For me, it was soft, it was a soft space, so that I felt the softness of the emotion and it also changed to feel more, instead of feeling emotionally, so to feel, from emotion to feeling maybe more. And before that I had already participated in Sazen and at breakfast with who is breathing and what is breathing. And the discussion helped me to bring this example of this morning at breakfast into connection. And I didn't say that yet. And among us in the group also there was this feeling very present. And we were thankful for the sangha at the end. Oh, and Christoph also said that maybe this is the golden thread.

[01:05]

The golden thread? Or the golden wind? At the end we were in the group and we shared this feeling and Christoph said, yes, this is the golden thread. Okay, thanks. Someone else? Yes. What I found very nice today in this same group, the English speaking group, was that we read the text today differently than yesterday. We sort of generated some playful and play-acting characteristic in our reading.

[02:17]

And we had some like dialogues played between us, one another. Parts were read standing or sitting. Parts were read in English or German. And a lot of fun. It was playful. Good. Otmar? Didn't you suggest once that we somehow should act out a koan as somehow an experience of a koan? Didn't you suggest once to somehow act out a koan? Oh yeah, you can actually do it. You can take parts and do it. Peter Coyote used to practice with me and he's sometimes in the movies. He was going to actually try to make a movie of a koan or a theater piece using a koan as the basis.

[03:29]

Yeah. Peter who? Coyote. Peter Coyote, der mit ihm praktiziert hat. His real name is Peter Cohen, but he took Coyote as a name. Ja, der hat vorgeschlagen, das wirklich auch schauspielerisch umzusetzen. Und er wollte mal einen Film auch drehen über den Chor. Yes. I feel a lot of sympathy with this group, the Chor and... Eight, cool. Because I remember a time when we had to study Qur'an and we have been forced to talk about the Qur'an so everyone had to say something. Was that with me? Yes. Long time ago. Long time ago, yeah. And I wanted to be so angry that I just couldn't listen anymore to other people talking about the Qur'an and I also couldn't listen about And I couldn't talk anymore.

[04:32]

I sort of remember. And what's interesting is that that koan somehow deals with that sort of problem. It talks about these... double enclosure and you have to get the power to kind of to smash the double break this double enclosure and I feel what makes me angry about it is this kind of some sort of always when I want to understand it and I have to talk and I want to give a good answer and all that it's always like kind of bouncing against walls and it's always some sort of rubber walls and I try it again and again and somehow there's no understanding possible in my usual mind and that gives me exactly the feeling what the enclosure is.

[05:38]

So in between this double enclosure there's just no way to... and the koan gives the answer, that's the enclosure, so I can feel this somehow this double enclosure of body and mind, and that on the other side is also a way into the koan, yeah? Mm-hmm. Deutsch, bitte. Well, I also had a time when we were a bit forced to talk about Kowalsk, we had to make rounds and everyone had to say something, and I was really in a state where I couldn't listen anymore and couldn't say anything anymore, and we really went out. the earth that comes up with it and also this ability to call and I always have the feeling that it's like wanting to understand and finding a good answer and it's always like running against the wall and the wall throws you back again and again and there is simply no gap, nothing goes through there.

[06:46]

But on the other hand, it also offers this koan when it speaks of this double enclosedness. This is exactly the feeling, this enclosedness in the body and in the mind and in this wanting to understand. That is, the koan itself also offers a way and explains it and also a way out of it. Yes, good, thank you very much. Yes? We had a similar change today with reading the text. like the English speaking group and with we read all the five German pages and everyone did it in some individual way

[08:04]

And the interesting part was that the topic of time arose after having read the text. One part was the discovery of our impatience to stick to each word in some way, to want to make a sense in the sentence and then to approach too fast, and the incapability to slow down because you think you're too slow because the others or the other people are boring when you are slow or something. Well, we found out that during the topic of this time it was interesting to see to what extent we actually have a lack of patience to really stick to every word and always try to grasp the content, that is, the content of the sentence, and to become faster, or how we are sometimes ashamed

[09:20]

And to shorten it up a little bit is that after we have ended the text, the first sentence was looming somehow. So we actually, we didn't discuss it, but it was obvious that the first sentence was somehow penetrating everybody in a way. So we discussed different situations about time. It was very interesting that after we had read the text, the first sentence, the one about the flower, came back, and I think that each of us in the group somehow came through, how do you say, through the thorns, is not the right word? Through the thorns, yes. and we shared a few things about time, anecdotes, and that was actually what I observed, a very common feeling.

