And then I could think about other things. Important thoughts. Anyway, while I was doing this, I noticed that, see, I was flipping through the pages and I'd count the number of graphs because they stood out against the type. And then I would put them in a pile with the right number of cages. And then I noticed that as soon as my hand touched it and my thumb touched the edges, I knew how many pages were in it. And then I experimented. If I tried to put my hand on, I'd say, okay, how many is it? And then I experimented. I had no idea.

[01:04]

I couldn't be sure how many. But if I just put my hand on it and put it in the pile, I was always right. As soon as my thoughts interfered, I didn't know. But if I just kept the activity and the information in the stream of the body, I just did it. My analysis of it at the time was that my finger my thumb gauged the weight and the distinction between 61, 62, 63, et cetera. But now I think it might have been more subtle than that, but that was part of it. In other words, for some reason, I studied as a young person perception.

[02:07]

And studying perception, I began to notice that my body knew things that my mind didn't and vice versa. And that my mind as thoughts couldn't process the subtlety of the information that my body knew as another level of thought, another kind of thought. Okay. So, as they say in the teaching of Vipassana meditation, Your body responds to your mind. And your mind responds to your body. And your body concentration and intelligence concentrates your mind. and vice versa.

[03:39]

So in this context, body is given equal weight with mind. Okay. So that distinction is clear. And both Western culture and Buddhist culture make the same distinction. But the emphasis is different. And we give more preference to the mind and less to the body. Buddhist culture gives the same weight to the body. Now I'd have to say this is different from Asian culture. Asian culture gives emphasis to the body more than Western culture. And it's more just naturally by habit, a body culture. And body cultures tend to emphasize relationships and space.

[04:41]

And mind cultures and thought cultures tend to emphasize things and time. Okay. But this as a developed practice of giving them equal weight is specifically Buddhist. So this is a language you can learn just like an Asian can learn it because it's not Asian, this is Buddhist. So this is Buddhist language in that body and mind are given equal weight. And so the word body and mind are the same but the weight is different and that's where the language really is.

[06:02]

Okay. Then in this kind of division, speech is seen as arising from the mind like a stream, like mind turning into speech. And body is seen, excuse me, and speech is also seen as body turning into speech. So you have two streams of speech, body and mind, flowing into one stream of speech. So they're called mysteries because this ability to bring the two streams into one speech is a mystery. Now the beginning of this Heart Sutra, the title in the first part of it,

[07:06]

is called the samadhi of profound appearances. Because there are appearances, form is emptiness and prajaparamita and wisdom and all that. But these appearances are profound because they go like that. And like that, you know. You don't have to translate that. And they tend to, they're profound because they tend to make definitions and merge definitions. Okay. So in this sense, when your speech, we can say, I'm trying to keep it in recognizable units so we can talk.

[08:19]

So we can say that when speech is arising from the body, it's more mantric. And in the body, in the speech, you can feel the knowledge of the body. Not just the knowledge of the mind. All right. So assuming the body knows things like... The hot water tap is hot, and there's 63 pages in this. And knows many other things. Again, I'm just trying to give simple examples. If we study, if we took a film of this room right now, and slowed it way, way, way down in a deserved movement like that,

[09:31]

And you'd see that my eyelid movements are coordinated with your eyelid movements. And at a very basic metabolic level, our bodies are now coordinated. are coordinated. It's not simple synchronicity, but it's simultaneity. It's not just synchronized like a dance, like we've trained ourselves to do all the same things. But what's interesting, it seems that it's simultaneous. There's not like I do it and then you do it because there's a delay. It's that we both do it at the same time. Now in the most refined martial arts, there can be no contact. Because you can establish immediately, if you have enough control over your metabolism, you can establish control over the other person's metabolism at a distance.

[10:45]

Just in a simple way, in a conversation, you can affect a person's ability to leave the conversation or stay in the conversation or feel uncomfortable if they leave by your body. So my body knows your state of mind quite well. It's more difficult and complicated for me to think about what that state of mind is but my body knows it. And your body knows. So that knowledge can come into your speech. But it comes into your speech in the pace of your speech, the feeling of your speech, the tone of voice. Okay.

