Ulrike, do you have anything to say? I feel that this drawing actually speaks to me. Mm-hmm. And so I feel this kind of, the drawing is still going on, sort of in the field between the paper and myself. Mm-hmm. So it's a kind of, I had work going on and one little thing I'm quite amused about it is that looking at the drawing I realized that I have some kind of eyes in my knees. Especially during the sheet I have a lot of sensitivity in my knees and somehow question how to put my mind in my knees or maybe I put my mind in my knees or whatever is kind of arising.

[01:05]

So I notice that this drawing that I made speaks to me and that the process of drawing continue in the field between the sign and me. What makes me very happy is that I realize that there are two eyes at the point where the kneecaps are and I notice that my knees are very sensitive. Well, you can read in meditation texts it'll say very specifically not to notice colors. as such things in your meditation.

[02:16]

But what does that mean? It means there are colors. So it's okay actually to notice them but not to get involved with them as some kind of special meaning or something like that. But it's just like noticing your breath. I mean, and eventually we want to breathe in such a way we're not noticing our breath, but at first you notice your breath. So we need some way to become more subtle in relationship to our body without thinking about it. So we need to find some way to notice our body or to develop a subtlety. And the traditional way is the four elements or five elements.

[03:32]

But again, you could take anything. Almost anything. And there will be some responsiveness to whatever you bring at a non-conceptual level. There will be some responsiveness. But the tradition is to go through these four or five elements because it's not because there's exactly a difference between a solidity and...

[04:38]

fluidity and heat and air and space, but because they allow you to look at yourself a little differently. And I think for the average person this is not much use, you know. But if you're going to practice meditation, it's quite helpful in making your whole body, mind more absorbent. And it's a part of being able to locate your sense of continuity and being in various places other than your conceptual thought. So is there something else?

[05:48]

I'd like to have a little more discussion if anybody wants to talk about something and then we'll take a break. And then come back and we'll do a meditation. Can you say that again? But also it's a kind of funny security. Because you begin to know, as Ulrike said, your inner topography. And knowing that, you can kind of feel at home more when you have more unusual states of mind.

[06:53]

Isn't it also a healing process if you, like, when meditation things just come up, and they should come up the way they do, and just not only try to deny, like, whichever color something appears, because colors can also be very healing too, so. Yeah. You might be exactly like what you need at the moment. Yeah. As long as you don't feel someone's looking over your shoulders interpreting. Yeah. Do you think it makes sense to kind of stable or carry this aspect of fluidity or would you emphasize just to realize where you are and be competitive? You want to say that in Deutsch? No? Maybe it's not necessary. But I can barely understand in English, so... Well, that's one of the advantages of this kind of practice.

[08:37]

If you start sitting and you feel very solid or kind of heavy even or whatever, you can identify that as solidity, say. Then you know what's missing. So you can see in the solidity itself a kind of fluidity. So again, you can do both. You can just pay attention to whatever it is. Or you can see if there's some movement there. And if there's some movement, you can change things a little. But if it goes right back to solidity, then fine. But the effort to change something is also part of uncorrected mind. But the... In other words, if it occurs to you while you're sitting, I'd like to change.

[09:55]

Well, do you correct that by saying no? It's a kind of... It's something you have to get the feel of. When you're doing too much to change something or when it's okay to change something, it's a kind of art. Okay. You want to say something? Yes. I've always difficulties with those kind of feelings in my flesh, my bones, the theme covers. It's what I'm doing in my job to create a new personality.

[10:57]

I'm doing that every day. And then I put it together to form a person like that and stuff. Okay. That way. And it's a figure of a play put together. And I start seeing all kinds of fairy tales. All of a sudden, when I concentrate here, there are stories coming up. And for me, it's the opposite of what I try to concentrate on when I'm doing satsang. Because then I try to be simple, and it's very useful to me that I have only one practice to count the rest of time into years and years. Every once in a week, I concentrate here. As soon as I change it... That sounds good. What happens?