[10:33]

And another person reported an interesting aspect, I think, about the connection between breathing and also emotion. So in the anecdotes that followed, somehow the breathing was always something that frees or when we come to our breath we have a feeling of being free or wild in that sense. A person then gave an example in the further discussion regarding breathing and emotions. And this person described a very contrary feeling that she realized in a way that she is not breathing in that sense.

[11:41]

It is breathing, but she had a problem or a difficulty to in some way accept that it is just breathing. So if she decides not to breathe, she would die, or she comes to the state where it just breathes. And she felt some strange, or a strangeness in a sense, not... foreign, some kind of foreign parts that makes this breathing. that the difficulty of breathing can actually not be controlled, in the sense that if she tries not to breathe, she either dies or she breathes automatically, so that breathing is a strange part, as I understood it, that was felt by her, and that also resulted in restlessness, how to deal with it, so the question also is how to deal with this,

[12:53]

feeling that it's something strange that is breathing or coming to me as breathing. And then we had the topic, you know, in a sense of faith or confidence, maybe as a gate to go through that. We came to the topic of trust and maybe at the end it was an answer for me. Thank you. I think this is a good example. Both your discussion and the whole topic of this practice week is a good example of oral teaching. There's no book, I think, that you could read that tells you to count your breath or do something or other like that that could really give you the feeling of how fully, how thorough the emphasis on the breath can be.

[14:21]

We're all breathing, so, you know, it's all this stuff about breathing, you know. And if you do do something, are you adding something to your breath? Why add something to your breath? Yeah. But, of course, if you're in a context like this, you can see that we're always adding and rarely subtracting from our breath. Now what you said, how you brought it up earlier about watching your moods, your anger or whatever, I remember I sort of stopped smoking because of some insight I had in my breath.

[15:41]

But I can't really use this as an example for anyone else because, like Clinton, I never inhaled. It's true. A couple of times I went, oh, it hurts, so I never inhaled. So I just blew it out of my nose, you know, stuff like that. It's true. This made me, I could sort of, maybe Clinton was telling the truth. But I did inhale marijuana, but I didn't inhale cigarettes. Not very often, but once or twice. A few times when I was 18 or so.

[16:51]

And it was much gentler than the cigarettes. Anyway. But I was going down the street. I remember in New York in the Greenwich Village. And I had to go to something, some kind of something important. And as I'm walking, I could feel I have to really concentrate on this, what I have to do. And so then I lit a cigarette. And I could feel It was an emotional thing to do that took my energy away from where I was going and put it into the cigarette. And I could feel I needed the cigarette to take some emotional pressure off.

[17:52]

Then I felt I might be able to not bring enough energy to this situation I had to do, so I said, uh-uh, so I threw the cigarette away. Because my feeling was I didn't want to waste any of this emotional intensity. I wanted to find how to make it go where I wanted to go. Okay. So now, breath usually follows or often follows our moods. If you get anxious, you start breathing more quickly. Yeah.

[19:07]

Excited, you breathe one way, etc. You'll notice that your breathing follows your conscious states. Now, practice is to unhook your breathing from consciousness. So if we take... The third foundation of mindfulness, of awakening. Let's take anger or something like that. One of the studies is you notice what minds are aggressive, what minds are deluded and what minds are desirous. Desire, anger, aggression and delusion.