[12:11]

So... Oh, God. I mean, Buddha. Oh, God. Okay, David is a musician and I've been interested when I listen to music how incredibly together sometimes, most music is more or less together, but how incredibly together sometimes the music can be. I would say that from my way of looking at it, the notes aren't together, the space is together.

[13:21]

And once the space is together, the notes can appear anywhere and it works. Okay. So, when I'm driving along in my car, or a car, listening to music, when I hear a piece somewhere in the middle of the piece or near the end, when they really are together in that sense, I find it very gripping. I mean literally gripping, it grips me. And then I think how gripped those musicians must be. I think musicians have more access to a kind of mutually generated ecstasy than any other artist.

[14:27]

And I would guess that musicians get kind of hooked on this feeling. When you and the instrument and you and other people create a kind of connection. Okay, now it's thought in Buddhism in the terms of social architecture that it's at this realm that culture is created. Now, you can create culture through language and books and thought and all kinds of stuff. Museums. But we have a need for this other kind of connection that occurs in marriage maybe. And with friends.

[15:30]

And there's a person here who's a Bhagavan. Yes, yes. Well, there you are. Okay. I think that, again, the Rajneesh Bhagavan community... was able, at least in Oregon and Pune and maybe in Germany, I don't know, was able to create a kind of ecstatic connection between people. For many people, the teaching, they didn't even know if the teaching, this ecstatic connection was very satisfying. Now, our society is very ambivalent about this. And I've pointed, as I pointed out before, Socrates' sense of daimon. Which is kind of close to Buddhist ideas.

[16:42]

Of each person's individual luminosity and power. Of each person's genius, own genius. that Socrates talked about as being the source of one's ideas and things. As I've also pointed out often, Einstein speaks about getting his ideas from feelings in his body. And this is excluded knowledge for us. And maybe Einstein's genius was to pay attention to it.

[17:43]

And then in Christianity, this sense of daimon, of Socrates, literally becomes the word demon or devil in political Christianity. Because Christianity, at least political Christianity, feared you having your own power. Power was out there. But there's a tremendous shift in our culture where this daimon becomes democracy, named Das, to give you individual political power. What's about the Jews, for example, Hitler? Yeah, that's why we're afraid of it.

[19:03]

But I think we have been talking about ecstasy, people, and if you look at Hitler and the masses and the ecstasy he has created, so as a German, how can you experience ecstasy without being afraid? You want to say that in German? When you look at Hitler, he talked about ecstasy, the struggle between people. This is not exactly to the topic of body, speech and mind but it also is. Or it very much is. Because you will have a hard time practicing as long as you fear it. You know, as I told you the story yesterday about the woman who felt pleasure coming up, didn't I?

[20:24]

Are we in Switzerland? I said, no. Okay. The problem I see is that you can't suppress it. It's a fact. And maybe a culture for some centuries, which is a short period of time, I mean, my lineage stretches to Buddha 2,500 years ago. And that's through 90 people. About twice the number of people in this room. So on the one hand, millions of people have been Buddhists.

[21:25]

On the other hand, this teaching has been passed through only 90 people. And each of the 90 has an effect on it. So... You can, a culture for some centuries, can work out techniques of suppressing such things. Of ignoring the body. Or of using words like, what are we doing here? We're breathing together. What's the word breathing together in English? To conspire. Conspires breathe and con is together. At least in English, we fear people who breathe together. They're conspirators.

[22:25]

But with our contemporary society, and with education and media and so forth, which is an incredible force for democracy, I think. I agree also with Marcuse. It's a subtle form of oppression, too. However, I think you can, if we look at China again, what we're having is more and more people who won't be followers. We have more and more people in the world who will think for themselves. And it's going to get harder and harder to get soldiers to fight their own people.