[11:58]

Maybe that's an interesting point for me because I can't bring myself together with my play. Well, you're being an actress. It's in the neighborhood. The state of mind is not far away. But it's completely different. I can't go from that. When I'm coming back from the seminar and I have to place, I have to turn, I sit upside down. I can't do it on stage. I'm out on stage. Well, a sense of acting in... In the Buddhist tradition, I can say something about it briefly, if you'd like. It may be the same in the... In the West I can only tell you what I know about it. And it relates to what we're doing here so I can say something about it. It's like I said that the practice of compassion is compassion first of all for the person's ego.

[13:01]

And there's suffering. And the second kind of compassion is compassion for a person's physical stuff, their skandhas, vijnanas, sense fields and so forth. And the third is compassion for what can't be seen, the space of them. And their unseen histories. Their history as an enlightened person as well as their history as a deluded person. In the sense that we have a history Each of us has a history of an enlightened person that we haven't acknowledged or noticed that that's the case.

[14:32]

So to use the word compassion may be too limiting a word. It's a way of relating to people in three different ways. In other words, while there may be suffering at the level of ego, their body is going along quite fine. So you can relate to both. Okay, in a similar way, when an audience comes into a theater, they are primarily in their exterior consciousness. And you want to establish your character as an actor within their exterior consciousness.

[15:38]

So you come out on the stage and you come out the stage really in their space, not in your character's space yet, or not in the space of the stage barely. Or you may do something dramatic, but you're sort of working with their exterior consciousness. But what you're trying to do is draw them into the interior consciousness of the character and then back into the exterior consciousness of the character. So you move from the exterior consciousness of the audience to the interior consciousness of the character into the exterior consciousness of the character which is no longer the exterior consciousness of the audience.

[16:54]

I didn't get it. You got it. And then In developing the exterior consciousness of the actor, of the character, you can go into the interior consciousness of the character and bring the audience into their own interior consciousness. Okay. I'm not so experienced. I know, it's difficult. It's difficult, these distinctions, yeah. So, do you want to say that Ulrike? No? No? So, if you know these things, if you are familiar with them, it makes it easier for you to do it yourself. So if you know more about your zazen posture and practice, in other words, like Eric and Michael, you've gotten used to sitting a certain way.

[18:09]

And then every now and then it's good to stir that up. And then go back to sitting the usual way. So this kind of practice on the four elements is a kind of stirring your practice up. And hopefully, as it says here, what... You may sport with the line on the pole. So in the verse on the top of the second page, it says, opened up the mind ground meets itself.

[19:28]

It meets of itself means it meets through itself, through being itself. So there's this sense in this koan too of stirring things up and yet basically coming through that to greater clarity. So let's sit for just a moment and then we'll have a break. But I meant to say earlier in relation to what Monica said, but really the idea is actually just to learn it as a chant without paying much attention to the meaning.

[20:30]

And then as you know it, in your own language, but just as a chant. Its meaning begins to work in you. Strange, I've had a number of people who even had Only knowing the Japanese have the phrases that are most pertinent to what's happening to them come up in Japanese as they recite it in their mind. But I could say that if I lived all my life, all my teaching could be considered an explication of the Heart Sutra.

[21:43]

Word for word. Okay, so... I'd like us to sit and practice with this next of the five elements. And I'll try to say as little as possible to keep Eric happy. Well, you'll see that the amount I say is very little affected. Maybe it will be one word less or something. I really do consider it a delicate matter to interfere with your sasen.

[23:51]

And if we had more time together, I'd just say a little bit now and then to each of you. But I want your zazen to develop when I can't see you, so I have to give you this medicine. So of course fluidity is in some contrast to solidity. The sense that the Phenomenal world and you are both made of solid elements or earth and fluid elements or water or liquid.

[25:20]

And liquid is also water. I mean movement. So of course we can start out with the obvious liquid wetness of your mouth. And if your mouth is very dry, you feel really dry. Your whole body feels dry. And if you are very thirsty and dry.

[26:34]

If you just have a little bit of water or drink, it makes your whole body feel better. It's almost like the body's water surfaces in the mouth. It's like maybe a spring for your body's water. And you can use your mouth to monitor the feeling, the overall feeling of your body in the sense of feeling dry or at ease.

