and this is considered a kind of body intelligence a kind of body intelligence that moves at very high speed your body intelligence is very very fast and you can shift into this speed or this other kind of intelligence if you know how to make them move Now, it's what Michael has concluded from interviewing many athletes and so forth. First of all, most of them repressed the information. They wouldn't tell us. He had people talking to him.

[01:09]

He'd sit in the locker room with these football players and they'd start telling him things. The next day they'd say, oh no, I just had a couple of beers. No, no, shush, shush, shush. What seems to happen when an athlete is so highly trained that his body becomes extremely conscious. And he pushes, he or she pushes themselves to the point which is way beyond any normal consciousness. Quite often, another kind of consciousness seems to kick in. For instance, it happens in runners in the 200 to 400 meter race, particularly the runners themselves secretly call it tipping. Well, it's a code word for them when they suddenly feel like they tip off the earth a little bit and actually are just running through the air and not touching the ground.

[02:38]

They feel like they're floating. And of course there are traditions in both Christianity for saints with a special kind of walking and in Buddhism. One of the charisms recognized by the Catholic Church as qualification to be a saint is this special kind of floating walking. Now, this is not... Probably these saints were not among the fastest people in the world, over 45 in the mile. The flying nun. Can you see the road? Wow! So it's obviously an ability not... connected to athletic training.

[04:02]

But it's an ability which happens when your, see if I say, when your consciousness is fully absorbed in your body, there we've got the tyranny of consciousness again. It's consciousness which is doing it. So somehow we have to have some language which I don't know how to find which doesn't imply all of this happens through consciousness. An awareness appears to us But it appears to us in our consciousness, but not as a result of our consciousness. And among the greatest martial artists and tai chi teachers and so forth, you have many of these same qualities.

[05:05]

But the teaching of Zen Buddhism, Adept Buddhism, is that some of these things are, well, first of all, all of them are ways in which we function to some extent. And if you awake, if you enter your phenomenalness, the ways in which you are like the phenomenal world, these things function more clearly with more awareness to us.

[06:14]

Now, the purpose is not to develop special powers. Some people actually take it on to do it, but it's considered kind of, you know, a little bit greedy. And interferes with real enlightenment. But the feeling is, to take Michael's first sentence, we live only part of the life we are given We at least ought to live the life we are given. Which means you have to step outside of your story and your ego sometimes. It doesn't mean you can't go back into your story and your ego, but sometimes you have to be able to step out of it.

[07:32]

And I think we do sometimes. Like when you take a walk in the forest. Or go on a vacation. Or think, maybe I'll take a taxi to the airport and take the first plane anywhere. Or could I disappear for a year like Knut? Sometimes we fall in love in order to, as a form of trying to disappear. We think, did she change it? We think, well, I can't really leave this life.

[08:37]

I can't disappear from this life, but I can disappear into this other person. And this other person says, listen, I'm no magician. You can't disappear into me. I want you to appear and create a new life. Oh no, help! Then you have two lives to take care of. So this practice of... Getting to know your body in its solidity.

[09:40]

And in its coherence, water is things cohere, water brings things together. And in its gaseous quality, the things to expand, to separate. And the heat or the quality that puts things together. And these four are emphasized when you're speaking about the form skandha. To realize the form skandha. And here we're really talking about thusness, not as a psycho-physical sensation, but thusness as an actual personal knowledge of the way things work.

[10:44]

So thusness can be understood from the side of consciousness as a kind of a vibratory sensation of the quality or nature of each thing. But it can also be understood from the point of view of a direct pouring of the pitcher of water into the pitcher of water, a direct physical to physical. Avoiding what I'm calling here the tyranny of consciousness. Or even awareness. So, as I'm saying, we can understand these things through the metaphor of consciousness, you know, somewhat easily.

[12:06]

Through the metaphor of the physicality of things, knowing the physicality of things, this is much harder for the way our minds work to grasp. But that's in fact how all these things are communicating, how this forest lives. So one last thing before we take a break is Just to give you a sense of what I mean by these knowing things through the solidity, fluidity and, say, gaseousness. Sounds like, no. Yeah. What is gaseousness? Like gas.

