You know, coming back to... Oh, hi. Good afternoon. Coming back to what you said. This kind of experience you had can change our life. And... Yeah, in good ways. And if we can stay with its affect or stay with the feeling of it. And, for example, you mentioned feeling lonely. You know, if you have an insight or experience like that, we're still used to other ways of locating ourselves.

[01:09]

So sometimes people, you know, they have an experience of the world in a different way than they usually do. And I'm not saying this is happening to you, I'm just giving an example. that they realize much of the effort they put into things over their life has been some kind of illusion or delusion. They've been propped up by innumerable flying buttresses. What things? And a cathedral, the things that support the walls. Okay. And suddenly they all come down and the walls are still standing.

[02:30]

Or there's a rearrangement. But suddenly you find you were very fond of the flying buttresses. They were beautiful and you worked very hard to get them up there. Thank you. Now I would like to try to respond to Christoph and Roland's questions since they were good questions. And because they also caught the others of us too. Now whatever I say, it can't really be an answer. Because at this level of, you know, we have to, you know, to the extent that there's an answer, one has to discover it oneself.

[03:49]

And of course, a particular Christoph's statement, I've been trying to answer that for myself for many years. And in various ways I've found in the Some decades, ways to respond to the question. But each time it's a new question. And how this kind of question or comment of both of you is answered lodged, lodged, stuck, lodged in the logic of our language. Our language assumes a doer, an actor.

[05:16]

Assumes a cause, a causer, a cause. Yeah. And of course there is a cause. But can you attach the causes, I'm speaking now to what Christoph brought up, to a self? Well, not in any simple sense. So what is... When Buddhism talks about the self, they're unspecifically talking about a creature of consciousness.

[06:17]

And the question is, Is there a permanent self? Well, there's no permanent self. That's fairly easy to know. So that's the first thing. Buddhism says there's no permanent self. But we tend to treat self as implicitly permanent, even if we know it's not really permanent. Does it carry who we are? Okay, what Buddhism says is that self is not an entity. It's not permanent, but that it is a way of functioning.

[07:34]

And primarily self functions to establish, which I won't go into looking at it closely, but establishes separation, As your immune system knows what belongs to you and what doesn't belong to you. And establishes connectedness. And the shift in practice is from an assumed separation to an assumed connectedness. And it establishes a continuity and practices to shift that sense of continuity out of consciousness and thinking into the body and breath. And the fourth function of self is to establish context.

[08:53]

So things at each moment have some meaning. You can't give meaning to things. People can have everything working, but they don't know how to function. Now at this point I should go to Benjamin Leavitt. He was a kind of, you know, he assumed some importance in my life. Er hat eine Wichtigkeit in meinem Leben erlangt. I never met him, but I saw his research in the 70s. Ich habe ihn nie kennengelernt, aber ich kenne seine wissenschaftlichen Studien von den 70er Jahren.

[10:00]

He wrote a paper published in 81. What was it called? I can't remember the name of it. But basically he showed that when, for instance, you decide, I decide to put my arm here, if we wired me up, About 500 milliseconds before I move my arm, my arm has already decided to move. Das ist ungefähr 500 Millisekunden bevor ich entscheide, dass ich meinen Arm bewegen soll, er sich bereits bewegt hat. And in neuronal or molecular time, that's an eternity, a very long time. Und in der Neurologie oder Molekularbiologie oder Zeit ist das eine unendlich lange Zeitspanne.

[11:07]

So if I decide to scratch my head or lift this cup of coffee, that decision has been made before it delivered to the consciousness. Now, why was Lesbeth's work interesting to me in the 70s? Because I actually become quite aware of this in the 60s through practice. Yeah. For example, I can remember noticing it at parties. I've never liked parties much. This kind of party I like. Philip Whelan, this poet, friend of ours, he describes a sashin as a very slow party.