[23:30]

That's my opinion. And in Poland, where I was a while ago, they can't actually trust the Polish soldiers to oppress the Polish people. So they have a special force called something else? that they hire out of prisons. They commute, they shorten somebody's prison sentence and say, if you'll serve in this special, you want to be in prison ten years, you can serve in this special army for four years. And they actually give them psychedelics to get them. And that group is the one who suppressed the Polish strikes because they can't trust these 19-year-old drafted soldiers to do it.

[24:33]

Okay, so we're having a society where more and more people are thinking for themselves. It doesn't mean we won't go through more things like China is going through. But I don't think it's going to be easy for a culture to suppress anything after a while. Now, Asian culture has lots of things wrong with it and it's the group mind that's kind of unpleasant. But they've chosen a different route in how to deal with this sense of communion. Okay, so all I'm trying to do is teach Buddhism. Let's solve the world's problems this afternoon.

[25:43]

Okay. It didn't translate that. We can't solve the world's problems this afternoon. I don't think we should even try. Okay. But the point I'm making is that Buddhist culture tends to make distinctions that join, not separate. So body and mind are not pointed out as different. Body and mind are pointed out in such a way they can be joined. And they're joined through speech And then speech is understood in a much wider sense than our usual understanding of speech To mean all activity and communication And there's some differences then when you listen to a Japanese person speak

[27:03]

First of all, they have a word called harage, which means belly talk. And they feel they communicate with their bellies. And I always, I mean, I've imagine this little meeting with German and American businessmen fiddling with their yellow pads and pencils. wondering why the Japanese don't start talking. What are they doing? And they're all sitting, lining up their tummies under the table. Till they feel they've got... I mean, this is businessmen talking. Till they feel they've got metabolic control of the room. And a kind of subtle control of the agenda.

[28:17]

And later the German and American businessmen by saying, why didn't we bring up, that was on the agenda, why didn't we discuss it? Well, when we came to that point, I just had no energy for it. Because the Japanese actually directed the energy towards something else. Now I've turned this into a little joke but what I'm saying is more or less true. And it comes from another kind of culture than ours, much different than ours, more different than we realize. Okay. Okay, so distinctions are... I'll stop for a moment.

[29:19]

Distinctions. You have to allow me a little pleasure here. Distinctions are made so that you can join the distinctions. So pointing out body and mind allows you to join body and mind. That's basic to all Buddhist thinking. And if you understand that, you can read koans and you can understand the sutras much easier. So meaning shifts behind the words. Sometimes you can call body mind, and sometimes you can call mind body.

[30:40]

Because the words aren't so attached, because they're always meant to join, so you can start shifting them around. And I don't want to explain that further, but it's true anyway. Okay, all right. So now we have speech, which is arising from the body and arising from the mind. And speech is extended to mean all activity. And again, giving you an example of Japanese speech, if you listen to Japanese talk, The inhales and exhales are part of the language. The pauses are part of the language. In ways that is not true in our language. So it's kind of... They make noises, little things that we exclude from language.

[31:51]

And if they make a nasal noise breathing in or nasal noise breathing out, it's very much part of the language but not in the dictionary. And they tend to tune in outside sounds which we exclude. For instance, if there's a song being played out there, We concentrate on our conversation and we exclude outside noise. And Germans, I believe, are the largest purchasers of earplugs for sleeping in the world. Because Northern Europeans in general want to stick to one subject at a time are technically monochronic and not polychronic.

[33:00]

Chronic is time, multiple time or single time. And Northern Europeans look down on more polychronic cultures like Spain and Italy All those Austrians, they're never on time and they're dirty. I'm not German, but I imagine that's what's said. But it's possible, it's valuable to be both, and it's possible to be both polychronic and monochronic. So a Japanese businessman will have his cork-lined office for meeting with Westerners. Then he'll go, as soon as the Westerners leave, he'll go out and have his desk in the middle of 60 other desks, even though he's the president. Because he wants to be in the information sea.