[27:45]

And fluidity and wetness is also the wetness of your eyes and your lids and feeling of your eyes in your sockets. And of course the blood in your many vessels. And this you can feel as a pulse in your arms and hands and actually throughout your body you can feel the throb of your pulse of the blood through your veins. And you can really feel this pulse that the blood vessels in your body cause everywhere. But the thought of enlightenment or the vow of enlightenment or the vow to realize, to realize each person you meet,

[29:41]

This vow is often considered to be a liquid. Even a liquid like a sexual liquid. Some kind of elixir of the body. And that's because words or vows which arise from the feeling consciousness have a, like intentions, have a kind of fluidity. And now also projects or promises or intentions that come from the sensitive scandal, they have such a kind of fluid nature.

[31:12]

When we chant, one of the things we're trying to do in chant is to turn the words from solid to liquid. We might say song is liquid words. So here this sense of the water element or fluidity also includes thoughts and words and thinking as liquid. Not words that keep their separate identity, but words that permeate your body. And not words that keep their separate identity, but words that penetrate your body.

[32:45]

So you can begin to feel transitions from thinking which is very conceptual and really is of the earth element or has a quality of solidity. And thinking which is more liquid. When I said in Zazen, let your conceptual mind sink into the sand like a liquid, This is a real feeling of the liquidity of our, liquidness of our thinking and feeling and emotions.

[34:28]

And begins, then we begin to see why people are We identify blood and being hot-blooded or warm-blooded or something like that, but we identify liquids with feelings. So your whole body can feel now, from outline to outline, can feel like a fluid thing. Even your ribs, which we forgot earlier,

[35:30]

which are quite solid and hold your whole chest. But starting with the lower ribs, the floating ribs only attached, you can feel a fluidity or movement and going with your breath and lungs. The bones themselves, all your bones have some movement and flexibility in them. The more you feel that, the more you'll be able to sit comfortably in sasen.

[36:47]

Because the rigidity or fluidity of your bones and body is influenced by the rigidity or fluidity of your mind that you bring to your body. The nervous system, too, and the energy that moves in the nerves is a kind of fluid or liquidness. And through this kind of practice you can begin to notice how there's not such a sharp division between solidity and fluidity. And you can begin to transform one into the other and back and forth.

[38:07]

It's the ability of the body, fluids and the muscles and the bones and the nervous system and thinking both fluid and solid. And the whole of our body, the bones, the muscles, the nervous system, the solid, the liquid, our thinking, both solid and liquid, you can begin to feel more these merging with each other and separate and together. And then you can begin to bring these together with the heat of consciousness, a kind of fire, and you're actually turning yourself into a kind of alchemical, you know, energy flask or something.

[39:47]

The sense these energies, sometimes solid, sometimes fluid, sometimes as heat or fire, moving from form to space, This is the territory where bliss begins to arise. In which your interaction with the phenomenal world's own solidity and fluidity and heat begins to become more subtle. So we say these elements have always existed together. But through enlightened concentration they become separate, they become distinct and then co-emerge or they rejoin each other.

[40:54]

And the many dimensions of this co-emergence are what is meant in the koan by how do we attain union. So when you count the breaths you're taking something that it's really just one motion and you're dividing into parts. And noticing the elements of the body and mind and phenomenal world is just another form of counting the breaths. You notice the parts, everything equally.

[42:50]

And then let them all rest in the equipoise of non-discriminating, non-discriminated space. So this fluidity of you can be concentrated or relaxed. Brightened or dimmed. You can touch everything or it can be sealed. This is a way of expressing or experiencing ourselves and manifesting ourselves.

[44:20]

It's not implied much in our language. But it's entering the world through yogic practice. And bringing the world into our experience through yogic space and insight. Last year when you asked me to stay here longer and not just do one seminar, I decided to try to...

[45:31]

See if I could have a space with you that wasn't the same as the excitement and pressure of Sechin. Or the intellectual stimulation of a seminar. Dogen Zenji says, you study the way with your body or you study the way with your mind. And almost always, certainly in seminars, we are studying the way with our mind. And this primarily means studying the way with the sense perceptions, consciousness, the five skandhas, awareness and so forth.

[46:53]

So it's a kind, but it has a kind of dimension of, even though the five skandhas and the vijnanas are not the intellect, It has a dimension that stimulates the intellect. So in order to get some things across in seminars, what I usually do is I create... a number of ideas. And as I've said several times, that ideas are a way of seeing. As long as we don't get careful, but it's also what we see.