[20:18]

Okay. So these are just like one of the teachings. I mean, again, you can look at teachings as a cookbook. Du kannst die Lehren auch sehen als ein Kochbuch. And so what ingredients, what are all these ingredients? What ingredients are important to notice? Ja, und was sind alles die Zutaten? Welche Zutaten sind wichtig zu beachten? What ingredients should you bring your attention to and put together with other ingredients? You can do this all by yourself, and much of it you should just do by yourself. But it's also useful sometimes to look at what the tradition says about what ingredients to pay attention to.

[21:23]

So you have this powerful, the most powerful thing in your life, attention. What do you notice with it? What do you bring attention to? Well, one of the things you bring attention to, is my state of mind aggressive, pushing things away or attracting things, or simply mixed up, diluted? Okay, now, so you notice, let's say, you have an aggressive mind or angry mind. Okay, so the practice is to say, oh, look, now I'm angry. Now I'm more angry.

[22:46]

Now I'm furious. But the practice is basically you unhook breathing from the emotion and you join breathing to awareness. So when you practice that, trying to do that, you're again changing the structure of the mind. You're changing the way the mind functions. You're kind of pulling your breathing away from being caught up in the anger. Which makes it much less likely you're going to act on the anger. Because another thing you're basically trying to do in practice is break the connection between thought and action.

[23:57]

And you really open up a kind of psychoanalytic process when you do this. What is a therapist? It's somebody who's sitting with you who's not... connecting thought and action. They're just listening to you. So one of the basic things you do when you sit zazen, to not scratch and all that kind of stuff, is you're breaking the connection between thought and action. And after a while, you can just sit, even though there might be various itches or flies or whatever on you.

[25:05]

And your legs can hurt and you want to move, but you don't move. No, that's a process of breaking the connection between thought and action. Once you deeply know, fully know in your body that you can think and feel something without acting on it, it gives you a tremendous sense of power and composure. dann gibt dir das eine unglaubliche Kraft und Haltung. But it also frees you to think anything. So once you really have that power, you can just open yourself up to any kind of Dostoevskian fantasies you might have about your mother.

[26:28]

Or father. You're not caught in this Christian feeling of the thought of killing the mother is... has a moral sort of, you know, it doesn't. It's just the thought of killing your mother, you know. I'm sorry, Mom. And what a range, a panoply of anything anybody's ever felt in the world is your feelings, too. That's what it means in the koan, the iron spine. Okay. Now, what you're technically doing also when you do this is you're actually, again... breaking the connection between breathing and thinking, and moods and emotions.

[27:58]

Okay, so you're in a way pulling breathing away from your moods, And you're joining it to awareness, not consciousness. This is the germ or seed of what's called imperturbable mind. So the breath becomes the vehicle, in a way, one of the vehicles of bringing your attention into a much more steady, stable mind. So the mind that... just says, oh, now I'm angry, now I'm more angry.

[29:03]

Is a mind of awareness joined to breath. So it's a kind of breath mind you're watching and you don't get caught up in your anger. And this breath awareness mind is more powerful than consciousness. Actually, it is more powerful. And your anger will be absorbed You're just watching your anger, but it's absorbed into this breath-mind awareness. And you can act on it as a form of communication, but you don't act on it as a form of, you know, anger in the usual sense.

[30:04]

Yeah, okay. You got that? That's clear? I think it's wonderful to find out these things, to know these things. It's remarkable. The ingredients are right here. Yes? But why don't you interrupt also the communication? Because communication is also an act. Yeah, but sometimes it's important to act. We have to act all the time. But where do you act from? Do you act from your most fundamental sense of how you exist or most basic sense or calm sense or do you act from your most irrational or emotional side?

[31:19]

Now, this is not to deny emotion at all. We can come back to that, but right now I can't talk about everything. It actually makes you more... This way of practicing... also joins emotion to your thinking in a really basic way. Thinking and emotion are the same. Yes, Lona? I just wanted to add something. No, go ahead. Add away. If I succeed in doing this, which you described, to go back and not to be involved with the anger, then I appreciate anger very much, because if I come to this point, it can be something like a...