[34:21]

And if he's having a conversation, he or she with someone, If there's a song or something going on outside, it's referenced in the conversation. It's not excluded. And it's very business. I mean, if I'm sitting there, if I'm sitting with some people in a restaurant... And I reference outside noises. Well, like this airplane that went by just such and such. No one heard it. Yeah. Anyway, it's different. So the distinctions are made to join, not separate. And they're also made to join you and me, not just join my mind to my body.

[35:28]

For instance, if my body stream is appearing as language and my mind stream is appearing as language, and language itself is its own stream independent of body and given equal weight so you have a language stream a mind stream and a body stream all appearing as language that allows me to connect with your language and your speech in a different way than just talking So it's thought of as bonding just in a quite similar way to musicians bonding through creating something together, playing together. Das ist eine Art und Weise, eine Bindung herzustellen, vergleichbar mit der von Musikern, wenn sie zusammen spielen.

[36:45]

So my body and my mind and my speech are more connected with your body and mind and speech through this. And that's another reason they're called the three mysteries. Also mein Körper, meine Rede und mein Geist sind verbunden mit eurem Körper, Rede und Geist. Und wir haben den Kontakt über diesen Strom und deshalb wird es auch diese drei Mysterien genannt. And then it's also thought that there's the macrocosm and the microcosm. And the whole phenomenal world can be understood in these categories of body, speech and mind. So you establish a connection with the world and with other people and yourself through these distinctions. These distinctions that join. And I think we try to come close to that in the theater, in music, and in cafe society. I think people actually get together, having a meal, to try to establish that kind of rapport.

[38:04]

And how good the food is is in one sense not so important. But if there's attention to the food at the same level as there's attention to the conversation, whether it's simple food or refined food, we create a situation that we find quite moving. So all I'm pointing out is society tries to do things like that. And I think it's not accidental that Freud and Wittgenstein and others developed a lot of what they thought in the Café Society of Vienna.

[39:08]

Many architects of Jugendstil and so forth. So you create a sense of a larger body. A larger identity that we only tentatively recognize. But Hitler recognized... who is certainly some sort of genius, and very involved with magic, and with the occult, and who adopted the swastika from down the line, Tibetan Buddhism, And so you can release a demon in the culture, or you can release a bodhisattva in the culture.

[40:12]

And a maha bodhisattva, a great bodhisattva, is when a group of people create an enlightened larger identity, which enhances the whole population. So I think it's important that we understand this kind of larger societal identity. So Hitler's and Stalin's don't get control of that process and we don't know what's going on. Now this kind of language has often been known by an elite in the culture. Actually, Jefferson and Washington and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine actually used a kind of genius like I'm talking about to create America.

[41:31]

And Paine's ideas influenced the French Revolution and England. But now we have more people being aware of this metaculture. And Buddhism has metaculture teachings. And I just think it behooves us as individuals to understand these things. And I hope the group of you create the increased likelihood of enlightenment in culture here in Munster. And have more of you who can recognize a Buddha if a Buddha appeared. Anyway, it can enhance the sense of enlightenment or bodhisattva living here in Münster.

[42:50]

Maybe he's already here, living in Munster. So anyway, you can see how the sense of defining things so they emphasize how they join. the sense of defining things, defining things, emphasizing how they join, leads to a sense of a larger identity that you can participate in than just your individual identity. and emphasizes the skills of passing culture down, not just truth now. So at this point, I can only wish you good luck. I hope you have fun with some of this.

[44:12]

And it's now 1 o'clock. And can we come back at 2.30? And start out sitting. And we'll probably still end at 5 or 5. You don't have to translate that. Why don't you try? And you then let it fade. I'll start out and then I'll let it fade. Can you want to say about the fade? So it's... And as you drop your voice a bit, everyone picks up overtones. And an overtone will start floating over the whole group. It's quite marvelous. It hums like it buzzes. I've actually never seen Westerners get it.

