I went and asked my teacher once something about breathing. And instead of speaking to me about breathing, he said, you know, some people look still from the outside, but they're not still inside. And I thought, that's not what I asked. And I thought, well, this is a Zen master. I guess I'll just pay attention to what he said. And so I began to notice that I wasn't still inside. And when I became more still inside my breathing did change in the way that I was hoping.

[01:06]

And there are many simple things and basic things but seem like something Yeah, for beginners. But when you have been practicing a long time, it turns out it's also for adepts. And one of those simple things is really finding your ease. It's really not so easy to translate.

[02:09]

Well, what would you do in German? Would you find your... I have a feeling about that, but one word is not... A calmness? What about calm abiding mind? I don't use that phrase much anymore because years ago when I was giving a lecture in Berlin, I hardly believe this, but this is what happened. Using the phrase calm abiding mind, And the audience, it was quite a big audience, they kept looking stranger and stranger.

[03:12]

And finally I turned to the translator who was not Neil. And I said, what are you translating? What are you saying? He said, karma biting mind. That's what that is. That was at the beginning of computer games and there was one called Pac-Man. So there's this karma-biting mind. So we can say calm abiding mind. Or in English defined your ease, your inner ease. This is something you are always deepening and renewing.

[04:24]

And the first step in this is taking the precepts. Yeah, we could say recognizing your inner precepts. In other words, what values, views, actions let you feel at ease inside. So the precepts aren't thought of as really something from outside you. Something given by Buddha, given by a religion. They're really about what? allows you to feel comfortable within yourself and how you relate to others and to yourself.

[05:34]

So the taking, as we say, you take and hold the precepts, You don't really follow the precepts. You hold the precepts in your actions and let them talk to you through your actions and thinking. And this conversation goes on with your own inner precepts too. And so the taking and holding of the precepts which really have nothing to do with Buddhism, they're just common human sense. How are we a human being without a human being? That has to be the basis of our practice.

[06:52]

And the assumption in Buddhism is, again, that these are also your inner precepts that you know and discover through taking the... of traditional human precepts. For example, one of the precepts could be translated very simply to not steal. But rather more subtly, the precept actually is to not take that which is not given. And that's a much more subtle territory to explore in your relationship with people. So the first step in this finding your ease is to find an ease

[08:06]

in your own mind and body through taking the precepts and holding the precepts. I think the second aspect I would like to mention this evening And the second aspect that I would like to mention tonight... our case, your Sangha. You try to create an immediate world that's, you know, that's environmentally responsible. And not commercially defined. I mean, everything nowadays is so commercially defined not commercially defined.

[09:17]

And which is politically engaged as it's possible and necessary. And so, although we can't fit really with this complex changing world perfectly for sure, Of course, we all know we can, and most of us, I think, always do try, To find with our friends and family some shared values and activity. And when you carry that into a deeper sense of the world, potential of this world, we call that Sangha.

[10:25]

And the third thing I would, just for this evening, like to mention As I said earlier, you can hold the mind with the physical posture. And as I recently have been speaking about, why does Buddhism emphasize the four noble postures? Walking, standing, sitting, and reclining. The four postures we can... in which our life happens.

[11:27]

Well, it's a real distinction between posture and position. And it's similar to the distinction between nature or nurture. In yoga cultures there's no natural position. You know, if I sit like this, Bring me a beer, please. Maybe this is a natural position. For some people, yeah. What do we call them? Couch potatoes? Couch potatoes. Sofa spuds. No. But if I say I want to bring energy into this so-called position, this energy, it's more chi or ki or something like that.

[12:42]

Or if I want to bring aliveness, let's call it that, into this position, that happens. So the assumption, when they say, they don't say the four noble, the four lousy positions, they say the four noble postures. It sounded good, didn't it? So it's the, that, walking or standing or reclining or sitting, in which you can fill your body, fill the body with aliveness. So when you walk, take a walk, you see, you know, don't first of all be going somewhere.

[13:47]

Remember, no place to go. First of all, be finding a posture in which you can walk which feels filled with aliveness. And move from one not positioned to the next, one posture to the next, in ways that aliveness continues moving, being present in the posture. And this is also in Taoism a teaching about longevity, filling every cell with aliveness. So as you can find the mind, the stillness of the mind in your posture.

[14:57]

You can also find the stillness of the mind in the aliveness of your posture. At each moment. And in particular in your breath. So the breath becomes a posture of the mind. So now this third thing I'm trying to express here is you can have a kind of double engagement or parallel engagement with the breath and with the world. And they can be One after another and simultaneous. In really a kind of horizon of immediacy.

[16:00]

A spatially sensed world, not a temporally sensed world. And if you can feel what I'm calling a horizon of immediacy, which can expand and contract, you can feel yourself engaged with the world and simultaneously not separated from the stillness. And again, let's go back to the poem, Sitting Quietly. doing nothing.

[17:05]

So now you're not sitting quietly doing nothing, but there's a posture of mind and body which rests in the initial mind of each moment. In the stillness of each moment. And so when you get in the habit of that, the creativity of mind and body and associations begins to be something like grass grows by itself. And in each moment like this, in each horizon of immediacy, you do feel in some fundamental sense the world fits.

[18:28]

And the sense of creating a sangha or of friends and family which have a responsible sense of the world, We have some faith in a conception of the world. If even a small group of people live the way We feel they ought to live. You feel you ought to live. This isn't all you can do, but it's the most fundamental thing you can do. And it does affect the whole of the world.