[32:41]

A dog, you know, this spürhund, what is that in English? A leaf? A sniffing dog which follows. A very fine nose for... Schweinhund. For turbulence and imbalances. Yeah, yeah, okay. Do the step. In German, please. She's always finding truffles. Really, if you're not afraid of your anger, this is obvious, but if you're not afraid of your anger, and you know you don't have to act on your anger,

[33:57]

You can really let yourself be angry and see where it leads. So it creates another area. It's not repression and it's not expression. It's some big space where you can feel things completely with the freedom not to act on them. René? When do I just think I'd like to kill my mother and when do I have the intention to kill my mother? I hope you can figure that one out. If your mother is still alive. She survived up to now. So far. I mean, yeah. Well, I mean, when do you know when it's the detention?

[35:14]

I don't know. Deutsch? Yeah, Deutsch. Exactly what is the question? What's the difference between the intention and the thought? Because he believes that the intention is not legitimate. The thought is legitimate, but the intention is not. Well, I don't know. A thought is... I can have thoughts I don't have any intention to act on.

[36:16]

If I start wanting to act on it, I can feel the difference. I don't know. Yeah, that's all I can say. But I mean, I don't know. I had a very complicated relationship. I don't know, I've almost never told this story. Maybe I shouldn't tell it, but anyway, I'll tell it. I had a very complicated relationship with someone. And we happened to be sleeping, this was back in the early 60s, We happened to be sleeping in the same big house together on Knob Hill.

[37:24]

And he was sleeping in some, I don't know where, some other room and I had a little room which had a window. There's a high-rise there now. There used to be this beautiful redwood house there. And I had this little room at the top part of the house and all of San Francisco is down below me. And it was a friend's house, and we just were sort of house-sitting for a few days. And I woke up in the middle of the night With, I don't know where it came from exactly, I won't try to talk about that now, but I just woke up with a really completely murderous feeling. And I thought it was like this was intention, not, you know, thought. And I'd already been practicing long enough to explore really feeling things, exaggerating feelings and so forth.

[38:45]

And I was there for an hour or something or an hour and a half in a sweat. I mean, I wasn't going to kill this dear person. But I was in the midst of, what if one does it? What would it be? Why would I do it, etc. ? So in a way I didn't repress the feeling, I just let myself feel it and it really gripped my body. I was in a sweat and everything. And suddenly sort of half lying, half sitting there in my bed, My mind just shifted into the sky.

[39:55]

That's all I can say. And there was the moon and the stars. That would be a different story. You never know with you. You never know with me. Am I that unpredictable? Yeah. My mind just literally shifted into the sky. And there was, as I said, the moon and the stars and... almost no clouds. And the thought, or the feelings became very little tiny thoughts, you know, floating in this.

[41:01]

I mean, really, there was that shift, and that shift has never left me. And that shift is also accompanied by or parallel with a breathing that goes like this while your thoughts are going like this. Because after a while through practice breathing is no longer the prisoner of consciousness. But breathing becomes the vehicle of awareness. So your breathing in this kind of more imperturbable mind is the basis for emotions and thinking, but doesn't get caught up in it. Now, the Japanese Buddhist word for detachment, the word that's translated as detachment,

[42:20]

is sohure. And it actually means detached, yet not separate from. So this would be an exact definition of that. You have this mind which is moving like this, and this mind, you're detached from it, but completely not separate from it. You see now, I think more, how bringing attention to your breath can bring you into the structure of how the mind works and how you function. Yes, and maybe you can see more now, when you turn your attention to your breath, how you recognize how your mind works.

[43:49]

Yes. Yes. Can people have the same experiences who are not practicing or sitting? I thought you were going to say, do you have to want to murder someone to realize this? Rilke says something like, all art arises from letting yourself go to the extremes of a situation. But that doesn't mean it has to be something dramatic. It just means you let yourself and this practice of detached yet not separate from lets you explore yourself much more fully.

