Well, first of all, if you design your houses so that everyone's required to basically sit in a meditation posture all day long, then in the same location you shift through just standing up into waking mind and sitting down you shift into a sitting mind a meditation mind and lying down you shift into dreaming and non-dreaming deep sleep And non-dreaming deep sleep is one of the minds that appears in meditation. That was pretty long. You did okay. It sounds like it anyway. Of course, does it really make a difference?

[01:19]

I don't know. My point is that you will find that kind of behavior and that kind of structural posture, a posture required by the architecture, in a culture which assumes that ordinary sitting is simultaneously a meditation posture and you get used to the simple shift So the waking conscious mind is not so far away from the sitting mind. It's just a matter of the same room. But in a culture like ours, which doesn't assume that the dreaming mind and the non-dreaming mind are functioning underneath consciousness all day long.

[02:39]

We conceptually think of them as separate. So we go into a different room for that mind and another room for this mind. It helps contractors a lot. I'm not suggesting you all go home and destroy your bedrooms. Yeah, but that's an idea. Anyway, Geralt? When I summarize what you say, one aspect is that every attitude presents another spirit or presents another spirit.

[03:56]

If I summarize what you're saying, then one aspect is that each posture generates a different mind, or generates a mind. Yes. That means, just as an example, I write something in the daily consciousness, I write something in the sitting Zen consciousness, I have two different results. That means that if I write something in daily conscious mind and in sitting zen mind, and if I write something in sitting zen mind, then I have two different results. Yeah, probably you do. Yeah, wahrscheinlich schon. Das heißt, ich habe Wahlmöglichkeiten, verschiedene Geisteszustände durch meine Haltung zu betreten. That means that I have a choice to enter different minds through my posture.

[05:02]

You have an opportunity anyway. And, you know, I was part of the painting world in New York in the 60s, 50s and 60s. And there's a technical term, pure perception without cognitive investigation. Und es gibt da ein, wie heißt es, Fachbegriff auf Deutsch, ein Fachbegriff der reinen Wahrnehmung ohne, without cognitive investigation. Investigation or without cognitive elaboration. Reine Wahrnehmung ohne kognitive Ausarbeitung. Okay, let's just take that term. It exists on the planet. Nehmen wir einfach mal diesen Fachbegriff, der existiert auf diesem Planeten.

[06:08]

Pure perception without cognitive elaboration. Now, how many of you heard that phrase in gymnasium or college? But it exists in yoga culture as the most fundamental way of knowing the world. So it implicitly presents to us another way of discovering what it is to be human. Now, watching or hanging out with painters... Wenn ich Maler beobachte oder mit ihnen zusammen bin.

[07:11]

I don't know about all painters. There's a piece that did hang out with quite a few. You should. Es für alle stimmt, aber ich habe alle Schnecken habe ich Zeit. And we'll start a painting. Die beginnen ein Mischbemälde. Beginnen ein Mischbemälde. And the painting starts. And I'm thinking. And that starts. All right. Lassen Sie. And we could say an example of pure persuasion without cognitive elaboration about all. Notice, and probably most of our, and parts of our, and parts of our perhaps most ritualized, obviously, Think something like that. In that kind of month, eigentlich tun die meisten von uns teile unsrer fruchtbarsten Arbeit.

[08:12]

Also, last night. Mindest mal davon aus, dass diese Art von Arbeit fruchtbar ist. Art von Geisteszustand. A simple matter of, oh, I, was, was, I lie down and I'm, or sit down and suddenly I'm fresh. But it's not that easy to just sit down and say, okay, now I'm suddenly in the front. Now, excuse me for time on each comment. Entschuldige, dass ich bisher so viel Zeit auf jedes Kommentar verwende. I introduce you to this ability to do this way of thinking. Aber wenn ich euch eine Einführung geben kann, in die Art Mensch zu sein, in die Art des Denkens, in die Art innerhalb von eineinhalb Tagen, it won't be too bad. It won't be too bad. When you sit down, what happens? You arrive at your sittings. You arrive. Wisdom is where much of wisdom lays presented to your zented.