[45:35]

I mean, I've been chanting with Westerners for 30 years almost now. And even in rooms which have good echoes... Westerners just don't quite get how to do it. But you go to a Japanese monastery and they just can create this overtone hum that's quite wonderful. Because they don't want to hear it, they want to feel the sound. So that's how these bells are designed. They're not meant to sound with something for your ears.

[46:35]

They're meant to be hit like it was a big belly or something. So you can hear a wah, wah, wah. Can you feel a kind of buzz in your ears with it? And if you pay attention to that, you can move that feeling into your body. And if you pay attention to that, you can move that feeling into your body. Now the quality of that lasting sound is what they're aiming for.

[48:01]

And these bells, you see all the little dance in this bell? It may be faked. But in the best bells, and this may be a good one, it's got a nice sound. And in the best, and I have the impression that this is a good one here, you start with a flat piece of metal and it is hammered out. So it is blown up like a balloon. And it takes months to make one. One old man will sit and watch him every day. And it takes months and an old man is very long busy with it. I priced a bell in Japan recently. And let's see if I can remember the bell about the size I paid $4,000 for in 1970. It was a bell that cost $4,000 in 1970.

[49:01]

is now about $25,000 or $30,000. And they're out of any price range I can afford anymore. And then the stand costs another, usually almost the same. But they are very carefully made and take a long time to make of one person. Anyway, and the Chinese learned, you know those funny shaped Shang Dynasty bells that are shaped like this? They're shaped like this with a thing and like that, and they're not round, they're oval and pointed in the corners. They're made to produce, I think, four sounds inside that meet and then produce a fifth sound, something like that. And they're based on an understanding of acoustics that we didn't understand in the West till in the last 15 years or so.

[50:35]

But probably they got to it by feeling the vibrations, not by listening with their ears. So while our Western cultural genius went into science and many things, their interest went into things like this. So this bell is meant to, you physically feel it and then the chanting you feel and that feeling you communicate with others. It's certainly not chance that the primary form of communication among the free-thinking people teenagers of the world, it's probably not chance, it's not chance that the main form of communication among chance

[51:56]

among the free-thinking teenagers of the world is rock and roll. And popular music. I mean, you go into the... I've been hiking in the mountains outside Belize in Georgia. outside of Georgia, in Tbilisi. And you find these Russian kids in their summer camps singing American songs. They can't even get access to the tapes. This was back in the 70s. Okay. So, and this is called a mokugyo. And mokugyo is... Wood. And yo in this case means sutra and fish. So it looks like a fish. But what's a sutra fish?

[53:10]

And it's actually shaped like a heart. It's meant to sound like a heart. So with the heart sutra you have this heartbeat going underneath it. But you really can't use it with English. For many years we chanted the Heart Sutra with this and it completely destroys the English rhythms. So let's try it again with the Mokugyo. I'll do the introduction here, Makahanya, and then you come in. So I'm going to do the overwriting here, and then Can will do it together. Maca, Anja, Anita, Stinjo... Thank you for watching.

[54:13]

Thank you. Thank you for watching. Yakumulatukduidwushatokobodaisatayayanyarabizalhoshumupyegimudyajantromu.

[55:41]

Thank you. As they die, jinn should say die. Y'all should say more. [...] Hey, you guys are pretty good. That was fun.

[56:43]

Did you enjoy that? This gorilla grunting? So now I haven't led service, so to speak, in many years, so I may forget how to do this, but... I'll do it with the bell this time. And the Heart Sutra can be chanted also with a drum. And it can be chanted much faster than this and slower than this. But we'll do it the way we're doing it right now. Generally, you also hold the sutra card this way, your little fingers. And it's all, again, yoga posture.

[57:46]

You hold it a certain way, a little space under your arms, like you could put an egg there. And so... Chant Chant Chant Thank you. Thank you for watching.

[58:57]

Thank you. Hey, hey, [...] hey. Thank you. Thank you. So that's a peephole into my life.