[45:01]

And still, all of these I would say, excuse me, but Christian-influenced psychologists, Jung and Freud and Hillman too, put the unconscious below consciousness. It's an underworld. It's something like Hades. And from a Buddhist point of view, it's just part of the way we function, but in other dimensions when repression isn't involved.

[46:03]

Now, your question. Can one practice these things or know these things if one isn't practicing them? I'd like to say yes, but I can't. Differences make a difference. If you just want to trust in grace and naturalness and things like that, Good luck. There's a story I like about some Zen guy, some Zen teacher sees, Zen master sees this guy walking through the forest and they end up talking.

[47:08]

And he says to this guy, Oh, who's your teacher? What's your practice? The guy says, no, I'm just a woodcutter. I don't have any practice. He says, but you have, you know, I feel like bowing to you. You really feel like someone who has a realized practice. Ja, und er sagt, ja, ich habe aber das Gefühl, dass ich mich gerne vor dir verbeugen möchte, dass du eine sehr verwirklichte Praxis hast. I'm just telling, this is a story, you know. Das ist einfach eine Geschichte. And the guy says, well, what do you do? I mean, I cut wood. What else do you do? Also, ja, was tust du noch, außer dass du Holz fällst? He says, well, I never let my... look like they're just kind of a farmer or something, they have some practice in there.

[48:14]

That's the Buddhist point of view, at least. But just look. If you bring your attention to things, that's one way. That's what people do. If you bring your attention to your attention, that's a big difference. And if you do that, you're a Buddhist or something close to a Buddhist. And if you bring your attention to your attention, no matter what your reason for doing it, it's very difficult to do that really fully unless you practice meditation and mindfulness.

[49:16]

And I would like to be able to say that you can practice Buddhism with just mindfulness alone. Well, that's true. That's true enough. But there's many things you will not find out if you don't also practice meditation. And if you only practice meditation, sometimes there's things you won't find out if you practice meditation as a regular habit, daily habit. Ja, und wenn du Meditation nur ab und zu mal machst, dann wirst du auch wieder weniger entdecken, als wenn du es regelmäßig tust.

[50:27]

Now, let's go to Yuan Wu's statement, which I've been bringing up for some months. Lasst uns zu Yuan Wu's Aussage kehren. Which is by implication also in this koan. Once you've understood and realized the gist of the teaching, then practice continuously, concentrate continuously without breaks, and and develop or realize or generate the embryo of sagehood. Okay. So here's another statement from Yuan Wu, again the compiler of the Blue Cliff Records.

[51:28]

There's another big difference between those who concentrate sometimes, you know, in meditation, and those who develop the ability to concentrate continuously when And so if we wanted to discuss it, we'd have to say, what does concentrate continuously mean? What is possible? So it also makes a difference whether you concentrate sometimes, or whether actually there's a continuous presence of concentration, a constant in your daily life. And through night and day.

[52:44]

So I would say there is a difference if you practice than if you don't. That's all. It's just a fact. And there's differences in how you practice, too. Now, I understood... This problem, when I was very young, that's why I need you. Really, I knew I was not strong enough to practice on my own continuously unless I practiced with a group. I mean, maybe it's good I knew how weak I am. So I arranged a life that I always have to practice with people. I mean, I tried to sneak into Germany this time. And I had my bags, but there was Dieter at the airport.

[53:47]

And he brought me here and put me in a zendo. Gerald used to do it. Yes, Gerald? I was just thinking about it. No, I asked back. You mentioned... I had that experience to break this connection between thought and action. But I don't see a connection to awareness. In my experience it's a very clear and plain act of consciousness. It's maybe a little more than regular consciousness. It's just very clear consciousness don't act.

[55:01]

And it's very concentrated and very precise and I don't see any connection to Ud. Okay, so when you say you have this clear intention... Deutsch bitte, sorry. I would like to come back to another aspect. I have this experience that I can interrupt the connection between thoughts and actions. But I don't see any connection there. It is a very clear, conscious approach. Okay, so you have an intention or a clear thought or intention, don't do this. You're not discursively thinking about it, you have this intention, don't do this.