[09:15]

Lived at a little victim. And a large part of your time becomes your activity of world consciousness. Sorry, can you repeat the word? Maybe I got the sentence. Yeah. is much of wisdom to you as a living being. A large part of wisdom will be given to you through conceptual content or is presented to you. But then part of the practice of meditation and wisdom and then it is part of the craft of compassion and wisdom is how to absorb that conceptual, not absorb that into a

[10:16]

a field of knowing. When I hear this and all of these unfamiliar phrases to many of you, phrases for. It's really not. You just speak. Why? Leave that topic to some other. A little later. What? Yeah, but just... No, no. I will be sure. So, if you sit down and you should get... ...measurable in consciousness for 40 minutes, you're going to be pretty darn bored. When you sit in the office for 40 minutes, then you get very bored.

[11:31]

Then you get- Temple daughter was- was now in her- daughter about body. Five, she sat down bodies of the- She said was sitting in her apartment and said- And she said, in five minutes out of all the things i could think of and what was i supposed to do with the other so you sit down and you can't it's a long period of time you can't roll along Just drop out of consciousness. And in effect, you did slip. In effect, you were floating to associative mind. Pretty similar or over to us with the Freudian free association.

[12:52]

Which as Freud noticed, is more than consciousness. He created this concept of consciousness where this knowledge that comes up is stored or something. The layered, static version of How we, uh, [...] static version, dynamic, um, than you're gonna, dang, do. Okay, so. Men, um, like the kind of shift men like to sleep. There's a breath in mental.

[14:09]

There's a breath in mental. [...] then you settle into this associative mind and then and then a kind of phase synchrony can begin to occur synchrony in your breath and your heartbeat which is in version is considered very rare does happen in non-dreaming place.

[15:32]

In deep sleep, it happens. The problem in zazen is in a way it's eher than zazen. Dreaming deep. Surfaces in your meditation. Surfaces in zazen. Surfaces in zazen. But that doesn't happen. Meditation doesn't happen. You have to get settled into this sub-non-cognitive sub-sphere. Sub-sphere. Sub-sphere. Sub-sphere. First. First. Okay, so what I've been thinking about all this time is a distinction where there is a difference to move in a circle.

[16:45]

Because a human being is movement, and my children, they commit to movement, and even when I want to have them sit, even at this point, there's that move around all the time. What about movement? What's the distinction? What's the distinction? Good question, because Americans and Asians, you can papoose. Papoose means to tie a baby on your back or tie it so it doesn't move. I've never tried to papoose a western baby but supposedly you can't do it they thrash their way out What?

[17:56]

You couldn't pappers them? No. Yeah, right. Well... I know that Herr Dr. Konze was a German Buddhist scholar. And he was into astrology. And the second or third time he met me was a year or so in between. So I met him. He said, you're an Aries and you're a Westerner. You can't be calmed down, but somehow you're calmer than you were a year ago. Aries, which one is that?

[18:58]

I don't know. Well, maybe we have to try a little harder. But the basic instruction of zazen is assume a posture that's sort of like sleeping, but you're upright, as if you were sleeping on your back. And then don't move. So you have the posture, the mental posture of don't move and a physical posture that's upright and energetic. Also hast du diese, was du da hast, diese geistige Haltung, das bewege dich nicht, und eine körperliche Haltung, die aufrecht und energetisiert ist.

[20:03]

And you have a second, usually mental posture. Und normalerweise gibt es eine zweite geistige Haltung. Which is easily, easily stated as, don't invite your thoughts to tea. Die man am einfachsten ausdrücken kann, als lade deine Gedanken nicht zum Tee ein. Now you could immediately say, To not invite your thoughts to tea is a thought to not invite your thoughts to tea. But obviously, we all know we can do it. We can have this feeling of, oh, okay, I don't have to get involved with my thoughts. So, they're both mental formations, but they're not both thoughts. The intention to not invite your thoughts to tea is a mental formation but not a thought in Buddhist thinking.

[21:07]

So you assume an intentional mental posture which you don't engage discursive thoughts. And if you do that, you can get pretty still. Yeah, and that stillness begins to change how your body functions and how your mind functions. That's enough. Someone else? Yes, Tara? I'm very happy that this Kuan Yin statue is here with us.

