When you held your first lecture I was looking for a question and I sat and was all the time in my discursive thinking Finally I noticed it and I noticed also that my breath is flat and really up here and I sort of gave up finding a question then. And at that moment, my breath deepened. And that became a question that you suggested in a seminar a while ago. It's like, who's breathing? And then, like, following what is breathing. But this...

[01:03]

I noticed that when I'm asking these questions now, I have the impression that it would be discursive again. Now it's again in my head, so it went away. I understand. Very quickly. So probably the question is, how can I trust these feelings, or this feeling of breathing? Feeling is the wrong word. It's this getting together of of the question occurring and my breath. That's a good question. Yes, in German, please. Yes, so after the first interview with Rochelle, where it was about the questions, I sat down and

[02:15]

I tried to find a question that was almost comprehensive and compulsive, and it was all in my head, and my breath was very high and flat, and at some point I had the feeling that I was giving up on finding a question, and at that moment my breath became deep, and then suddenly came the question that Roger asked in a seminar a while ago, who is breathing and then immediately on what is breathing. And these colors have gone away again quickly and now everything is very, very in the head and very, very high again. Yeah. Well, like I said, speaking with Anita, the noticing is the most important thing. So you've noticed it. And, again, you have some intention.

[03:26]

And it is a yogic skill to be able to bring a thought that arises, let's say, from bodily knowing or from your breath, into your discursive thinking and not let it be taken over by discursive thinking. I have that problem giving lectures. I can't let discursive thinking get involved with what I'm talking about. When I do, my eyebrows get longer and longer. I cut them before every lecture. That's what they say.

[04:32]

You talk too much about Zen and too discursively. D.T. Suzuki, have you ever seen him? He whacks the ends of the knife. So, but that's just, you know, you need to have a feel in your breath, maybe. That's where you could start. Holding the question in your breath rather than your thinking. Maybe why we need think tanks. But I come back to that. But we'll get back to that later. Beate? I'm still quite engaged in Heinz von Foerster.

[05:34]

This morning I read something about his book about truth and that he is avoiding the word truth because in his call it concept truth doesn't exist because you have already drawn a distinction so truth in itself can never exist without the other side with the non-truth so and then That came then to my mind, okay, what is Buddhism all? Especially here we then were saying what's the meaning of our true nature, the true body, and in which is there also a contrast.

[06:38]

And another thing What belongs to that kind of thinking, I would say, was probably it has more to do, not to draw this distinction, Bernhard said it then to Heinz first, not to draw the distinction, but to proper the distinction. And I felt a connection to what you mentioned in your textuals, this releasing, always releasing. Is this meant in the sense of getting rid of distinction? At the moment I am very concerned with constructivism, one of Förster's works, and this morning I read a passage in which he says that for him the term truth is no longer used at all, because he says that truth can only arise through a distinction,

[07:51]

I think that there is a difference when you speak of truth. At the same time, there has to be the non-truth. He thinks that for every form of dialogue it is fundamentally very difficult to get out of this starting point. Oh, this is an interview, and Bernard Parkson answered him on this. There is a famous quote by Spencer Brown, he said, Dwarf's distinction and the universe comes into being. And Bernhard referred to this and said, then one should rather assume that one does not meet the distinction, but rather lets the distinction fall. And if they have been left to fall, whether that is something like that, Roschi has a lot to say. Come in, Sophia, come in. Yes, also from letting go.

[08:59]

What? Mommy, where's the bobby card key? Can you open it? Okay, okay. Can you open it? Yeah, that's all I'm doing. No, I think Marie-Louise ought to go, and maybe you can come. Thank you. Where's the bobby card? Finished? What I would like to add is what in this context I practice with it is I mean it starts of course with discursive thinking and then I try to turn it into let's say my body or my bodily experience or matches with my bodily experience and it's really interesting there's a point where

[10:25]

When I go, let's say, too deep in it, it really feels like I'm on the edge of an abyss, looking down and, ooh! So everything gets floating. Sounds good. It's not a nice experience. I know, but it's good. Changes in the wind. Okay. Well, first of all, I would advise you to be careful about bringing ideas from Heinz von Forrester, who was a friend of mine, or G. Spencer Brown and those folks. So if you bring... If you're going to... You know, if you're... Say you're a cook.

[11:32]

And you go to a restaurant. And you eat something. And you like the taste of it. Yeah, you can go back and try to bring that into your own kitchen and cooking. Yeah, usually that works. But if it's Thai food, say, you better really understand what's going on with Thai food before you bring it into your kitchen. It's very difficult. I mean, I can go in virtually any Japanese restaurant and tell you immediately that the cooks are Korean. Ich kann in irgendein japanisches Restaurant gehen und kann dir sofort sagen, ob der Koch ein Koreaner ist.

[12:56]

Because they really don't understand Japanese food and they don't cook toward the taste that Japanese food is about. Weil sie wirklich das japanische Essen nicht verstehen und sie kochen nicht in Richtung des Geschmacks, was japanisches Essen eigentlich sein sollte. So, now Heinz von Forster's work, he's a very, very intelligent man and a sweet guy. And his thinking is deceptively close to Buddhism. But it rests on a different foundation, as Thai food rests on a different foundation than Japanese food. So you really don't want to bring his idea of truth into your thinking. If you can study him thoroughly enough till you really understand what his idea of truth rests on, the whole process of what he means by truth.