[56:09]

That intention is awareness. You can call it consciousness if you want, because there's a kind of consciousness of the world, but it's an awareness of the world. Discursive thinking functions in consciousness. Intentions function in awareness. Absichten funktionieren in Gewahrsein. So if I look at you with a feeling of intention, without discursive thinking, my feeling of knowing you is awareness, not consciousness, and it feels different in my body. Now, Maybe tomorrow morning we can go into this. Well, you know, if you want to skip dinner, it's okay.

[57:23]

But we can carry this, you know, non-consciousness too far. Okay. Oh, my God. O man, who shall save and die? O man, who shall save and die? O man, who shall save and die? The evil beings are mercilessly trying to enslave me.

[58:27]

But they are so powerful that I can't give up on them. In that case, I'll have to go through a technical trial. I'll have to go through a technical trial. I'll have to go through a technical trial. No, no, no, no.

[59:43]

Still breathing? Must be the right topic then. And I think the discovery of the heart to do that seminar before this was actually, for those of you who were both, was actually worked together quite well. If you ask the question, let's just say we ask the question, how does the world exist? In most states of mind, it's kind of schmalzy or silly to ask such a question.

[61:23]

Some kind of ponderousness, too heavy. So eher etwas zu schwer. But it's also, you know, it's a... If you can have a calm enough mind to feel the question, ask the question... Aber wenn du einen Geist hast, der ruhig genug ist, diese Frage zu fragen und sie zu fühlen... Yeah, sometimes when you think about this world, you're not sure, you want to know the answer. But, yeah, it still requires, it creates a kind of sacredness to be able to be calm enough to ask the question. And say that you don't try to answer the question.

[62:34]

You let the world answer the question, maybe, or some feeling like that. Oh. Let's imagine we are calm enough to ask the question, how does the world exist? And then we don't do anything but notice our breathing. And we've discovered in the last few days that how we can Let our mind rest in our breathing. And we begin to really feel why these words like spirit and inspire and psyche are all related to the word breath.

[63:44]

Maybe it's easier to just breathe in the mind of breath. And let the world just be there in our breath. There's a kind of rootedness and fit. In ancient times, supposedly Greek and Etruscan times, They would make a furrow when they founded to locate a village or a city.

[65:03]

Furrow is to plow. They'd make a furrow, a circle. around the site or at the center of the site. And they would have the feeling that the soil and the horizon of the earth met at that point. The soil and the horizon. Yeah, and inside and outside met at this point. And heaven and earth met at this point. So there was a sense of creating a root or a center.

[66:19]

Yeah. And where things fit together So if you're asking this question, how does the world exist? And you just stop and you breathe, breathe. I'm trying to bring you into a certain kind of experience that, or show you a certain kind of experience. It's at the center of what awareness is about, but not consciousness. As Gerald pointed out to us yesterday afternoon, you can be in the midst of consciousness and awareness simultaneously.

[67:26]

Of course you can. The teaching, partly the introductory teaching to that is the three minds of daily consciousness, which many of you know. Yeah, so awareness isn't just, you know, at night or, I don't know, in Zazen or something. These are words, two words, that give us a chance to notice the... Differences in knowing. One of the simplest differences you can feel is when your consciousness feels like it's on the surface of your eyes.

[68:37]

And when consciousness feels or knowing or awareness feels like it's on the back of your eyes. What's called customarily soft eyes. Das wird gebräuchlicherweise sanfte Augen genannt. When the mind as consciousness doesn't grab at things. Ja, also wenn der Geist als Bewusstsein nicht nach Dingen grapscht. It just leaves things alone. Ja, du lässt die Dinge einfach alleine. It leaves things to speak their own tale. Ja, du lässt sie ihre eigene Geschichte erzählen. And, yeah, it's the same, you know, it's like the light is on or something like that, you know, but the body feels different.