[61:01]

There are better things to do for a living. Okay, that was fun to do with you. Thanks. So let's try it now in English but I won't use the mokugyo. And this mokugyo has got a good sound but it's a little sharp. And I think if you had a striker which had, you wrap cloth around this, it would make a better sound. Make it more soft. Make it more soft, yeah. This is a little hard.

[62:03]

And a good striker is made just bound cloth, very tight. And then, of course, they have huge ones, big monasteries. You have to use both hands. And they actually tell the time of day and what's going on and what building by all of the different sounds. In the Japanese monasteries, all activities are shown, also in which places they are, through these different sounds of these different instruments. And so in a big monastery, you'll hear a big drum go, boom, boom, you know. And over here, you'll hear a boncho, which is a bell like this, which hangs and goes, boom. And some other building, you hear, boom, boom, boom. And you can tell exactly what time of day it is. pretty close, and what activity is going on in what building.

[63:13]

Because different buildings will have different sound equipment and it's coordinated different ways. So you live in this world defined by sound and activity that you can hear all the time. So I think, shall we say it in English once first? I think maybe... Mahā-prajñā-pāramitā-dāyā-sūtra.

[64:17]

Avalokiteshvara-pusisattva. With practicing deeply the prajñā-pāramitā, perceive that all Thank you for watching. feelings, perceptions, and imbalances, consciousness, those I understand all about, stop my presenting as they do not appear, not disappear, I'm presenting it all to you, do not increase, no decrease, therefore, in emptiness, no form, no feelings, no perceptions, no imbalances, no consciousness, no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind, no color, no sound, No smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mine, no ring of eyes that take no blame for my anxiousness.

[65:22]

Though we are very close, no host on this station, I'll get up till no one is yet at the door, so the rest of you can slide it close. I pray, no entreaties, no study, no laughs, no competition, also no team that would rely on to take the world inside, but it depends on what your power is. This fight is so big, but it's not all that you can do. There's no fear, it's just far and far from where you go, but it usually goes in your honor. It depends on who you are, so what it is, it depends on what your power is. And the thing is, it's just so big, but it's a great place. They are the born of the Prashnavārīs as the great transcendent mantras. This great great mantra is the outpost mantra. This is the supreme mantra, which is able to relieve all suffering and destroy all loss. Those are the great great mantras of Prashnavārī, the mantra. The great great mantras of Prashnavārī, the mantra.

[66:24]

You all know English a lot better than you know Japanese. Or this Japanese-Chinese that this is. But she did a much better job of chanting Japanese than English. You can see that the sounds that English is made up of are much more difficult to turn into this overtone chanting than the Japanese. But I think it's important to chant it in English or German for you in your case. Because if you chant it so your body just knows it, No feelings, no perceptions, no impulses, no consciousness, no eyes, no ears. Your body just knows it. It'll tend to pop up in circumstances when it applies.

[67:48]

You'll find yourself either dreaming about it or in some situation, suddenly it'll come up. No origination, no path, no stopping. So anyway, this kind of teaching is good to expose your body and mind to it in this way that you know it physically. It's a very nice bell and I don't know if I get it in my suitcase, but... And it's surely good.

[68:52]

As you open yourself up to a multiplicity of cells and modes of being conscious and aware, It's the practice of zazen which creates the territory for all this. If you don't have any territory to participate in this, then you're pushed around by these things which push up into your thoughts but aren't something you're aware or conscious of. So I'd like to have some questions or comments or statements about what you felt or what has occurred to you during the discussions or the meditation.

[69:54]

Or anything from your life. You can even tell me the name of your mother if you'd like. If you remember. At least I'd like you to say something. so I have this staff which Suzuki Roshi gave to me and it has the peculiar power of making people speak when they have it in their hands So I'm going to pass it around.