[12:16]

But you know, one has to go to parties. And I remember that I would think, oh, I think, yeah, pretty soon I'll have to leave the party. But then very soon I noticed that actually I'd already decided to leave and that delivered to my consciousness was just a kind of polite way to... Or I would notice that people... did things, were going to ring the bell, for instance, a little bit before they did it. Yeah, so before the information was delivered to the person's consciousness, their body delivered the information to my, this body.

[13:25]

And the more the what-nesses of our bodies are resonantly engaged, the more you know what's going on or what the person is going to do or say before they do it. And I would expect, I mean, I don't know, Valentin is a musician. I don't know, of course, but I would assume that Valentin is a musician. When a group of musicians playing together get really together, it's something like this.

[14:38]

It's not consciously. It's the bodies are doing it. When musicians really come together and play together, it's something they do physically and not something they do consciously. And it must be through it. It must addict you to being a musician. And I've often wished I had the skills of that addiction. As I said, I've had two big regrets in my life. One is I've never had a baby. And I think it's too late for me now. And the other is I'm not a musician. But my daughter is a musician. And she's getting married and saying, my goodness, she might have a baby.

[15:52]

So then it's clear that consciousness is an editor and an... an editor. And sometimes a publisher. But the sense of agency that you made the decision is pretty ephemeral. The sense of agency. You're more an emissary of a process of making a decision. Yeah, so, you know, I mean, again, we have to find, it's nice, it's useful if you notice these processes in yourself. Yeah, I get up in the morning, I'm in a new town.

[17:10]

I go out for a walk. I decide to have a cup of coffee. Okay. Now, the decision to have a cup of coffee is because my what-ness has decided it's dry. But I walk by two cafes and find one I like. The who-ness decided on the cafe. And I have to have the World Herald Tribune. That's my who-ness deciding. Except it can be traced back to... the pleasure one gets from reading and so forth. So if we think of consciousness and self as the sense of agency, as an editor and a publisher, if we think of the self

[18:17]

and the sense of agency, the sense we're acting, as more like being an editor or a publisher, then I think we have a more accurate sense of who decided on this intention. dann bekommen wir eine genauere Vorstellung, wer sich für eine Intention entschieden hat. Who asked what we are? Wer fragt, was wir sind? Yeah, this question comes up in such a complex way. Diese Frage stellt sich auf so komplexe Weise. But our society educates us to be a responsible publisher and make sure the newspaper has only, you know, kinds of things in it. But you can't always ask the publisher who wrote this story or where did the story come from or what's the source of the story.

[19:39]

But the publisher is responsible for the overall story. content and look of the newspaper. Yeah. When I was, I told you this story, some of you before, I was in northern Italy last year. At a friend's place. And they had a swimming pool at this place. It didn't happen to be heated. So Sophia said, Papa, you're going to go swimming with me.

[20:45]

And she seems to not be affected by heat and cold much. She always takes all the covers off. And she seems to not be affected by heat and cold much. What can I say when a three-year-old asks you to go swimming? I said yes. Will you jump off the diving board? They had a two-story diving board. Yes, I'm Papa. So I got in there. There were lots of 500 milliseconds saying, no, no, no. But the publisher took a look at Sophia and said, jump, you fool. And halfway down as the cold water is going up... It took about four laps to get warm.

[22:05]

So in effect, in that case, the publisher made the decision. But I think the actual context of most decisions is much more complex than the agency of self. I think that in most situations the decision-making is much more complex than the acting aspect of the self. Or the acting of the self. What does the agency mean? The agency of the self. Can you say agents? Agents or agents. Agents of the self. So part of practice is to choose your context and then let the context talk through you.

[23:06]

So anyway, that's something to say. Do you want to add something? Does that mean there's nobody to detect who is in charge? There's no one to detect who's in charge. The publisher maybe gets salary from some guy. Well, I think there's some truth, there's some accuracy to that. I mean, we're in such a consumptive and consumer-oriented society. Consumptive means sick.