[69:53]

Sophia, the other night, she did some drawings of this earlier, but the other night she was... Crestone was all snowy and bright in the sky at night. And the moon was there, very bright. And she said, Papa, there's a lantern in the moon. It does look like some of these paper lamps with light inside. And Nekuchian is designing these lamps. He makes a little moon, red moon, on the side as a symbol for the lamps.

[71:00]

Yeah, everyone takes these lamps for granted actually nowadays, but actually they were invented by one person. Yeah, for use indoors, electric lights and So she said to Papa, there's a lantern, a lamp, a lantern in the moon. Well, one feels like you've changed the lamp in yourself. It's still light, but the lamp is different somehow. And it feels like the lamp is inside you more than in the outside. James Joyce, you know, lived at the time. when Freud and all these new ideas were becoming widespread and culturally accepted.

[72:26]

And he said once to a friend, what's all this fuss and bother about the mystery of unconsciousness? What about the mystery of consciousness? Here we're speaking about the mystery of consciousness. What kind of consciousness do you live in? Does it have a, well, I don't know, we need some visual image. Can we say it has a topography? Or it has different centers?

[73:30]

Sukhir, she says in his little section in Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind on Breathing, That breathing is like a swinging door. And I just, I, the experience of I, just moves with this swinging door. And he says, when our mind is calm and pure enough, the eye disappears, fades from this swinging door. The eye disappears. The I, the pronoun of. And there's just this swinging door.

[74:33]

And we find ourselves in the midst of myriad worlds. And yet we're at the center of the world. So when the I disappears, which kind of traps the world in one world, and we're calm enough to be surprised by myriad worlds, We can also call this the state before the beginning of time. Because there's no expectations of what the world is going to be like.

[75:42]

It's just, yeah, it might be myriad worlds. We might be surprised. So there's a kind of sacredness in this. How does the world exist? And waiting for the world to tell us. And strangely, we feel in this rootedness in the horizon of the breath. And this is not finding your identity. Or finding oneness.

[76:49]

Or finding yourself reflected in the world. No, no, it's more like you find yourself rooted in the world. Somehow you and the world fit together. And you feel fit. It's a different use of the word fit. You feel healthier, good. It's the same in German. English is just a dialect of German. With a lot of French words. So you somehow aren't pulled down by the world, but lifted up by the world.

[77:57]

Let's imagine you live in water. We're all secretly inner dolphins or something like that. Yeah, delphina. Nice name, isn't it? Your name's Delphine. You feel, if you lived in water, you might as well make use of the water. And the water, as we know, is always trying to return to stillness. So you could just kind of, as we talked earlier, just sort of float in the water and let the stillness of the water become your stillness.

[78:57]

And the air is trying to return to stillness, too. But it's much easier to move about than water. So I think we can help the air find its stillness. And this is Sukhya, she's trying to suggest in this little two or three pages this experience. Helping, having a calm and pure enough mind, he says, in effect to help the air find its own stillness. When the Etruscans and the Greeks drew this kind of circle, they felt they were making a sacred marriage of heaven and earth and so forth.

[80:09]

And I think we can feel, too, a kind of sacred marriage or fit of ourselves and the world Yeah, it's almost like we're in the arms of the world. So it's a... The world, like the water, maybe lifts us up when we feel this. Now it brings us down. Yeah, and we can feel the... Breath now as mind, as a kind of fine-tuning of the world.

[81:22]

So it's not a mirror again, it's a rootedness or a marriage again. We feel our breath mind adjusts us to the world and adjusts the world, this horizon of the world to us. This kind of sacred breath mind is always available to us. Can you find the physical and mental pace that allows you to be thus nourished? We always in this sacredness feel created and sustained, supported.

[82:27]

Not by the similarities in the world, but by the many differences that now fit us. And make us feel fit. So Dungsan, Dungsan in my beginner's mind, He's called Tosan. He says that the blue mountain is the mother of the white cloud. The blue mountain is the mother of the white cloud.