[13:07]

It means the quality of gas. But unfortunately in English it has other meanings. Sounds like gassho or something. Yeah. Anyway, to give you another example of what I mean by the function of sensing things in terms of their solidity, fluidity and gas-like quality. You could make a you could make a case for writing a poem is turning words into liquid or gas. To take the solidity out of words. And the root of the word poem is quite interesting. In the limited sense it means to pile up, to make or to create maybe, I forget.

[14:26]

But the same root is also the root of Kaya in Dharmakaya, Samogakaya and so forth. So there's something else that many, many, if you look at the roots of words, many of the roots, there are many roots for to make. Or rather, there's many words, there are many roots which mean to make. But this particular root, for some reason, becomes poem and becomes the kaya, which means the subtle physicality which can carry spiritual reality. So when you say Dharmakaya, It means the body of the Dharma.

[15:52]

So if I said Giorgio's Dharmakaya, I would mean that quality of Giorgio which could apprehend and function through space as a body. And this isn't always such a big deal. It can mean very specifically that Giorgio as an architect can see a drawing and can physically feel the space of those rooms from the thing on the paper. A more developed form of that would be to douse on a map. Some people seem to be able to douse a map and find a body. And they say, oh, it's there. And then they go to that point in the map and there's the body of somebody who's been killed or something. So this is the sense of kaya, to be able to experience and function through space.

[17:05]

And Sambhogakaya is that quality of each of us that experiences non-referential bliss and joy. So it means that dimension of the body that is outside our conscious mind. So if I say Giorgio Kaya, I would mean some qualities that Giorgio has that are not his visible physical body only. Or maybe the soul known through the five senses. Now, the thing is, to get the feeling for this, it really can only be intuited through consciousness. It can really directly only be known through awakening the body itself.

[18:40]

So I want to go somewhere with this sense of language and I also want to talk to you about different kinds of attention. But you can see that to develop even one of these points very thoroughly takes quite a bit of time. So if I keep trying to bring my understanding of this out into the dissolving net of words, it may dissolve all over our tea and coffee break. So why don't we take our coffee break now? Shall we come back at 11.20, which gives us 30 minutes? So I'm not going to do Zazen, but I'm going to hit the bell once. Don't use eyes and just stop for a minute.

[20:29]

Habitat for cells and bacteria and so forth. It creates a realm or habitat for mostly beneficial to us organisms. Colder or hotter, we become sick or die. So the element of heat means that realm in which we maintain the habitat that brings things together. And each person has such a habitat.

[21:56]

And this is a wider idea than consciousness, because consciousness The habitat that our cells live in, that our cells flourish in, is not related to consciousness so much. So the term heat in the Prajnaparamita Sutras, which occurs very often, is a wider term than consciousness.

[22:57]

So heat means the realm in which things work together or merge together. Consciousness is a very powerful cooking pot within this larger realm of heat. And in practice you begin to be aware of the heat in your own body. And it's a heat partly maintained by the bellows of the lungs.

[24:10]

By the action of exhaling and inhaling and maintaining a certain reserve of prana. First breath. First breath. First breath. It's also maintained by an overall feeling of lightness and flexibility in your body.

[25:21]

If your body is too solid or rigid or dark in certain parts, then this heat, as a wider word for consciousness, does not penetrate all of our body. So your back is a field of light and intelligence and consciousness, for example. If you look more closely at the topography of your back, there's patterns of heat and coolness and wind in your back.

[26:26]

It's a big enough area that you can feel the gradations. But these gradations exist all over the body and throughout the body. These are the many eyes of Avalokiteshvara. The whole body is covered with eyes, even the interior of the body. Ulrika found eyes on her knees. So not only does each person have this kind of living habitat of heat, which you can contact directly in a way that doesn't go through consciousness.

[27:52]

But so does each tree or plant or leaf or even stone have its living habitat. Slow or fast, spacious or structured. Our gift as human beings is to be able to enter all the realms of the elements and flow back and forth among them. So it gives us an unparalleled connection with the physical world. This isn't one of the five senses, this is mirror body knowing.