[24:09]

Pneumonia is called consumption, I think. And, you know, Advertisers are buying your attention. And I mean, it's amazing. And the world is a pop-up ad these days. And by buying your attention, They externalize your wishes, desires, needs. So in some ways the self as publisher is owned by the society. But we do have a responsibility for our actions.

[25:15]

No, we're not just automatons. But the content that's presented to the self is not decided, is not... Anyway, you understand. Dogen says, the elements come together to form the body. The agent eye does not have to appear. And he says, when the elements dissolve, the agent eye does not have to dissolve. So I think when we practice we have a sense of context more of...

[26:23]

participating in a lived life, which the function of the self is only a part. And Roland, do you want to reframe and put it in a less generalized context what you said yesterday? Yesterday I thought it was easier, but I think it is better if you give it a context out of which a question rises. I'm concerned with the subject, how do you help people and organizations to change themselves?

[27:40]

Especially when they don't want to do this change from themselves. But through their professional context they're forced to do this change. That's why I'm asking what is the kind of igniting force or something, driving force behind intention. Well, of course, just in terms of business, there must be endless studies of how people can get involved in different, survive in different corporate cultures and stuff. So I'm not going to try to respond on that level. But if I come back to what's behind an intention.

[29:15]

Okay. Well, it depends on the intention. I have an intention to say no things as empty of permanence. I mention that because I may speak about that before we end. Now that intention does not arise through my sensorial experience. We could call that a wisdom concept or a concept or intention that has arisen through wisdom. But behind that is a concern with how we live, how we know this world.

[30:32]

And behind that is caring. And for me, it all roots back. I can't think of anything right now, anyway, that doesn't root back to character. And a guy named Jack, I guess it's Dutch for Jack, J-A-K, Jack Punksept. You don't have to translate it. It's not translated.

[31:35]

In a book called Effective Neuroscience, it says our whole cognitive system would collapse if our emotional value system that underlies it was destroyed. And we think with the emotions. Our logic is accompanied by emotions. And this book I've been talking about, Animals in Translation, which I found in Vienna in Shakespeare and Company the other day, one of my favorite bookstores in the world. This funny woman has such a great edited selection of books. She points out research which has shown that rats have a close-up scent system and a long-distance scent system.

[32:44]

In other words, if a cat is right up close to a rat, the rat smells it and feels fear, but it's too late. Oh, poor thing. But the rat also has a long-distance sensory system. But it's not attached to fear receptors. So the rat is not scared about a cat that's 20 feet away. It's only when the rat is face to face with the cat that it gets scared and it's too late. So it's lucky for cats.

[34:17]

Okay. But it seems to be it protects the rats because it's a predictor of where cats have been. And because a cat may have just left, but the rat can smell where cats have been and then is afraid and stays away from those places. This is one example of a number of how emotions hunches, hunches? No, no, that's hunched. A hunch is a guess. Yeah. I have a hunch something's going to happen. Yeah, but what's the phrase? This is one example among a number of hunches or intuitions in how emotions predict the future.

[35:23]

So I'm only speaking about emotions and under emotions, I think all emotions are rooted in caring. And in any situation, my experience is you have to work with what people care about and what you yourself care about. And when I've tried to practice in various times in my life, reducing things to as close to zero as I can get, for instance, I don't get up unless I get up. I don't wash my face.

[36:32]

But after a few days, I think, you know, it's really nice to wash your face. So then I say, okay, I've decided to stay alive. I've decided to get up. I've decided to wash my face. And then you could add brushing your teeth after a few days. Then you can add wanting to have a friend with you. I was feeling a little lonely this morning, so I brought down the Buddha. Okay, so the reason I brought him down actually Aber eigentlich der Grund, weshalb ich ihn runtergebracht habe, ist, weil ich über Kin Hin sprechen möchte.