[14:05]

You can learn from the process But it's not so good to learn from the conclusion. There's no question in a philosophical context, truth always has its opposite. But we're not in a... philosophical context. We're in a context like a tennis player more. Is this a true swing? Or was there something artificial in the swing and the ball didn't go as well? And there is a difference. So I can speak in the Eightfold Path of bringing breath into, as you brought it up, bringing breath into your speech. And if you bring breath into your speech, you bring your body into your speech.

[15:18]

And if the process is evolved, you will create what we call the truth body. Now the truth body means a body which has a difficulty in lying. Difficulty to lie. As the example I give, lie detectors work as often as they do because it's difficult to get the body to lie. And then you can find your own thinking is truer to what you feel. So, but this sense is like an arrow is true.

[16:39]

If you make an arrow that goes straight, and the word truth is related to that. I think in that context we can use the word truth or true. In diesem Zusammenhang können wir das Wort Wahrheit oder Wahr benutzen. But at the same time, if you said in Buddhism, is there a truth? No, there's no truth. Aber zur selben Zeit, wenn wir sagen, in Buddhismus gibt es da eine Wahrheit, nein, da gibt es keine Wahrheit. There's more. There's trust, but there isn't truth. Da ist Vertrauen, aber keine Wahrheit. Was you said? Magst du dem noch was hinzufügen? That was it, more or less. No, it was this releasing. Yeah, the releasing is, you know, you can take that as I said yesterday, I think that's what you said was right about that.

[17:47]

No, it looks like we're going to have to do what we did yesterday, last time. is continue tomorrow if you want to, or I can give another teisho tomorrow. So tomorrow is the last time we have a discussion. Or I could see each of you in Taisho tomorrow, I mean in Doksan tomorrow. And the rest of you can sit in the Doakson room and listen. So then we just do it in the Zendo. Then we don't have that. No, this is being taxed. So let's finish with Judita's question, especially since last time she went to the funeral and didn't say anything.

[19:02]

Let's finish with Judita's question, because it was her last funeral and she couldn't ask any questions. Yes, I'm interested in this knowledge, the car and knowledge, what Roshi was talking about yesterday, the physical knowledge. I'm interested in this knowing, know and knowing. Knowing and knowing. Can notice and notice. And I have asked myself, have I ever made such an experience with my body? And I remembered that I'm playing a sort of game with myself when I'm for the first time in a new city. I let my body guide me where it wants to go. Right, left, straight ahead, without a map, without a map. I let my body lead wherever my body wants to go, right, left, straight on, without a map.

[20:27]

And thinking myself into that, I noticed that my discursive mind has to be out of the way and that my body has to be ready to go into that, yeah. And my body also then, doing that, my body has another tension as an opposite when I go in a normal way. And that reminds me a little bit of this body posture in Zazen. When I hang there sometimes because I can't do it otherwise, then I don't have this Zazen feeling. And that's a little bit when I'm hanging around in zazen. Hanging around in zazen. Like my body cannot just... And then I don't have this zazen, this feeling for zazen. Yeah, yeah, I understand. I'll bring you a cappuccino during this. And I have now the question, is there inside and outside...

[21:50]

connected at that moment, so that we would actually have to switch it around or turn it around, that from the outside it comes to me. The question is, is inside and outside being connected or should I somehow switch it and let the outside come into the inside and let the outside take over? Yeah, exactly. But it's like, you know, you go back to a city or some place you've been in the past. You haven't been there for ten years, say. And you try to drive your car by feel back to some place. Yeah, and I... It can be a disaster. Well, if you're with somebody like you in the car who tells me that Umleiten is a village.

[23:10]

I don't translate that. Umleiten. Umleiten. That's not a fair test. No, no, I want this experience. I mean, the city in ten years can have changed quite a bit. I got totally lost in Kyoto last time I was there. Because I know Kyoto in my body extremely well. But you need certain cues. I hadn't been there for ten years. And it was thousands of buildings where there were none. I mean, I was totally lost. Finally, I called up. He said, come find me.

[24:16]

I couldn't even tell him where I was. I couldn't read, you know. But generally I won't use a map in a city. I prefer to get lost. Well, you have Wilfred. I'm talking about walking. Before Wilfred. But if Marie-Louise is in the car, I get the most out of it. Before Wilfred. It's my global positioning system. He speaks with a slightly British accent, so I call him Wilfrid. Wilfrid is a German name, actually. Wilfrid's always telling me, he's always telling me, make a U-turn, I say. And Wilfrid always says, turn around, or please turn around, that's what it's called.

[25:16]

And Sophia, when she was learning to talk, would say, who's that man? But you can feel that if you're chanting. And you're chanting from... And you pick up the card, you try to switch to reading it. There's a little bit of a shift because it's coming from a different place. And if you go from reading to putting the card away, you've got to go into the the breath body of chanting before you take the card away or you get lost. And so you have to Yeah, you can ask, what knows the chant?

[26:33]

It's hard to say. Okay, now I'll let the Eno and others decide whether we have a tesha tomorrow or... Maybe this is better to do. I would have enjoyed trying to unmuddle yesterday. Maybe it's better if we do it this way, but I would also be happy if I could pull it out of the swamp a bit from yesterday or get something clearer, so from the topic yesterday in the talk.

[27:36]

Okay, okay. Thanks. Thank you.

[27:44]

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