[29:17]

So I don't know about the words but let me say that when your living habitat or spiritual habitat is most developed or maturing it is characterized by a feeling of clarity inside and out And brightness. And softness and fluidity. Now, may I say something that you told me at lunch, at break, about the maps?

[33:00]

It's okay? Okay. Giorgio mentioned to me that at the break that he did what I said about his feeling the space in designing buildings or in architecture was of course quite correct. But he also said that he's also, or actually Christiana mentioned that he's also able to douse on maps. So how did I know that? And we can ask, because I picked him out and mentioned it. It wasn't on my schedule to talk about it. Okay, now this kind of thing happens to everyone, it's not special.

[34:21]

But we can ask how it happens. Okay. Did my consciousness know it? And I think many of you will have the experience sometimes that I speak about something that's on your mind or you're about to ask. So what time is good? It's okay? So, now watch, we'll have lunch at two. I'm just teasing. We'll break it together. So the question is, did my consciousness know it? No, I don't think that's the answer. Did my awareness know it? Maybe, but I would say my awareness was only a passive participant.

[35:27]

We're talking about my knowing, you understand. So we'd have to say, I think if we tried to find words for it, that my cells knew it. I don't know what other word to use. Okay. Now, what is the importance of saying my cells knew it rather than my consciousness knew it? Well, one, I think that, you know, if you listen to your consciousness or awareness all the time, you're not going to hear everything. You have to listen at a more somatic level. And also, if your consciousness or awareness knows it, it means that my consciousness is listening to his consciousness, which means he has to know he has this ability.

[36:48]

So my knowledge has to know, my knowledge would know his knowledge that he knows how to douse on maps. But if my cells know it, then he doesn't have to know he has this ability. Which means I might be able to look at somebody and say, oh, you could douse on maps, although you've never tried it. So the question is, am I reading my ability? Am I reading his knowledge? that he can do this, or am I reading his ability that he can do this?

[38:05]

Do you understand this simple distinction? In this case the answer has to be both. But the most basic is reading his ability, not his knowledge. And there are two different things. Now, this kind of understanding or typical of Buddhism is to divide, is to take something that isn't divided and divide it into parts And what are the rules of dividing into parts? The rules are in Buddhism is that all the parts go back together. And each part can become the whole part.

[39:07]

It can become all the parts. So, if you look at the five skandhas that way, or the vijnanas, or the four or five elements, they're all divided into parts according to these rules. So, by dividing these things into parts, like as Yang Chan does, active consciousness and perceptual consciousness, Or a communication at the level of ourselves or communication at the level of awareness to awareness or consciousness to consciousness. This helps the way we activate this understanding. Now, we were talking about this the other day and Ulrike mentioned something about in school you knew what the teacher was going to say, tall on you.

[40:34]

And I'm almost certain if you hooked her teacher and Ulrike up with wires, that Ulrike knew he was going to call on her before he knew he was going to call on her. Because our cellular knowledge is much faster than our conscious knowledge. And if you were really a student who got good grades easily, you also knew what he was going to ask you and you knew the answer that was in his mind. This is a very big help in school. I used to do that.

[41:44]

I remember the teacher would... I'd be fooling around with somebody as usual. And the teacher would say, what is the date of something you should have given me a hard time? I wouldn't have any idea, but I'd look at him and say, 1878. All right. The trouble with this kind of thing is you can't control it. It happens sometimes and doesn't happen any time. It's something we have a delicate relationship to. But it definitely increases your general intelligence in the world if you let it happen. And Dogen has a whole section of teaching on it called the whole works. The rough translation is the whole works.

[42:49]

The W-H-O-L-E, works. In English, the works means, like if you're talking about an engine, the works means all the parts of the engine. So this translation of works has a kind of pun in it, because it means that it works, and it also means all of the things together. Mm-hmm. So what he means by, Dogen means by the whole works, is to work in the way the whole works. And that's a wider idea than heat, the way heat is a wider idea than consciousness.

[43:54]

Now, I said I'd talk to you about attention. Now, there's passive attention. We are in the world as if it was outside us. And this is primarily the realm of attention of the ego. And it's the realm of attention when our story is narrow. And we're mostly involved in the way it was and in the way it will be.