[83:46]

And the blue mountain and the white cloud depend on each other. All day long, they depend on each other. And you really can see that at Crestone, the mountain, Crestone Mountain is a kind of cloud machine. You know, we live down here in the, it's like there's this huge valley, which you know is the size of the state of Connecticut. And then it comes up, and then there's a kind of chair, the back of a chair. That's where we are. And then the back of the chair goes up to... 4,600 meters or something like that.

[84:54]

I'm not a travel agent. None of you should come and visit. It's dry, harsh, cold. No, it's not. It's warm. It's dry and high. You wouldn't like it. So, you know, we live on this sort of shelf or seat of the chair. The mountain is always just producing these clouds and throwing them out. So Dung Shan says that the mountain is the parent of the white cloud. And all day long they depend on each other. And yet the white cloud is always the white cloud.

[86:08]

And the blue mountain is always the blue mountain. Now this is a pretty silly, simplistic thing for our leader to say. I mean it's so simple you probably wouldn't put it on a greeting card. Hi, happy birthday. The Blue Mountain is always... And yet, why is there some power in this simplicity of the Blue Mountain and the white cloud? Because Sukhiroshi and Dungsan are pointing at this experience.

[87:10]

The sacredness of breath, mind. And Sukhiroshi tries to give us a door to enter it. By saying the breath mind is just, a breath is just like a swinging door. Doesn't go that fast, not with me, anyway. And... the I can just disappear, the pronoun I can just disappear from this swinging door. Then we may find the world and we fit together. Like the blue mountain and the white cloud, We let the world speak to us.

[88:25]

Do you know why I keep us chanting this Japanese, which we don't understand? Because it just really breaks the conscious thinking mind. For me, both chants do it. But I dropped it for a while years ago and just had people chant in English and it made it harder for me to give the lecture because people were thinking. Yes, that's right. And who's going to start the discussion? Wer beginnt die Diskussion?

[91:11]

Or what is going to start the discussion? Oder was beginnt die Diskussion? Whose whatness? Wessen was halt? Andreas isn't here, so, you know, one of you has to... Andreas ist nicht mehr hier. Oh, good. Our group started with the problem of the terminology, and it was hard for us to get a good understanding of the difference between mindfulness and awareness and consciousness. It is difficult. Yes, in our group it was difficult to keep the concepts apart. Consciousness, awareness, vigilance. Thanks.

[92:13]

In our group it was similar, and then we started a subjective definition of the experience in terms of awareness and consciousness. That was one thing. And the other thing is that it is very good to have, for example, a structure like the firm Scandas, where you can measure it, so to speak, and where you can align yourself. In our group it was similar and we started out to give in sort of personal definitions of what is our experience with consciousness and awareness and it turned out to be quite helpful to have a Buddhist system like the five skandhas in the background so that we could start to use similar terms for similar situations.

[93:26]

Just to have this kind of structure is very helpful. Yes. In our group, well, I was in the same group as him, it was also the case that we started with the terms and it was exciting that we were two Swiss, so Swiss-speaking Germans, then Well, in our group we also started with and there were two Swiss people and then some people coming from Germany. Well, we are near the border. And although we speak sort of the same language, we use the terms differently, the Swiss and the Germans. It doesn't sound like the same language to me.

[94:41]

It's sort of close to Dutch, I think. Yeah, go ahead. It's cool. We pretend we are speaking the same language. Yeah, yeah, I understand, yes. And then there was such an approach in the discussion... It could be that we are getting closer to each other, and the moment when the Dalit has called upon the concept of how you use them, how they are used by Roshi, we have changed the subject. So we sort of approached one another and, well, we got relatively close, but as soon as David started to use your terminology... This guy?

[95:46]

Yeah. We changed the subject. This means I should meet with you without David. So I can know what it's like when you don't change the subject. Okay, I don't quite understand that. But anyway, what else? Yeah. Yeah. In our group, we wanted to start sorting out the terms. And then Frank had the idea that we could...

[96:30]

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