[19:30]

And if you in yourself can find this engagement in the world and engagement in the posture of stillness through the breath, then in some way we can come to a feeling that there's a dynamic fit in the world, if not a perfect fit in the world. Does anybody have anything you'd like to bring up? Maybe we need another break and then we come back.

[20:34]

I have a question. My own understanding is that it is true that As long as you are not identified with your physical and mental activities. As long as you are identified, then you stabilize the ego and you stabilize your personality. But as long as that stops, then in a way the difficulty starts how to carry on. Deutsch, bitte. What? Deutsch. Yeah. Or any language you'd like. In the way in which you identify with your physical or mental ideas.

[21:34]

That is very good. That keeps enlightenment away. That sounds like English, but you know. That is very good. But as soon as you no longer identify with your physical or mental processes, Now let's see if I understood. I would like to see it practically. I had meditated for 25 years and some things happened. I hope. And then the question comes up, what's everything for?

[22:40]

The wish for enlightenment isn't there anymore and there isn't the wish to alter the world, change the world. So let me go back to the beginning, see if I understood what you said. You said, as... If we identify with our thoughts and our actions, it stabilizes the ego. But if we don't identify with our thoughts and actions, then there's a kind of freedom in that you implied, but then the ego is not stable. Something like that. And then the ego doesn't stabilize you. Okay. Well, we need a whole seminar to respond to this question. Let me just try to say simply that we want to in Zen practice, as I understand it, we want to think of self as not as a I'd leave ego out of the picture and just say self as a

[23:47]

function and not as an entity. Now, without going into it, because we don't have time, the main four functions of self are to establish separation, connectedness, continuity and context. And once you see self as a as function, you can practice with it. Okay, now, I only speak about continuity.

[25:01]

If we establish our continuity in our thoughts, and in consciousness itself, whose job is to make the world predictable, and so implicitly permanent, So when we identify with the way consciousness presents the world, there's already a fundamental delusion there. Sukhir, she said once, the nature of thinking in consciousness is to simplify the world. To make it easier to understand. And so we're living in a shadow of reality. And if we can learn to function, he says, without depending on thinking mind, will come to know how things actually exist.

[26:16]

So speaking to this point, I think the main way to shift your sense of identification and continuity from moment to moment So if you not only identify with your thinking egoistically or self-referentially and in addition you establish the stability of the world moment to moment through identifying with thoughts.

[27:16]

Then it's a rather big job to let go of that. You can actually feel quite crazy if someone disturbs your sense of continuity. And that's why it makes it so difficult to keep the mind, to keep attention on the breath. As I always say, it's very easy to keep attention on the breath for a few minutes or something. But it's very difficult to keep attention on your breath for 24 hours. Why is it so difficult when it's so easy to do? That's the question we should ask.

[28:30]

Well, it's difficult to do for any length of time because we establish our sense of continuity in the world through our thinking. So for a short time your continuity isn't disturbed and you can concentrate on your... bring your attention to your breath. But very quickly it goes back to thinking. Now you may think it's impossible to concentrate on my breath all the time. I concentrate on my finger all the time. But in fact you are all pretty much most of the time concentrated on your position or posture.

[29:38]

One thing a child learns to do is stand up, walk around, watch where they're walking and so forth. So we already can do that. We just don't do it with the breath. But if you keep trying to bring attention back to the breath and attention is a kind of current kind of conduit for energy and aliveness. It's also a kind of switch, like an electric switch. So if you keep pushing the switch down, attention to the breath, It's like trying to turn a light on your whole, but it doesn't go on right away.

[30:39]

You have to hold it down 10 minutes or maybe a year, and then the light goes on. So if you get in the habit of bringing attention back to the to the breath after a while it starts coming back by itself and pretty soon you're establishing continuity in breath and body and phenomena and then you don't have to identify with self I mean with thoughts and you're Self is stabilized in the continuity of the body and the breath. But you're also right in that The problem is not thoughts, it's identifying with thoughts.

[31:49]

Excuse me for that little riff, but... So that's probably enough unless someone else wants to say something. Thank you really very much. Oh, please. Es gibt so viele Sachen, die sind viel interessanter, als immer auf den Atem zu gucken. For most people, there are many things more interesting. Wie bringt man sein Interesse jetzt zum Atem? How do you bring your interest, interest in German is not interest in English, being interested in, to your breath? The incentive. Yeah. As long as it's in terms of interest.

[32:50]

Yeah, of course, interest is... In Japanese, what's translated as the word interest is kigasuru, which means to do ki or to do chi. So interest in Japanese is to bring your energy to something. And the word interest actually means between business. Interesse oder Interest bezeichnen wir also für zwischen... So it means something very close to Thich Nhat Hanh's favorite phrase, interbeing.

[33:52]

But our usual sense of being interested in something, you know, is... Yes, something else, something rather different. And if you have to make your breath interesting, this is really quite a problem. Maybe you could breathe in a dance step. Or you could smoke. That makes breathing interesting. This is a special breathing practice. So let's not look at it in terms of interest. Let's look at it in terms of satisfaction.

[34:55]

When tension really does rest within the breath, There's a satisfaction that doesn't require you to be interested. It's almost like the mind folds in and becomes satisfied with itself. We're the most extraordinary... subjective objects that anyone knows about in any world system, how could we possibly be bored with ourselves? And let's get bored with a very superficial part of ourselves. Just being alive And at ease is deeply satisfying.

[36:16]

Really thank you very much again. And thanks for translating. Coming our way across was a Deutschland. Triangle.

[36:31]

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