[45:41]

And these are, as I said last weekend, the definition of the ego in Buddhism is what gives permanency and inherency. Because if you look, it always says, there is no permanent nor inherent self. It uses those two words. And permanent refers to seeing the world in the future as predictable. So it emphasizes, of course, that the world is permanent in the present, past and future, but really the word permanent refers to the fact that the world will remain permanent and be the same in the future.

[46:50]

And inherent refers to the sense that there was an origin to or beginning to this self. That the beginning controls the present, so it was inherent in the situation. So when you're involved in a sense of the future, the past and the future, Isn't it interesting? I put the past on my left side and the future on my right. I'll have to study that. Reverse it. Okay. The past, when you have a consciousness which is defined by the past and the future, that's quite interesting actually because I can study the sense of darkness and light in my body in relation to which direction I think my body is going.

[48:09]

See, after all these years I just noticed that. Okay. If you do that, you really have a passive attention in the world. Because the world just exists simultaneously with you. Actually the world is gone in the future and gone in the past and we're in this little thing right here. Past and future extend horizontally from us. Okay. Now, another kind of attention is communal attention. And communal attention is culture.

[49:10]

The way we agree on how things should look. And you can look at the shape of any culture and how it shapes the individuals and people in it through a few big questions, like how do they deal with the question, what is reality? And how do they deal with the question, what is the body? And certainly the final arbiter of our definition of the body is the body as seen from outside. Not many people decide they are attractive from how they feel from the inside. Which is a much healthier way to feel you're attractive. We feel attractive in the sense that we see our body from the outside and that we imagine others see us.

[50:29]

Now that's a cultural or communal attention. Now, another kind of attention is a consensual attention. is that we together at this moment agree to think about things a certain way. And that's what makes a seminar work. If we agree together to look at something, a new kind of looking appears. If one person decides not to look, it changes the whole seminar.

[51:30]

If several people decide not to look together, then you have a consensual, not just an individual attention, but a consensual attention changing the fabric of what's happening in any situation. Now let me give you an example of this consensual attention that Eric Hino brought to my attention. Could you tell us what you told me yesterday and today? about the therapy, the family therapy, where there's a consensual attention and then people's bodies and minds begin to know things. You can say it in German because... from one of the therapists, you try to set up the original family and the patient stands up in front of the other people, representatives of his family, and also himself, and puts them in the room with the hand.

[52:57]

So don't think too much about it, just lead them with the hand, put them in one place, And then it works like this, each of those who were placed there, the others sit down and look at each other, describe from this situation how they understand each other, their feelings, how he feels about the other members, and then you see what happens. And the surprising thing is that this is almost always exactly in line with the family. And that, for example, certain feelings are physically very tangible. So that you feel pressure in your head, or that you feel cold on the one hand and very hot on the other, or up and down, that you are in pain, or that you are somehow worried about the other. And most of the time it will also relocate. or that one sees a person very high, or that everyone looks up at him, or looks down at him.

[54:04]

So, the whole thing is strange, and it fits exactly with Vanille. And the principle is to make it easier for the three to position the people of the family in such a way that everyone in this group is at ease with the situation in which they come. And this is a slow development, usually two or three hours, where different situations are explored. It is also surprising that the patient himself recognizes these situational parts, because the family itself also tries out different possibilities, how they express these problems, diseases, which you can also feel in some parts, that there is pressure somewhere, that a representative of another family actually has a disease at that point. In the end, the patient is placed in the same position as the patient in the bus stop. You can look at the whole round.

[55:06]

The intention is that the inner image can be narrowed down. that he then realizes that it can also be different. It is actually the case that the child does not actually change. Other family members, for example, behave differently to the patient in such a situation, but that certain problems actually no longer exist. This opening, this dissolving of this position also actually incorporates the inner formation with its external reality. I'm sorry, the child or the family is not in such a good condition? No, he is in a worse condition. It's just one thing, that he is in such a bad condition.

