Yesterday I felt... Hey, hi. Yesterday I felt I was too philosophical. Could you pull this poet over? Let's see the whole... There, that's good. Anyway, I was... felt that I was too philosophical, but the reason I do that is partly just so I don't get carried away with what to say. But I also think each of us has an inner debater. An inner defender, an inner resistor.

[01:01]

So, I mean, I'm hoping I'm speaking in a way that you don't hear me. And that's why I hope that I speak in a way that you don't hear me. Because if you hear me, you'll forget what I say. But if you feel what I'm saying, it will continue, I hope, to work in you. And then, if it works in you, your inner debater and inner defender and inner resister will try to come to your rescue. Because, you know, you'll want to, can this be true?

[02:20]

Can what he said really make sense? Are the possibilities of human beingness implied in what he said? Real potentialities, even for me? And immediately your inner debater will try to find holes in what I said. And your inner defender will just say, forget about it. Yeah, that's it. Okay. And because what we're doing and what you're doing and we're doing, I think I would have to say is dangerous work.

[03:29]

Because it's about how we're glued together. So here we have something here, which is a... 20-minute long or hour-long therapy. Or a two-day long therapy. Because there's a therapeutic... dilemma and aspect to everybody's constellation. I mean, when I'm In a field of consolation work, I cry almost as much as I do in movies.

[04:54]

Which my wife and daughter won't go to the movies with me because I make a fool of myself. Now, how are we glued together? I think we're glued together by familial patterns.

[05:58]

Innerly, we're glued together by familial patterns. And maybe I could say, outerly, we're glued together by cultural expectations and activity. And moment after moment, our moment after moment continuum is usually or very often a transcendent expectation of the future. And our continuum from moment to moment is often something like a transcendent expectation of the future. And that's one of the problems in the West with the concept of enlightenment. because it can easily be seen as a future-anticipated transcendence.

[07:11]

So when you start messing around with how you're glued together, it's kind of dangerous. Kind of dangerous. And... So if I speak about potential Zen practices that could extend this constellating practice into your daily lives and into your future, I mean, I said constellating instead of constellation.

[08:11]

Because if this was a Buddhist practice, we would develop it into a teaching which then you could practice in zazen, practice at home, practice in your daily life circumstances. But in our hour-long or day-long or two-day-long therapeutic field. We're here because of the accomplished presence of our master constellation shaman, Guni. Excuse me for calling you that.

[09:33]

Whatever. Doesn't all the shamans say, whatever. So if there's a situation where it looks like We're in the midst of seeing our, feeling our familial patterns in new ways. It's challenging or devastating. And if it looks like we have access to see our family patterns in a new way, which may even be disturbing or disturbing... Goni can suggest and bring forth quite a few bodies Bodies you don't know, but bodies that nevertheless, who can reassure you, stand behind you, stand with you.

[10:41]

But if you do this practice on your own, I mean, let's imagine, how could you do it on your own? You don't have Guni there to say, hey, let's get all these people to give you actual physical support. I spoke yesterday about imagistic thinking. And maybe I should say now imaging rather than imagistic thinking.

[11:48]

Imaging is an activity. Imaginieren? Okay. Thank you. Okay, now, what's the difference? Terry Deacon, who's somebody I know a bit, has written a book which says about the... that the brain and language is a co-evolved process, the co-evolution of the brain and language. He speaks about it. I'm quite convinced by his book, actually. I saw him fairly recently and I said, Terry, I swear by your book.

[13:04]

He said, don't swear. If our language and our brain co-evolved, How we function symbolically has a great deal to do with who we are. In other words, I think all animals we call human beings can reproduce together, can mate. So we're biologically pretty similar.

[14:05]

But culturally, and I wish I had a stronger word than culturally, our beingness can be pretty different. What I'm often trying to recognize is this practice, which I'm doing for 55 years now, from the rise and has been evolved in Asia for two or three thousand years, is more different than we realize. That's my experience. And one of the differences is if we... And one of the differences is, if we function imaginatively and not conceptually, I don't know how to say these things, I'm doing my best.