[47:54]

And it's a way of seeing as long as we don't get caught by what we see. So anyway, I don't think of the seminars as being at all intellectual, even though they're intellectually stimulating. There's a kind of intellectual crust though to it. So what I decided to do in this midweek is sort of take the intellectual crust off the practice. and create, see if we can have a time here which is more like the ordinary time in a monastery, which isn't sashin time.

[49:16]

It's a kind of time which is very, I find very subtle and satisfying, but takes a little time to get used to. It doesn't get... The transition from being in a mind in which you're stimulated by the daily life and the radio and activity to a life in which there's not much stimulation is a little difficult. You know how even if you're not bothered during the day by much you know maybe there's You're in your apartment by yourself, and so you're pretty free.

[50:36]

But still, deep at night, it's different than during the day, even if during the day you weren't disturbed. You can feel the rest of the world has settled down and you can think in a different way, feel things in a different way. And the kind of space, monastic time I'm talking about is to night time the way night time is to day time. It has a kind of deepness like being at night, but even a night time seems busy by comparison. Everybody has sort of sunk into themselves, but also into each situation.

[51:51]

And your sense of needing stimulation is really diminished. Maybe once a month you think, hey, I haven't had a beer for a few days. Or, you know, some such thought. Maybe it'd be good to go into town if I could pick up something at the store. And if you know town and Crest Town, it's, you know... It makes Rostenberg look like a major city.

[53:11]

But it still seems very exciting down there. You saw two or three people who you didn't see very often walk across the street. But it's actually a very special kind of time once you get the feel for it. You see, Dogen Zenji says again, the true body Is the bones and marrow beyond consciousness and unconsciousness? The bones and marrow beyond consciousness and unconsciousness. So we could think of our stream of consciousness as being kind of horizontal.

[54:26]

Kind of moving picture show. And what you need to do, because the body has its own intelligence or its own mind, What you want to do is sink out of this horizontal stream of consciousness into the body. But the problem is that for the most part the teachings of the vijnanas and awareness and skandhas actually are creating a kind of consciousness space, mind space in the body.

[55:27]

It's a little bit as if, you know, through these practices you created a kind of hollow space filled with awareness in your body, and that's dasasana. But when Dogen talks about the body studies the way he means not awareness or consciousness but rather each cell in its form, not in its emptiness, in its form studies the way. Anyway, so I thought this weekend I would try to lower the intellectual content of the weekend. And depend more on what you suggested and also what our bodies told us to do.

[56:49]

But it takes time, I guess usually more than just two or three days, to have our bodies start creating a kind of teaching space. And I thought I'd try it as an alternative to sesshins and seminars. Sesshin, the schedule and the many details of how you do things structure the exterior time. and actually are a tremendous support to your unstructured interior time.

[58:12]

But when your interior time and exterior time doesn't have much going on, it's a little more difficult. And I think we also... Can you do that again? See, when we enter this kind of space I'm trying to talk about, very small things become interesting. Quite funny.

[59:20]

Because it's partly because you're entering, you know, to cast this in ideas, perhaps, is you're entering more non-referential states of mind. And the quality of what bliss or joy or buoyancy of mind Or as I talked about this weekend, the rising mind. These are non-referential states of mind. They come up when there's no cause except being alive. If there's causes and And if the mind is drawn toward this or that idea, non-referential states of mind are not possible.

[60:33]

So when you begin to have a kind of time that you're living that's pretty non-referential. The way you experience things is different. No, I have a feeling that we have some, in general we human beings, have some resistance to psychological and, what should I say, spiritual states of the body. We can deal with athletic states of the body and mental states of the body.

[61:34]

But just straight old body states where the mind of the body isn't yet recognized but is kind of waiting for the opportunity. Not just boring, but slightly threatening. They kind of burden us. They make us feel funny. So in this seminar in addition to kind of taking intellectual content out of the seminar, I'm making a small concession in this talk. and proving what a bad teacher I am.

[62:46]

But in addition to taking intellectual content out of this mid-week seminar, or at least reducing it, I also wanted to give you some ways in which to let your body be more vertically absorbent. In the body's own terms and own language and not the language of consciousness and awareness and sense fields. and to the conditions of the body itself and to the body consciousness and not to the conditions of consciousness.