[56:09]

It's not the other way around. It's always about one patient. And every other patient has a different point of view and a different inner view. It sounds very intertwining. It is in this internal world that he works. Until then, no one, that is, while the text and the rest of the work has to be reflected in the beautiful work. The family members are all there, but there is only one solution. The main thing is to find a good solution for the one person. Otherwise, it can also be done by the one person. They are normally not present. Only the patient is present. Yeah, thank you. Did he add anything beyond what I implied?

[57:10]

No, it's wonderful. Yeah. So if I understood what he said, that these folks who are doing this were not the family itself, they acted out the roles of the family, And so through developing a consensual attention, they were not only able to know the cellular field, shall we say, of the person who was a family member, They were able to, in a sense, douse the map or douse the field, the cells of that person, and recreate their own family situation with the diseases and so forth that are there.

[58:22]

Not their own, but this person's. I mean, that person's own family who were not present. Now, this is what makes family therapy and codependent therapy so powerful. But I don't know how many people actually think about the fact that it means you're dousing the field, family field of the person and of people who are not present. Now, this is technically a siddhi. Now, this is a dimension of medicine that our establishment has actually no knowledge of.

[59:37]

At least at the level of the American Medical Association. So the ways in which we exist within each other is barely understood, you know, is little touched by our culture. Yes. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah. This is something much more astonishing, that when you speak about beings as existing, but they found out that it's possible to go into the higher intelligence An ally's works or afterworlds is a really overlapping of systems which you never could have thought before. So it's only your intelligence. That's also being.

[60:57]

Can you translate it? Georgi can translate it for himself. In German? So, what Ritzel is talking about is the field, the data. It is recognizable, because the family exists, that I can switch to this field. But what surprised me so much is that you can also switch to fields of higher intelligence, which are visible and non-existent, and only in hindsight you can then recognize that it even comes as a superimposition of systems. Isn't it interesting that we get into this sense of meta-intelligence or supra-intelligence when we talk about the body? And I appreciate what you brought up, and you brought up, and you brought up, and you brought up, because it begins to create a consensual attention to this subject.

[62:08]

And even when you bring up the idea that you were resistant to saying things, it still actually helps create a consensual intelligence. And a way to discuss these things together and bring up your own intuitions of these, we have to develop a consensual attention which breaks through the cultural attention. And that breakthrough is often preceded by a lot of resistance or denial or discomfort. Because we're thinking in categories that aren't accepted in our culture and our usual mind.

[63:35]

Now, I think you see the important distinction between a communal attention and consensual attention. Now, then you can also, I think, and you also can see how powerful, even magical, this consensual attention is. Now what does that tell us? It tells us how unbelievably powerful communal attention is. Because communal attention isn't just a bunch of people doing a little group therapy. Communal attention is our whole culture saying things are a certain way. You could say that the degree to which we are primitive beings, we are elevated by our culture.

[64:45]

I'm not sure I understood you correctly. Before you said to understand how powerful the communal attention is. But I don't see why the communal attention is powerful. I understand why consensual attention is powerful. Because communal attention is just a huge consensual attention. And it lasts longer. It lasts for centuries. Excuse me, but what is then the distinction between the two? In this sense, there's no distinction. A communal attention is a big consensual attention. Because you just said it was important to know the distinction between, that's why I got lost.

[66:00]

Yeah. Okay. A communal attention is a consensual attention shared by a culture. And within that communal attention there are small puddles of consensual attention. We've created such a small puddle here. We're like tadpoles in it. Tadpoles? The little baby frogs? And what Erich Ino was speaking about was a small puddle of consensual attention. Okay.

[67:05]

So, as I said, it's the cultural or communal attention of a culture which elevates us from being rather primitive and unformed. But to the extent that we are... What shall I say? Magical beings, the communal attention of our culture imprisons us. A culture creates its own living habitat which allows only a certain kind of development. A minimum and a maximum. So what Buddhist practice is trying to do is get you outside the habitat of your culture.

[68:12]

We're looking at actuality as it is, not just as it's defined. So what you have in a way when you shift from passive attention to communal attention to consensual attention is you have a shift maybe we could say in wave frequency or something like that. You have a highly condensed maybe in physical terms, a highly condensed, information-rich situation. And culture articulates some of that and opens it up. And consciousness and awareness articulate it in different ways. But where it's most solid and most fast is in the physical phenomenal world.