[22:20]

I know, it's one of your favorites and that's why I brought it over. Very nice. That's awfully nice. Yeah. this posture simply really resonates with me and it also transports, transmits particular mental postures. At the same time, I ask myself, I mean, you have an aspect of Avalokiteshvara, why are you in this position? And yet I wonder, she is an aspect of Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva. Why is she depicted in this particular posture? And now it looks like she stands with one foot on a kind of rock and the other foot is in the lotus flower.

[23:34]

And maybe you can say something about this one of these days. Oh! Hi. I don't know exactly the history of the iconography. But the earliest Buddhas were the Shakyamuni Buddha, the images. And the images, I mean, in earliest Buddhism there was no image because you shouldn't have idol worship. Sitting worship is okay, but not idle. No, that's a bad joke. Idle means, of course... Not doing anything.

[24:44]

To be idle. So that was my little bad joke. Not doing anything is sitting still. I can't help it. All right. So my understanding is that the later development of Avalokiteshvara, which is mainly a Mahayana bodhisattva, developed out of the earliest two Buddhas were Shakyamuni and Maitreya and Maitreya is the Buddha of the future and the Buddha of the future holds a little vase which is the elixir of immortality But the bodhisattva of compassion was originally a male, more male-like figure, and developed out of the Maitreya iconography. In the Maitreya iconography, the Bodhisattva is stepping out into the world.

[26:10]

But she's being very careful. She says, I'm going to step out into the world, but only on a lotus. And the lotus is the symbol of Buddhism in a way like the cross is the symbol of Christianity. Because the lotus rises above the water and its roots are in the mud and the lotus is above the water. And the lotus seems to be in a kind of wavy pond. Now there's the two main iconographic representations of Avalokiteshvara are this kind and the other kind is more like looks like the Virgin Mary and emphasizes maternal love and a figure sort of looking down and

[27:34]

like looking into a crib or something. But they're both very common. I mean, the maternal loved one is more common in China in general, though this is Chinese, too. But this is, I think, more typical in Zen, which is this, you know, to my mind, she's one powerful lady. Now, the figure is androgynous. It's gender-free in some ways. And in Buddhism, wisdom is considered to be feminine and compassion is considered to be masculine. So the gender distinctions don't make much difference and you can still have wonderful feminine power statues in a culture which oppresses women.

[29:12]

Oppresses, yeah. I mean, I'm sorry to say that's the case. Insofern machen diese Geschlechtsunterschiede keinen großen Unterschied und man kann dennoch großartige Statuen haben innerhalb einer Kultur, die aber die Frauen unterdrückt. Okay, so this figure is a Bodhisattva. Diese Figur ist ein Bodhisattva. And Bodhisattva means Bodhi is enlightenment and Sattva means suchness. So it's a suchness enlightenment figure. And these figures are meant to give you the feeling in their posture of the power of this non-cognitive awareness. And you can see on her costume, her clothes, that the chakras are articulated by her jewelry. that the chakras are expressed with their jewelry.

[30:33]

And their arms and all. It's all organized in ways which have to do with your energy system, which is called the chakra system. And the main iconographic detail which indicates that it's Avalokiteshvara is it has a Buddha in the headdress and the headdress also is this chakra okay and if it doesn't have an Avalokiteshvara in the headdress it's probably a Maitreya But early statues of Avalokiteshvara, not that you need to know all this, the earliest ones sometimes didn't have a Buddha in the headdress.

[31:56]

But the early statues of Avalokiteshvara, so not that you have to know all this, but these early statues normally had no Buddha in their hair. So strictly speaking, this is an enlightenment, a statue representing the quality of enlightenment That arises from wisdom and is expressed as compassion. Because in Buddhism compassion is an expression of wisdom. It's not about love and feeling and stuff like that so much. Es geht dabei nicht so sehr um Liebe und Gefühle und so weiter.

[32:58]

It's when you know that all things don't have separate identities. Sondern wenn du weißt, dass alle Dinge keine getrennte Identität haben. Interrelated manifestations of the world. Yeah, which we call that wisdom. When you embody that, the way you treat other people, we call it compassion. So we don't really have... You have versions of the golden and silver rule. The golden rule. Do you call it the golden rule in German? Depends what comes now.