[63:46]

Now, I don't know if I've said this in any way that leaves you some opportunities to say something, but if you'd like to say something. Since you asked me to, you all voted to have a meeting tonight, so you must have had something you wanted to do. Yes. I didn't feel that I'm lacking sensation You were saying that it would be very good to be here, hear your talk, and just let me drop in and read some kind of style or a script there.

[65:26]

It's where you explain sometimes in Vienna how it's part of your captain. And that's the idea. I thought that the cooperation is on top of that. I have a question about what you've been saying, and it's a kind of... I thought that if you want it to naturally somehow, thinking, questioning about what you've seen, I understand. Thank you. Oh no, I think I should do it tomorrow.

[66:40]

If we, you know, if it makes sense to do it. Yeah? Several planes? Yeah. one is the physical plane which may enjoy swimming or which may not enjoy sitting sometimes. Especially when the physical body is not enjoying sitting, there is another plane which isn't less real but kind of more subtle, which does enjoy it, which gives the sensation ease, or sometimes even joy, and that simultaneously. And I can feel it as a bodily sensation too.

[67:42]

And then there is another plane of the body, which is hardest to describe because there are no discriminations in that body, which is very which is mostly personal to me. But sometimes it's hard to shift from one plane to the other, to get them together, to differentiate between them. Yeah, just being aware of that is helpful in practice. But not really doing anything about it, but being aware of it. And making more precise your awareness, but not doing anything with the precision.

[68:47]

I think it would be good if I tried to give you a feeling for, if I can, what is meant by the body in Zen practice. Now, this is particularly the, I would say the contribution to Zen that's particularly been made by the Japanese, the development of Zen. And especially of all, of course, Dogen, who has really developed the concepts of body-mind. And Dogen is the most recent kind of genius or surpassing presence in our lineage.

[70:00]

And there's been no great figure in Zen since then, really, except for Hakuin. And Dogen's the 13th century, and Hakuin's the 16th century, I think. So the next great presence in Zen is, development of Zen is really waiting. There used to be a television program in the United States called The Squeaky Door. It was before television, you know. And it started with this door going... And then it said, the squeaky door. Hmm. So anyway, the next development of Zen or surpassing presence in Zen is waiting for you guys.

[71:48]

It's possible. I'm not just giving you a Hallmark card. Do you know what a Hallmark card is? In America, all the commercial birthday cards are made by a company called Hallmark. So when you say that, it means it's not a false sentiment or something like that. Okay. Now, in the West, we've tended to think of the body from Platonic and Christian traditions as something wild and irrational, needing to be tamed. And in... more contemporary traditions, the body is tended to be viewed as some sort of desouled mechanism.

[73:07]

Of course, this is being the big change, and this is coming with the New Age movement in the United States and Europe. Which almost goes so far as to say, if you have a body, you don't need a mind. And in a way, Dogen almost goes that far. Cool. Now, again, as I said to you last night and earlier, I've never really tried to create the conditions for or means or language for teaching so directly about the body.

[74:17]

And in the book I'm writing, I do spend about a third or more of the book just on posture and so forth. And my decision to give so much space to posture was to imply these things but not talk about them directly. And my decision to write so much about Haltung came about by explaining these things in a hidden way and not speaking directly about them. Yes. Yangshan says to Kueshan, because Kueshan asked about his understanding, and Yangshan said, if you're asking about my active understanding, I don't know.

[75:40]

If you ask about my perceptual understanding, it's like pouring a pitcher of water into a pitcher of water. So in both these cases, these are Chinese masters, but they're really speaking about I guess what we could call understanding through the body. Even though he says perceptual understanding, he means perceiving through the body. Now naturally enough, Well, in Berlin, Heidelberg and here at the seminar this weekend with the psychotherapist, I tried to develop

[77:18]

I did find ways to develop this, to teach about a distinction between interior consciousness and exterior consciousness. Although it sounds like things I've said before, but it's actually significantly different and more precise. Although some of this is difficult for people, usually again because it's just too much all at once. And I know the experience because in my long conversation with Hans-Peter Doerr and David Finkelstein, Each of us had to stop the other and say, now say that again slowly.