[69:23]

Where it's most information rich. So this is the point of and why Basic practice starts with first intuitively and then consciously working with the four elements. As soon as you do zazen, you're letting yourself down into, in a sense, the four elements. And more adept sasen develops the consciousness or modalities of these five or four elements. So that when you look at the world, it's like pouring a pitcher of water into a pitcher of water. And you can look at koans, these kind of koans, like this one I presented you, about wash your bowl, is the effort of the koan to take the structure of words and in a way turn them into liquids or gases.

[70:32]

So the words begin to float on the periphery of our consciousness. They've lost their structure. And they become like homeopathic doses. And they begin to permeate the way a gas does or a liquid does into things we don't quite know yet. So when you go for a walk and you stop having just a passive attention being involved in your past and future, And you shift then into a communal attention and you're walking along a path in a forest that belongs to somebody or it's a park.

[71:53]

And then you shift into a consensual attention, a consensus, a consensual attention that's between you and the trees. You're moving in the phenomenal world in a consensual way which shifts you out of your story and you can begin to see your life from more perspectives. Yeah, you're moving out of your communal world into this consensual world for a moment. And then what? And that sense of a consensual attention that's established with your walking in the ground and the trees, May only last like that.

[72:57]

But it's enough to actually change your own chemistry. Then you start walking back in the communal park. And then back into your story. But that consensual attention, and there are more attentions, but this is one, is one in which you, like Zazen, begin to change your own modalities. So practice here is a way of, this would be a kind of developed mindfulness practice. Or bringing Zazen mind, matured Zazen mind, into your walking in the woods.

[73:57]

And develop the ability to not neglect your story, but to move in and out of it. Into the wider world of other people and the phenomenal world. And then back into taking care of your own life. And at the same time more deeply in taking care of your own spiritual life and so forth. Because your spiritual life has roots in your story, but also has roots in the phenomenal world and in consciousness and awareness. Just stop for a moment. A famous Zen teacher said, announced one day, all the great bodhisattvas have become the pillars and columns of the temple.

[75:45]

Of the temple. And I think Florian is exhibiting that over there behind me. When I came in he was sitting Zaza and his legs were curled around the column, you know. Hmm. Everyone okay? May I ask a question? Why not? We talked about the field in our last meeting. So, as I don't like politics to do politics work, there are some people who say meditation does enough, can do enough.

[76:47]

Now perhaps there may be an explanation with the help of these fields or morphogenetic fields, but I think those people who decide about weapons and so on, they don't have the sensitivity or they don't feel in their cells what's going on. So what do you think about that? Well, I read a comment recently by Rajneesh Bosho, Where someone asked him, there's so much suffering in the world and I feel it when I'm meditating and what can I do? He said, you feel the frustration of this suffering because you want to help others, you want to make others understand. And he said, but you should not care about the world.

[77:56]

He said, just raise your consciousness to the highest level of perfection like me and you can do it. And one person who does this changes the world for millions. Sounds great. I don't know if it's true. To some extent, I think it's true. But if you direct your attention and concern about these things, you make things happen, too. As Giorgio said earlier, energy follows intention. He was quoting a woman, of course. And I think that's true, too. So if you have an intention about what's happening, I think energy follows that.

[78:58]

But, you know, I've in the past myself tried very hard to be engaged, very hard in various ways to be engaged in ways that I could in political efforts. But I think the main power is always local. It's better to make big changes nearby you than small changes at a distance. And each of us create formations in each other. And mostly we don't see that we're doing it. And each of us has a responsibility, I think, to work with the formations we create in others.

[80:22]

And free up those formations that we've created. And in that way of working with the formations you create in others, which are often negative, You actually create a vocabulary of communication in which many things can happen that overall are positive. Now, I want to apologize for... Or like staying upstairs while you're sitting. Or coming in the morning after you've started sitting.