[15:33]

Yeah, then we're a significantly different kind of person, which most of us can't really believe is possible. And when that potentiality becomes real for you, it can take apart how you're glued together. And if you're doing some kind of related practice without Guni at your side, I'm wondering if I should suggest such a practice. I would love to have Guni by my side all the time, but that's not possible.

[16:40]

She might get tired of it. So what do I, let me just try to say, I can't say every, I can't, I can only do so much in three little sessions. But let me give you a feeling for what I mean by imaginal thinking, imaginal, imagining. One of the concepts in Buddhism is three thousand coherences, the immediacy of three thousand coherences. In other words, there's the causation from past to future or past to present. In other words, there is the causation relationship from the past into the present.

[18:11]

Whatever that causal trigger is in the context of an immediacy of 3,000 coherences and that context of 3,000 coherences really stirs up, stews, stews, like making a stew, stews up this causal trigger. Now, 3,000 coherences is not a number. It's an image. Yeah, like the 10,000 things is an image. The word in English, myriad, actually means in Greek, 10,000. But the word myriad has become a generality.

[19:28]

The 10,000 things is an image, but it's an image of particularity, not generality. Now, a mathematician, for instance, who thinks in units like sevens and threes and forties, and he sees numbers as groupings, those are images, not numbers. I don't know if I'm making sense, but let's pretend I am. Now, knowing the world as images immediately takes your process out of consciousness and out of thinking, into feeling, and not emotion, but feeling, non-graspable feeling.

[21:00]

It's like what's happening in this room right now, that you can't grasp, but you're present in it. And not emotions, but a kind of untouchable feeling. So what is the feeling in this room right now? This is not an emotion, nothing that you can touch, but it is a feeling, a feeling. Now, if you're in a world of feeling, non-graspable feeling, it calls forth this associative layer of mind, this associative field of mind not yet shaped by self-narrative and cultural narratives, or not so much shaped by. So that becomes, it becomes really the name of or the fact of creative and intuitive thinking, so-called thinking.

[22:03]

So that's really the name or the fact of what we want to call intuitive thinking. Okay. Now, let's take Japanese, Chinese, East Asian culture. Nehmen wir mal die japanische, chinesische, ostasiatische Kultur. Their language are images, not words. Deren Sprache sind Bilder, nicht Worte. From birth on, they're functioning through images, not through conceptual language. Von Geburt an funktionieren sie durch Bilder und nicht durch eine konzeptuelle Sprache. This makes them a different kind of person. And when I do practice meetings, one-to-one practice meetings, with people who grew up in China or Japan, what is what they feel and experience different in Western people?

[23:22]

It's actually different. A different spectrum of experience. Okay, so now I can give... So, I'm going to stop pretty soon. So a practice I could give you is which is a practice within Zen and well I'll mention it and I think you can I'll also mention some antidotes and you can think about it An image about it.

[24:26]

Is imagine the space around you, the extended space around you is populated by your family. Right now, imagine for a moment, where is your father in the space around you? Some of you may be able to feel that already. And imagine where your mother is in the space around you. I bet it's in a somewhat different place than your father. And I bet one is nearer to you than the other.

[25:29]

Now, if you have that experience, in fact, your extended space is actually populated by your family. There's an always present constellation actually around you all the time. And it's there when you image the world and not think the world. So what would we do if we developed this practice in our Zazen?

[26:30]

And it's unusual that I'm suggesting this, but I don't know if I'm trying to participate. Anyway, because I don't usually suggest it to my students. Okay. Now, if you do develop this ability to feel the population in the space around you, the familial population. You have to be ready for some unexpected visitors. Sometimes they're friends. Sometimes they're relatives, brothers, sisters, ancestors.