[37:37]

Weil ich heute Morgen beobachtet habe, dass nur ganz wenige von euch ihre Ferse heben, wenn sie einatmen. Da könnt ihr mal die Ferse sehen. Most of you just move your foot flat forward. And there's a... Excuse me for handling you like this. But there's a line. We call it heel breathing. And as you inhale, you actually lift the back heel. And there's a relationship between the heel and this. And you feel an energy coming up this line to here. And then you feel an energy going down this line back. So, kin-hin is a walking meditation. is a meditative form of the noble posture of walking.

[38:55]

And it's very particular. Although this is a symbol of blah, blah, blah, really you don't feel this unless you feel this. So these postures we take, like in walking meditation, are Ritual ways we give the body form outside the context of who. Formen außerhalb des Kontextes von wer.

[40:05]

If you really walk Kinyin, some people, I know Bill Kwong says, and I've noticed it, people too, that you start to weep sometimes doing Kinyin. it's somehow even when you sit zazen it's something like you're lifting yourself up above the level of who, the water of who. And the more embedded you are in your who-ness, the harder it is to do things like morning service and do nine vows and all that stuff. The whatness of you doesn't have much trouble bowing. The whatness, you know, you're alive, your heart's beating, you're breathing.

[41:09]

Yeah, what difference does it make whether you're bowing or standing or whatever? So these practices are meant one way to understand them. Because they take you out of your wholeness into what-ness. And you feel something is walking, but you couldn't say exactly who it is. Okay. Now, Maybe what I said, the absence of permanence, I should speak about that.

[42:32]

It's an entry into the experience or understanding of emptiness. As we may have felt this sense of the what-ness of us and the world embeds us in the world more fully. And as you said, it often gives us a more open, vulnerable and safe feeling. Open to others and to phenomena. Okay. And so we could just, if we have open and wide, let's say that the experience of emptiness gives us a sense of the wideness and freedom of being.

[43:55]

The wideness and freedom of being, of becoming and being, and in which also moment by moment self doesn't have to arise. Now, let's speak for a moment about the illusion of permanence. First of all, consciousness has to give us, the job of consciousness, as I've said, is to give us, to make the world, to limit reality and make it seem predictable. Now, consciousness can do more than that, and consciousness can be in the... There can be non-thinking consciousness, which is somewhat different.

[45:10]

But mostly thinking consciousness tries, implicitly makes the world seem permanent. So it makes the world seem knowable and chronological and so forth. So consciousness itself creates the illusion of permanence and duration. But also, each object, horse, human being, the walls of this building, are all impermanent, but they're in different times.

[46:34]

They have different system-dependent clocks. So the overlap of these different times creates a sense of permanence. And the contents of consciousness itself of memory, associations, also overlap and hide any biological transitions. And finally, the process of perception itself creates a background-foreground relationship So if you see a fly, it flies through an area that you've actually created.

[47:46]

You scanned back and forth and created a scene which the fly flies through. If you're in a herd of killer bees, which I was once in Peru, You can't create a background. It's just like this. So the way our consciousness functions, it creates a background in which we see movement, but the background itself is impermanent. So it creates an illusion of permanence. So permanence and duration are a complex illusion. When actually it's past, present.

[49:07]

There's no duration to present, it's just past. And we participate, we create this duration, which is being a participant in this duration is part of practice. So now, when Copernicus and Newton and Galileo all assumed there was a fixed reference point, Now, Einstein, I think, was the first to say, if you want to measure something very carefully, you've got to measure that the laboratory itself is also moving. There's no fixed reference point. It's all an arrangement. And the koan of Keichu's cart, you take apart the cart and put the cart back together. This is a teaching about emptiness of no fixed reference point.

[50:10]

We don't have time to go into these. This is the biggest topic in Buddhism and we only have five more minutes. A short question. Is that the point when it says Seeing emptiness, having compassion, is that you're caring. Okay. So, but let me give you an example with the bell. Also, one of the metaphors for a dharma is a flame at the end of a stick. It looks like a circle, but it's only an illusion.