[81:23]

The thing is, in order to teach something, I have to have a little different consciousness than you do. And your consciousness is very powerful. Particularly when you're sitting. Sometimes German is shorter than English. I make it shorter. We at least try to get shorter and shorter. We're both sitting here going... So, you know, and I like all of you so much. It makes me feel very good to bathe my consciousness in your consciousness. If I come down and join sitting with you, I start taking a sort of bath and sauna in your consciousness. And it feels very cleansing.

[82:25]

Okay. But then I don't have anything to teach. We should all go to the inner beach. Which you're doing okay? Yeah, okay, good. Hmm. So to teach I need to have a little tension between my consciousness and your consciousness.

[83:28]

And to maintain that difference so I can locate myself in the teaching, sometimes it's helpful to come in a little late after you've already settled. And to keep this difference between you, is it sometimes meaningful to come later, when you have already set up? Because it actually is not too easy to establish a kind of teaching in my own consciousness and hold it and be able to maintain it when it's not understood or you're not, it's unfamiliar to you. And in actual fact, I can only maintain it when I'm with you, when I can find ways in which it is also familiar to you. So we could say in a way, I can only teach you what you already know.

[84:37]

I can only teach you what you already intimate because I'm just not strong enough to maintain something that's completely different than you. But there's also a tremendous health in that. Because I could meditate by myself and come to many interesting or deep feelings. But it's even hard for me to recognize them unless I find ways to practice with others and with you, which helps me recognize my own experience.

[85:41]

So in other ways I could say, I can't even understand practice that I can't also share with you. So teaching, it becomes a way for me of also understanding. And in discussing this, I'm giving you an example of consensual attention. Ulrike says that these words consensual and consensual and communal and so forth in German are very elegant or beautiful words. So maybe we can work on getting a more elegant translation at some point, or developing a language.

[86:52]

Okay. Now I've presented these attentions, the first three, in the order in which most of us participate in them. And as Ulrike pointed out, that the communal attention is basically another form of a consensual attention. But the dynamics are quite different. A communal attention or cultural attention was generated initially in the past.

[87:56]

And the dynamics of it and the health of a civilization, a culture, has to do with its ability to remain flexible. And the ability of this communal attention to receive unconscious, consensual support. And let me say it again. The ability of this communal attention to receive unconscious or passive support from people. But what I mean by a consensual attention is it's in the present moment consciously given a support. Okay. So these first three, passive, communal and consensual, are where we usually live.

[89:21]

Now these are affected by Buddha's practice, but they're only indirectly or laterally in the later part of practice the focus of one's attention. In the latter part of one's practice. After one's practice develops, they become... You know, it's interesting in translating, I have to make, as much as possible, make the concept of what I'm talking about clearer than the words. Christina is familiar with the words, we have to also develop a familiarity together with the concept and share it.

[90:37]

So I always find it quite intimate and refreshing to translate the sentence. Okay, the next three are really the territory of Buddhist practice, the next three attentions. And one is, you know, I'm just making up these terms sort of in English as I go along, so we could call it accepting attention. So accepting attention means that your attitude toward the world is one of acceptance.

[91:38]

You're not looking at it so much consensually or communally. Or though, of course, as someone pointed out, the Sangha is a consensual Buddhist identity working within the larger communal identity. And it very much helps to have a few friends you practice with. Even to share a practice like an attention to the world which accepts the world. And I'm using pedestrian words for these terms. I could use some bigger sounding word, but I'm using pedestrian words like attention. Because I'm trying to emphasize that this is quite ordinary and a functional, something that we do normally.

[92:47]

So by accepting attention I mean since we have all these beautiful trees and forests cared for by Giorgio and his father. All these beautiful trees cared for by Giorgio and his father. We can look at these great shadow or silhouettes of the trees at night or these very alive multiplicity of greens and practice with just having a kind of attitude toward them that's not communal or consensual but just accepting. And in its most developed sense, this acceptance is a form of grace. And, of course, Buddhist grace is a little different because there's no one who's giving the grace to you, but you're certainly receiving it. So it's nearly the same, whether there's a being outside you that gives it or whether you just are able to receive it.

[94:25]

And in a Buddhist sense, using Western words, grace is always present. In the Buddhist sense, by using Western words, grace is always present.

[94:52]

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