[27:46]

And the population is pretty big. And the space can be darker on the left than the right and things like that. And sometimes you can't quite feel the presence of somebody, but you can feel they're there in a kind of darkness or mist. So imagistic thinking, imagistic imaging can lead you into this kind of space. And an unexpected visitor could be a twin aborted inside you. I've known several people who've had a twin born inside them and there it is.

[28:58]

And it's discovered in an x-ray, but it can also be discovered in exploring this space around you, because the aborted twin is in the space around you. Now, if you try on this kind of practice, it's assumed that in Zen practice, You've achieved a certain degree of imperturbability. That you're not defined through your familial patterns, primarily. or your cultural patterns, but the potentiality of a field of mind that's non-articulated. And when Nagarjuna, who's lived from, I don't know, nobody knows, 150 to 250 CE, in the Christian era, contemporary era, yeah?

[30:25]

Who's called the second Buddha. When he says, locate yourself in a non-articulated self, in a non-articulated reality or actuality. Non-articulated self. He's speaking Imaginary. Locate yourself in these images. And these images have tremendous power to create what they're imagining.

[31:26]

And you are then again in the midst of how you're put together. So you want to feel inside yourself what you actually learn physically from Zazen. No matter what happens, I'm able not to move. And you see it pretty soon in practitioners. I mean, in San Francisco, when I was head of the San Francisco Zen Center, In San Francisco, when I was the head of the San Francisco Zen Center, we were in the second most dangerous neighborhood in San Francisco, where Chris Persig, whose father wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Mason, was shot to death a block away.

[32:49]

There were often gunshot wounds, shouts, sirens. Nobody moved except one person who was designated to go out and investigate. If you can help somebody, they're just being assaulted. You would just sit and you'd hear this, what's going on? When you have that, you're able to begin to investigate yourself in deeper and more potentially shaky ways. And you develop a kind of

[33:53]

Animality immediacy. I'm talking crazy again, yeah. A sensorial physicality. Where you're simply located in your immediate physicality and virtually nothing can disturb that. You have no future, past. You're just there, no matter what. And the accomplishment of that is the condition for certain kinds of practices. And the achievement of this is the condition for some exercises, for some practices. And in a certain way, some of you are here to learn how the Zen practice can overlap with the installation work.

[35:13]

And I jokingly and seriously call constellating work shamanic practice. After all, you're talking to the dead. You're talking across the boundary where you can't go, which is still in you. So part of Zen practice is to clear the extended space around you so it's no longer populated by your family. So when people ask me, I'm a little cautious about speaking about the overlap. Und wenn Leute mich fragen, wie können wir das umsetzen in der Praxis, ich bin immer ein bisschen vorsichtig, über diese Überlappung zu sprechen.

[36:43]

But I'd like to end as Gunny ends. She asks you sometimes to shake yourself or tap your feet. She goes like this, clear yourself out. And in an imagistic practice is also a microgestural world. And gestures are images which have a power, surprisingly, that you wouldn't think they would have power. I watched a Japanese girl, three-girl rock group the other day, and they don't dance to the beat so much. They articulate space around them. Hello Kitty is a mudra.

[37:54]

I mean, even Michael Jackson knew this. He would let everything absorb into his presence, and then he'd move a finger. So, Guni says, just bring it out of you. But you can also have a feeling, and I would do it as a practice maybe, Instead of only investigating my familial population, I would make an inner and outer gesture

[38:57]

of extending my identification from my familial patterns to tribal patterns, instinctive tribal patterns, to humanitarian patterns, which are, you know, the last modern period, the emphasis, to the sentient world and the phenomenal world, the environment itself, And this can transform how your familial patterns function within you when your sense of identification is throughout this spectrum of beingness.

[40:35]

No, it's translated rather in Western terms, to save all sentient beings is the basic Buddhist vow. But the vow is really something more like which a Buddhist takes every day inseparably inseparably beingness inseparably in I don't know what to say. Inseparable beingness.

[41:37]

Something like that. And that's also a way to locate yourself in this engaged immediacy. Well, that's more than enough to have us miss lunch. Thank you very much. Thank you. You're welcome.

[42:11]

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