[33:59]

I can't get a brander. Do unto others is what you would... And the so-called silver rule is don't do unto others what you don't do done unto yourself. Oh, that one I didn't know. Okay. Okay. That doesn't really exist in Buddhism. Let me try the safest. It's just the negative. Don't do to others what you don't want done to yourself. Okay. Okay. But of course versions of it exist in Confucianism and Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth. But that's not the emphasis. That's a way of being human. We should do that. But in Buddhism this emphasis on compassion is more like Do unto all as it is due, D-U-E.

[35:21]

Aber hier im Buddhismus ist diese Betonung des Mitgefühls eher, behandle alle so wie es angemessen ist, würde ich sagen. Do is like what something's deserved. Yeah, the thing I translated now is appropriate or something. Do unto all things as they should be treated. So Dogen, for instance, says, treat everything as if it were your own eyesight. Okay, so how are we doing here? Could be worse. Anybody, somebody else, please, yes. In your talk just now, you spoke about the right and the left brain.

[36:41]

And in my semi-sleep, I got the impression that you... In your semi-sleep while I'm like... At least you're honest. At least you're honest. That you associated the left brain with Western culture. Yes, I did. and the rights with Asian. I also associated with artists and scientists and so forth. What kind of qualities do you associate with the left brain? Well, for example, if you do a kind of ECG, is that what it's called? EEG. EEG. If a person is counting, it's the left brain.

[38:03]

If a person is estimating, like how many jelly beans in the jar, It's the right brain. So when you try to feel you're into a problem, it's the right brain. When you think your way into a problem, it tends to be the left brain. And since I'm so interested in art and science, I've spent quite a bit of time with physicists and microbiologists and mathematicians and so forth. And when they're trying to solve a problem which has never been solved before, you can't think your way to the solution because there's no pathway to it.

[39:15]

Wenn die versuchen, eine Aufgabe zu lösen, die zuvor noch nie gelöst wurde, dann kann man sich nicht an die Lösung, zur Lösung hindenken, weil es da keinen Weg gibt, an dem entlang man sich denken kann. The process seems to be to get all the information you can and then you just kind of grok it. You use the activity of the world to carry your thinking. And the best people at this I've ever met... You can call them up. Everybody's trying to solve a problem and they can't solve it. I remember we used to call Gene Liu, who was a Chinese person, and ask him, he'd say, just a minute, and he'd suggest something like that, and you'd use that and it'd solve the problem. Because he could feel the equations.

[40:28]

Yeah, and so this is A way of being human which we don't emphasize as much as yoga culture does. But maybe you're tired of hearing about all this and feeling like an inadequate westerner. But in fact it's just one of our human possibilities that we now have available to us. And the main purpose of it in Buddhism is to free you from mental suffering.

[41:28]

Which is, believe it or not, possible. Okay, someone else? Yes. You spoke about compassion and you've repeatedly emphasized that it doesn't have that much to do with feeling. Yeah. My right brain is listening to what you're saying in German.

[42:31]

Now can you help my left brain? Okay. I think I do understand that it has to do with an embodied basic posture, and yet it's interesting to see that people experience it as in response to seeing suffering and as a feeling in response to emotional happenings. Yes. Those responses in Buddhism would be called Empathy or something, not compassion.

[43:33]

Compassion is a kind of technical idea, probably mistranslated as compassion. I mean, compassion in the etymology in English is something like with feeling, to feel another person, the same feeling, to feel with another. Okay, but I used to say in my early days of practice, because that didn't work, it meant something more like combed out. C-O-M, comb. Like combing your hair?

[44:34]

Yeah. Combed out, evened out passion. Because the emphasis is on being present with equanimity to the other person, not necessarily doing something. So, for example, the Bodhisattva would, if somebody's suffering, right? The first thing the Bodhisattva would do would be to create a mind that doesn't have mental suffering. And show or demonstrate that to the other person and try to bring them into a mutual mind which frees them from suffering. But there's lots of little rules about these things.

[45:45]

The first thing you give them is money. Or you give them food. Or you give them shelter. And after you've given them all their needs, then you show them the mind that doesn't suffer. And Hannah and Ulrike? Hannah and Ulrike. I spoke at Rastenberg about the four Brahma Viharas. The four immeasurables. Now do you mind if I speak about them again? So I'll only start with the first one.

[46:48]

And then we'll go to lunch. The four immeasurables are preparation in a sense for the six paramitas which are the craft of realizing enlightenment and compassion with others. Okay. Now... Look, I'm sorry, this has been going on for 2,500 years, this teaching. So I've got a big basket of 2,500 years here to thinking about these things. And we have two and a half years. One and a half days.