[51:30]

So when a person dies, when we do the funeral ceremony, we take a flame on the end of a paper flame, on the end of a stick, and make a big circle, which has many meanings, one being you take responsibility for the cremation. But it's also a symbol of... We do it both directions as a symbol of nirvana, representation of nirvana. So let me see if I can catch this in one example of the bell. Okay. If... If this hand, which 500 milliseconds ago has decided to ring the bell, but the publisher here has created the context for the decision, so if I ring the bell, the sound of the bell establishes its impermanence.

[52:44]

etabliert der Klang, der Glocke, die Vergänglichkeit der Glocke. Okay. Do you understand that? The sound itself shows you that it's impermanent. That the sound is impermanent or that the bell is impermanent? The sound is impermanent. Entschuldigung. Also, dann zeigt es, dass der Klang vergänglich ist. Okay, so the sound... The nature, the qualities, the aspects of the sound show you it's impermanent. Now, what's the delusion about that perception? The delusion is that it implies that permanence is the state of being and the bell is sound as an example of impermanence. It assumes the natural state is permanence, but the bell is showing you that in this case the sound is impermanent.

[54:10]

So what we could call the wisdom shift in Buddhism is that not that you perceive the impermanence of the sound but you perceive the absence of permanence. From the beginning, there's an absence of permanence. But the bell itself does not establish by its own, in our perceptual duration, does not establish its impermanence. But I can conceptually know that it's impermanent.

[55:18]

So I can perceive the absence of permanence. Somit kann ich die Abwesenheit der Permanenz wahrnehmen. Also ich kann sie kennen, diese Abwesenheit der Permanenz. Wenn ich die Abwesenheit von Permanenz im Klang der Glocke wahrnehmen kann, I can also perceive the absence of permanence in the physical bell itself. Okay, so the openness or wideness of the mind in which everything you perceive, you notice the absence of permanence. And Dogen says something like, this sound knocking on emptiness, this sound continues endlessly.

[56:32]

This sound knocking on emptiness, this sound So it takes wisdom to bring the absence of permanence to each percept moment. But if you take this as one of these phrases, And you somehow find a way to feel on each perception the absence of permanence.

[57:33]

Makes us feel very free in this world. One way to approach it is to notice on every perception every perception is. Every object perceived One way to notice it is to notice that perception points at the object perceived, but also points at the mind perceiving. So if you get used to, when you hear something, you hear your own hearing as well as the bird. Wenn ihr euch daran gewöhnt, wenn ihr etwas hört, dass ihr euer eigenes Hören hört, genauso oder gleichzeitig wie ihr den Vogel hört. Ihr hört nicht die ganze Komplexität des Klanges, den der Vogel erzeugt. Nach sehr vielen Studien über Vogelrufe,

[58:35]

I can't remember his name. He came to the conclusions birds sing not for any reason. They sing because they can. So they sing and develop songs because they enjoy it. I said they don't sing just out of joy. No, you did it wrong. They sing because they can. Because they're able to, they sing. So they sing for the same reason we do, because we enjoy it. Not because instinctually they have to defend their territory or something like that. So maybe the birds are singing for us and for each other.

[59:49]

But we only hear what our sensory apparatus allows us to hear. Now, this has been philosophically noticed for some centuries. But it's Buddhist to practice with it on every perception you perceive. You perceive mind. So when I look at you I know I'm seeing my own mind and senses looking at you. Since I enjoy my own mind and senses I'm happy most of the time. And that happiness and sense of Mind is an entry to this absence of permanence.

[61:16]

This happiness and sense of mind, everything points to mind, is an entry to the realization and practice of the absence of permanence. Yeah. It's the center of Madhyamaka Buddhist teaching. And took centuries for people to get to. And now you've had it easily handed to you this weekend. You can do with it what you like. Thank you very much. Let's sit for about a moment. Wide mind.

[62:34]

Open mind. Empty.

[62:36]

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