[78:32]

Because although if one of us was introducing a new idea, it wasn't that we didn't hear the words, but we needed a certain amount of time to feel each unit of the words. So if I can create a way or a teaching where people can feel each unit of the word or the, you know, Then people get the basic idea pretty quickly. So we can make a distinction between primordial mind, awareness, interior consciousness, And exterior consciousness and re-educated exterior consciousness and so forth.

[79:42]

And I think we can talk about this and get a feeling for it because we are really in some way conversant with the idea of consciousness, unconsciousness and so forth. Conversant means able to talk about, have a conversation. Or able to think about. But in the end, there's a kind of tyranny to this.

[80:42]

In other words, I mean, from the point of view of trying to make the teaching of Zen fully understandable. Because even though awareness is distinct from consciousness and interior consciousness is distinct from awareness, new ideas in our culture They still fall into categories of thinking that are familiar to us. But to try to talk about a kind of body, there's no word for it, intelligence that's like pouring a pitcher of water into a pitcher of water, we don't have any categories in which to think about this.

[81:48]

Now a friend of mine, many of you I've spoken about before, Michael Murphy, Tell me a favorite. There's a plastic bag right there. Could you bring me the plastic bag? And it used to be two or three times as big, and the publisher made him cut it down to a reusable size. And he starts the book with a quote from Rilke. And I'm sure it won't go back into the German of Rilke. We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can. Everything, even the unheard of, must be possible in it.

[83:05]

This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us. To have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable. Blake says, the body is a portion of the soul discerned by the five senses. And the first sentence of the book is, we live only part of the life we are given. And Michael's thesis would be, we live only part of the life we are given because of the tyranny of consciousness. So Dogen was trying to make the given part of the way we function.

[84:27]

And which Yangshan refers to as his active understanding, which if you ask me about it, I don't know. So it's an understanding known through activity, but not able to be known through reflection. And of course this is the basic way we all exist. So some of you might want to look at this book and you might want to order it. I don't know. It's quite an amazing book. He's got quite a lot on the martial arts and athletic things. And one very big section on the charisms of Catholic saints and mystics.

[85:47]

He goes into quite a study of how the Catholic Church studies siddhis or charisms. And he says they study them more thoroughly than any other religion in the world. He's got a lot on Vienna and Mesmer and early use of hypnotism and so forth. One of the things, you know, his own background is he's very intelligent, but combined with that was a lot of innocence. Having been born in California probably helped. Because there's a lot of freedom to think anything.

[86:59]

But also he was born in a little tiny farm town. I never heard of any of this spiritual stuff. And then he went to India for a year and a half. And studied with Sri Aurobindo. And became very interested then in parallel to that in athletics. And I think he's, let's see now, he's 61 or 62. And he's the third fastest person in the world over 50 in the mile. And he's now going, he thinks, now I should make an effort to be the second fastest. He's going to make an effort. So he trains a lot. He runs quite a bit, obviously.

[88:01]

And he founded S1 Institute, by the way. And through his athletic interests and his own practice, he began to discover siddhis that occurred through athletics. Yes. Well, one siddhi, for instance, is considered one of the eight powers in Hindu yoga, is to be able to see the interior of the body.

[89:07]

And we've been actually practicing it here. The attitude in Buddhism and Zen is a little different, but it's still kind of Siddhi. ESP, extrasensory perception, would be an obvious kind of siddhi. Okay. If you wanted to see something that's talking... Yeah. You don't want me to lose my point, huh? Well, for example, he discovered that there are quite a lot of runners who, while they're running, start seeing the interior of their body.

[90:11]

Arnold Schwarzenegger, do you know who that is? Terminator 1 or 2. A friend of mine said to me, if I hadn't been in love so many times in my life, I'd still look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Anyway, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was the top bodybuilder in the world for some years, told Michael that if you put your The mind into lifting weights, bodybuilding, if you put your mind into it, it's ten times more effective than if you don't put your mind into it. And there are other experiences, like runners sometimes come in for marathons, and as they come into the Olympic Games, and there's thousands of people, and as they run in, they see their girlfriend and their mother, and so on.

[91:29]

Hi, mother!

[91:30]

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