[47:49]

And I reach into the basket and I take something out that took 250 years to develop. And I expect you to grok it immediately. Okay, sorry. Okay. But this is a good example of the craft of practice. Do you know the technical term peripersonal space? Peri is like perimeter, around you, personal. So if you give a monkey or a human being a hammer, The brain thinks, says the arm is that long, the extra length of the hammer.

[48:53]

If you give Andreas a Porsche, he knows exactly where the fender is. Okay, so that's peripersonal space. Das ist peripersonaler Raum. You have a bodily sense of your instrumental extension through a tool. Du hast ein körperliches Gefühl für deine instrumentelle Ausweitung durch ein Werkzeug. So, that's just one simple example of the sense that our... Presence, which is more than our body, is not limited to the boundaries of the body. Okay. So the first, the four immeasurables. Die vier Unermesslichkeiten are unlimited friendliness, sometimes translated as kindness, and unlimited empathetic joy, and unlimited equanimity, and unlimited compassion.

[50:26]

Okay. Now, this is a very accessible practice. Which you can keep yourself busy for the next year or two. Or really, your lifetime. Okay, so I'm going to only start with unlimited preeminence. Ich werde nur mit grenzenloser Freundlichkeit beginnen. Now you try to practice unlimited friendliness, which includes being friendly to yourself. If you can't be friendly to yourself, you can't really be friendly to others. You have to love and like yourself and so forth. I mean, I could be better, but I'm not so bad. So, now, to practice unlimited friendliness, first, every time you meet somebody, an animal or a human or whatever, you try to just be fully friendly or fully kind

[51:48]

You try it out. And in meditation, you imagine you're being friendly toward the front. And you sit and you imagine being friendly to the space in front of you infinitely, as far as you can imagine. Now, you're kind of working with peripersonal space. You're beginning to actualize or actuate the bodily extended presence. Which is a kind of mutual body with the world.

[53:11]

Now, again, Heidegger says, Dasein, everything is being with. There's no being. It's only everything is being with. Heidegger sagt, dass alles Sein mit ist. Es gibt kein Sein allein, immer Sein mit. Being with others. Being with the instrumentality of phenomena. Mit der Gebräuchlichkeit, mit der Art und Weise, wie die Erscheinungen gebraucht werden zu sein. Being with the instrumentality of phenomena. Okay. So you extend this feeling as far as you can imagine in the front. And then after you've done that as much as you can, You imagine this unlimited friendliness and acceptance and openness reaching as far as you can imagine in the back.

[54:24]

And you do this rather mechanically. First to the front. You can do it in any order you want, actually. But first to the front and then to the back in some pattern. Du kannst das eigentlich in irgendeiner Reihenfolge machen, aber sagen wir jetzt mal, in irgendeinem Muster, erst nach vorne hin, dann nach links, and then to the right. And as you explore the space around you, you can also fool around and say to yourself, where is my mother? Und während du diesen Raum um dich herum erforscht, kannst du dich auch fragen, wo hier steht meine Mutter? And if you call forth your mother, you'll find usually she's on one side of you or the other. If you call forth your father, they may be on the opposite side or maybe beside your mother.

[55:28]

So part of practice is clearing up the psychic space around you. Okay, so then you imagine as far as you can to the left and then to the right or vice versa. And then you imagine this friendliness extending and kindness extending as far as you can below you. Into the earth. And then you imagine it as far as you can upwards. This is really a being with practice. Awakening our mutual body that's with you. embedded in phenomena and with others.

[56:42]

And simultaneously supportive of and inclusive of our own individuality. And then you imagine all around, in all directions, this friendliness. Yeah, that's seven directions. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. So you practice this until you really have a feeling of the space around you as a tangible presence. And then some unwary, grumpy person is walking along the street. And they happen by accident to stray into your friendly presence.

[57:56]

And they immediately start smiling and they don't know why. And you really will find, if you practice this, you're walking in the city and people start smiling at you. But since people are cooking in the kitchen and you're the tenso and we don't want them to be frowning at us, let's go to lunch. How good to be here with all of you. Thank you.

[58:41]

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