[71:14]

It only gets passed to those people who haven't said anything yet. And I expect it to loosen your brain and your tongue. The name of my mother is Christa. The name of my mother is Christa. Thank you very much. I have a question. We talked about words this morning. If I have understood this correctly, then the center of our practice is the sitting, the zazen. Can it not be that the words can also stand in the way? Can it not be that words like samadhi or enlightenment can actually stand in the way of pure sitting, in the sense that one can actually cling to such words

[72:25]

She can't remember too much now. Okay. One thing I have to claim towards, and if you identify with thought forms as real, and you identify with thought forms as yourself, as your own identity, then you have a problem, a quite serious problem. But you wouldn't even know much about zazen without the word zazen. So words that point us are okay. And as Dogen said, don't let the sutras turn you.

[73:31]

You turn the sutras. So if you turn the words, that's okay. But again, there's a general confusion in the West because of our tendency to think of one identity. that as Buddhism says not talking is best you believe that and all Buddhism says is not talking is best sometimes And they also say talking is best sometimes. I mean, Zen is the teaching outside words and letters. And it has the largest capacity It uses more teachings, more sutras than any other Buddhist teaching.

[75:16]

So sometimes it's good to have a state of mind which is free from thought. And sometimes it's good to have a state of mind in which there's thinking but you're free from the thinking. Sometimes it's just fine to think and enjoy yourself. So why don't you pass the stick? Let's go back and forth this way. I think you've spoken already. No? Okay. Well, people who have already spoken, I'd like their questions to come later. Okay, go ahead. Yes, I'll say it first. In meditation I have the feeling that I become an observer myself. I often have difficulties in my everyday life.

[76:18]

How do I act? How do I become active? This difference from being an observer to becoming more active. During meditation it happens that I become a witness and my problem or my difficulty is then to step out of this being a witness again and become really active in my everyday life. Can you comment? Yeah. I think that's actually quite usual and natural during the first year or two of practice. As you become familiar with this third space, it's neither waking nor sleeping.

[77:23]

It kind of changes your relationship to working and activity and so forth. In fact the general advice is for instance if you're an artist or a musician or a writer is that you stop painting or writing or your music for a couple years. And then you start it again when it comes back to you from another basis. Because art is, because one of the main characteristics of art is to create art outside the confines of narrow self, you create a kind of subtle self which maintains the narrow self as the basis for the self which paints.

[78:47]

And then you invest the self that produces the art with status and needs and so forth. So the kind of self artists have, which is a self that frees itself from self, continues self subtly. Yes, so artists get the illusion they're free from self. So, in other words, it's quite natural to change your relationship to activity. And during that period, it would be common in an Asian country to go into a monastery or retreat for a few months or a year or two. And then the life there helps you start to find basis for action outside the personality

[79:52]

in a different personality basis than they used to have. So there's actually some skills in this that one has to learn. But if you just make an effort If you have an intention to not be a witness all the time, and if you can keep that intention with you, you'll find ways to do it. Okay. Maybe we could open the window again. Yeah. Have you spoken? Would you like to? Well, I ran into one difficulty.

[81:09]

One of the sentences of the sutra, I got hooked up to it, and it mixed up with my spaghettis and with my meditation. And this was the sentence... perceived that perception was empty. And the first reaction was, well, that's a typical thing of a philosopher who didn't reflect the position he went out from. Because if everything is empty, also the proposition is empty, but also his perception is empty. But to come finally out of this difficulty, if you say, well, I take it as a hypothesis, but I can't think that he comes out of some other hypothesis, so I went on reflecting and telling me, well, perhaps his kind of perception is a sort of more encompassing sort of perception, something like the thing synthesis, synthesis, synthesis, that means, which includes, but when I,

[82:27]

said to me, well, that can't be true because it's empty. On the one hand, it's not empty. So I am, sorry to say, I'm standing before a wall and there is perception, which is perception, and perception, which is not perception. Yeah. Do you want to say that in German? It's sort of the pretzel before the wall. It's sort of the pretzel before the wall. And now the consideration, or my consideration first, if this is the typical case of a philosopher who has not thought about the foundation of his thinking, if not all perception is empty, his perception is also not absolutely correct.

