was freezing cold. But when he put the heat on, the windows fogged up and he didn't know how to defog the windows.

[18:37]

I'm sorry this anecdote is getting so long, but it was rather quite an event. So he's got this big wheel here, right? And the windshield's quite far away, but he didn't know how to defog it, so he's reaching over the windshield, flying over the wheel, and watching his... He didn't know how to get to New York, so he's got a GPS going, and he's looking at time. And I noticed more and more he was driving in two lanes at once instead of one. So I decided I'd better, I happened to be sitting like there and the driver was here.

[19:50]

So I decided I'd better stay awake if we crash at least a duck and to see if I can keep him in his lane. So you have about 50 or so terrified passengers. And who's going to break the ice and tell this guy Stay in your lane. And no one was doing it, although they were all kind of like... So I decided I'd at least better do it. So two big trucks, he's driving 35 miles an hour or 40, and it's a freeway, Autobahn, and everyone else is going 65 and 70.

[21:08]

It's the main Autobahn to New York and Washington. And huge trucks are coming by, which often are much longer than trucks in Europe. And those trucks had to get into other lanes themselves to get by our bus, which was, you know, So I finally said, when two bus trucks at once started honking at him, I said, get in your lane! But of course he was blaming the two trucks for honking at him.

[22:12]

He was swearing at them. Yeah. So I began to get some help. His GPS ran out of battery near New York, so I had to use my phone. I'm not very good at smartphones. But I had to guide him into New York. Turned left. And then he was on freeways you can't drive buses on. They're only for cars. You can't be on this. So I U-turned. No, you can't U-turn. This is not an exaggeration. This is not an exaggeration. This guy even got lost in a parking lot where we'd stop so he could go to the toilet.

[23:32]

We went around the truck two or three times until he found a way to get out. But when we got finally pulled into, I mean, we didn't hit anybody and nobody hit us. That's the best you can say. When we got into New York, all the terrified passengers were so relieved. It's usually a four-hour drive. It took six hours. But when we got to Terminal 4, everyone was so relieved, they began applauding him.

[24:43]

And he stood in front of the bus and... So that's the butterfly effect. So activities are always happening in front of you and you have to find the way to be in the activity. And our life is an activity, of course. Our life with our friends and our family is an activity. unser Leben mit unseren Freunden und unserer Familie ist Aktivität. And the yogic sense, and I think the constellative sense, is the best way to be in an information-rich environment.

[25:49]

Und dieses yogische Gefühl dabei, und ich glaube auch das Verständnis in der Aufstellungsarbeit, ist, wie du in einer is to be present in the un-languaged breath body. Now the un-languaged breath body is a metaphor. I'm particularly having fun with Koan 52 in the Shoyoroku these days. Which starts out, the first line says, basically... Language doesn't get us there.

[26:56]

Metaphors do a little better. We could say language arises from feeling. And then it gets constrained by naming words and grammar. And you can't really approach this vastness, this everything-all-at-onceness with naming words. So the implication in this first line of this koan is that metaphoric thinking uses language to return Language to feeling.

[28:15]

And then in that feeling, it's best approached through, and I'm shortening a bit, through the unlanguaged breath body. So Paul picked me up at the airport yesterday. Yuten Roshi. And I had nine hours sleep last night. And when I got up, I did a little yoga to try to see if I could get my body from the Atlantic and from the bus back here. And then I decided to go to breakfast. And why did I decide to go to breakfast?

[29:27]

Because I knew it would be silent and I could relocate this unlanguaged breath body with your unlanguaged breath body. And in our practice, dharmasanga practice, we make a significant distinction between consciousness and awareness. And Nicole has suggested that maybe we could, among other things, maybe we could constellate the distinction between awareness and consciousness. Because my experience is that constellation therapy, a practice, arises from being aware of a field of knowing that is only partially accessible through language.

[30:37]

So the Constellation practice has developed ways to enter into a field of knowing that's... to be sensitive to a field of knowing that only partially can be now brought into conceptual recognition. can only in a limited way be brought into conceptual recognition. So if we're going to recognize the meta or para language of metaphors, In order to use feeling to look back into and in immediacy form our life.

[32:14]

And there's various... ways we do this in Zen practice. And then the revelation to me discovered consolation practice is finding ways in our own Western culture to do something very similar. to be sensitive to a field of knowing that's present all the time, but we don't have conscious access to it. But through postures, mind-bodily postures,

[33:17]

But through attitudes, through physical and spiritual attitudes, we can sometimes feel our way into the complexities of our mutual aliveness. I mean, just one simple example and then I'm going to stop. In a yogic worldview, we are not human beings. And so you should really never call yourself a human being. Because it implies there's something called non-human.

[34:35]

We're mutual beings. Maybe that's the best language I can find for it. And when we're mutual beings, we're much more likely to notice our mutuality than if we have a word which separates us. So the phrase, you're already a Buddha, assumes an investigatory approach Because being a Buddha or whatever, enlightened or whatever, is an activity.

[35:37]

So being a Buddha, call it you're already a Buddha, calls you into investigating how this is so. And so, for me, constellation practice is a brilliant craft at exploring how we're alive with others. Es ist eine brillante Handwerkskunst, um zu erforschen, wie wir mit anderen zusammen lebendig am Leben sind. And how we're alive within a transformative worldview. All right, thank you. Danke. Danke. That was a little long, I'm sorry, but I got carried away in that bus.

[36:43]

Thanks. Thanks for being here. Thanks for translating.

[36:46]

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