[83:38]

never ties it together. Well, there is the typical path of philosophers from this difficulty. We say, it is a kind of hypothesis, let's try it out. Where does this Avalokiteshvara come from, from the Samadhi? That is, he has experience, he will probably not want to confront us with a hypothesis. That is, What is it then? Is it then something, for example, in the Hegelian sense, something that, so to speak, is a higher kind of perception that includes, so to speak, the lower form of perception, which is empty? But that can basically not be the case either, because here it says, on the one hand, perception is empty, on the other hand, my perception is that the perception is empty. And now I stand for the fact that There is perception, there is no perception at the same time.

[84:42]

Well, this is not only a fundamental question, it's fundamental particularly in Western philosophy. And David Hume, I believe, no matter how far he got, he always found, whatever level it was, was perception. So when he reached that point in his own thought, He went and had a piece of cake and coffee. And Dogen Zenji said, think non-thinking. But the important point in what you're saying, I think, or let's just say the methodological point is Buddhism's view is not just to look at the question at the level at which the words indicate its existence but that you picked up on this phrase

[86:24]

For some reason you picked up on this phrase. So that you don't treat the phrase intellectually, you treat it like a mantra. It's one of these funny shaped hooks that you don't know what kind of fish it's going to catch. And sometimes we get hooked on the hook and we're kind of hanging it out. And... So in Buddhist practice this is called a critical phrase. It's called also huado or turning word. And certain things will pop out of a sutra or out of your own life or out of a song. and for some reason stay with you.

[87:37]

And the Zen, the Buddhist teaching is basically the unity of wisdom and method. Because in the end, Buddhism is an artifact. as a painting is an artifact or yourself is an artifact so that there's wisdom and method and the method in this case would be to stay with this phrase The way, for instance, a pure mathematician might stay with a certain formula that he can't figure out. It's an unsolved problem. Until in front of the grocery store or something, something pops up. Or you find yourself actually acting differently and the different action is the answer.

[88:53]

So if you're practicing Buddhism or practicing in this way, When a critical phrase pops out like that and gets mixed up with your spaghetti and turns your brain into pasta, you simply... You think about it as much as you want. But mainly what you do is stay with it. You just stay with it. Again, as I said, with a dream of which you don't know the details necessarily. Okay. Have you said something? Oh, yes. Yes, after meditation it happens very often to me that I can't look clearly, so I have some difficulties to read for 10 to 15 minutes.

[90:05]

Okay. Have you ever taken a nap in a car and the cloth on the ceiling you can suddenly it'll get, you can see the little holes in it enlarged because your eyes change their focus, you know. So when you have shoplifters come in, you know, they're stealing for their baby. You should have a little Polaroid camera at the door which says, we'd like portraits of people who are stealing for their babies.

[91:07]

Yeah. Just the camera and the little sign would probably discourage some people. But, you know, this sense of compassion is... It's not a moral thing. We're compassionate because we're not independent. It's a fact of our existence. And also it's part of practice. So since we've been talking about body, speech and mind, there's also the seal of body, speech and mind. And it's the same idea as this kaji, which is there's the pulse of coming and going.

[92:22]

But yet how do you seal this pulse without containing it? Without containing it. So it's this spacious state of mind like giving your cow a big field. So there's also the sense of the three bodies of Buddha. the Sambhogakaya body, and the Nirmanakaya body, and the Dharmakaya body. And the Dharmakaya body is related to, in practice speech in mind, is related to mind.

[93:23]

And the Dharmakaya body is the body of space and that's sealed by emptiness. Okay, I'm just giving you a feeling for this. And the the the body is sealed by the Sambhogakaya body. And that's the body of bliss and energy. And then speech is the body of the Nirmanakaya body, the body of activity and of teaching and of appearing in the world. And that's sealed by compassion. In other words, the sense of this teaching is, the more you are actively, spontaneously overflowing like a fountain,

[94:40]

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