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Intention's Dance in Zen Practice

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RB-03698

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Seminar_The_Continuum_of_the_Self

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The talk focuses on the concept of intention within Zen practice, emphasizing the inherent and learned intentions that guide behavior, particularly the intention to stay alive and practice mindfulness. The discussion explores how intentions can conflict, especially within a complex intentional system, and the importance of anchoring beneficial intentions. The speaker highlights repetitions and faith in anchoring intentions, as well as the distinction between awareness and attention, using examples from daily life, Zen, and teachings. The talk also contrasts self-awareness and the sense of self's continuity, suggesting ways to perceive the self through feelings of selfishness and selflessness.

  • Eightfold Path in Buddhism: Mentioned as starting with right views, underscoring the importance of having an accurate worldview for effective practice.
  • B.K.S. Iyengar: Referenced in relation to awareness of the body, especially the feet, in yoga and mindfulness, and the connection to understanding the self.
  • Socratic Dictum "Know Thyself": Critiqued here for lacking the acknowledgment that true self-knowledge transcends mere conscious awareness, hinting at Buddhist concepts of deeper understanding.
  • Descartes’ “Cogito, ergo sum”: Criticized as a limited perspective on consciousness and self, contrasting with broader Zen views on self-awareness.
  • Suzuki Roshi: Referred to in mentioning the significance of attitude in understanding one's state of mind within Zen practice.

AI Suggested Title: Intention's Dance in Zen Practice

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Transcript: 

Well, did anything I say cause some reflection in you? And if any of you that are newish have any aspect you'd like me to bring up, don't be shy. It might give me permission to speak about the more experienced, speak about things the more experienced practitioners are too shy to bring up. The senior practitioners think they should know Is that true?

[01:01]

No, no. And the new practitioners are embarrassed they don't know. No. So... Yes, a new practitioner. Every time. Every time. So when you said that the intention is more important than attention, The question came up for me, how do I anchor the intention or is it a continuous repetition of the intention? Fundamentally, I don't know.

[02:35]

But I can try to describe what kind of alive being we are. A baby is born. And I think pretty early, maybe from the beginning, they're afraid of falling. You can scare a baby by holding it over an edge. As I remember having three children. And shy babies are afraid of strangers and so forth. So there's some kind of built-in instinctual attitudes, let's call it. And one of those attitudes becomes the intention to stay alive.

[03:57]

And to Yeah, which is not the same as just avoiding being hurt. You try to do things that could lead to hurt. You avoid doing things. You try to do things that would lead to hurt. So there's some kind of built-in intention that develops to stay alive. You might be feeling suicidal, but as you're driving a car, somebody starts driving towards you, you immediately drive out of the way, even if you're feeling suicidal.

[05:13]

Yeah, so there's some kind of built-in to stay alive. And if I make that a conscious intention, I intend to stay alive no matter what. Yeah. This is an important decision. Many people make a decision, I intend to stay alive if my mother loves me. Or if I'm successful. Or if people like me or something. So ideally you want to make an intention to stay alive with no ifs.

[06:26]

But many of us may feel we have such an intention, but if the ifs don't come true, we sort of don't really feel fully alive. Okay, so what I'm saying, just mumbling about here, is that we already are part of a system of intention. schon jetzt Teil eines Systems von Intentionen sind. To stay alive, etc. Am Leben zu bleiben, usw. And we add the intention to our intentional system.

[07:35]

Und wir fügen diese Absicht zu praktizieren usw. zu unserem Intentionssystem hinzu. Mhm. And how do you anchor an intention into that intentional system is basically what your question is. Well, most intentions are anchored in by imagining it has some self-benefit. So we hook it into the intention to... develop to satisfy the self. So it's much more difficult to anchor an attention into our intentional system if it doesn't benefit the self.

[08:46]

So as you imply, repetition helps. But I think the repetition has to be in a meta worldview or a larger worldview than self-benefit. Selfishness is a narrow description of selfness. Selfishness. The Buddhist view to benefit all sentient beings is a wide form of selfishness. Yeah, it's still a kind of selfishness.

[10:09]

But it's a more wise form of selfishness. So somehow what I'm trying to do here today already is to create a shared form of reference. Yeah, where we have a taste or feel for or assumption about living within a way that's beneficial to all sentience. And the more you have that as your worldview, The easier it is to anchor intentions.

[11:30]

So the eightfold path starts with right views. And without right views, nothing else is right. So much of what we're doing is trying to make more sophisticated and wiser our views. And more accurate our views, accurate about how the world actually exists. Sorry. It took so long to say almost nothing. But maybe I can think of, it will appear a more useful way to speak about anchoring a new intention.

[12:41]

I suppose basically it's repetition. within the context of faith. You have faith that this is... Each moment it comes up, you experience faith in the repetitions. And faith is the glue that starts to make it work. I'm intentionally not using the word believe. But believe also works, but then you have to start talking about what you believe in. Practice needs faith, but we human beings are ready to believe almost anything that makes us feel good.

[14:02]

or confirms an anthropomorphized view of the world. In other words, the phenomenal world is somehow a person we call God, and we can be true to that belief. It's a world, I'm sorry I forgot. A world that we can call God. And then we have faith, belief in that concept. That's dangerous. Buddhism really says avoid beliefs. But once you confirm the world by observation and intelligence, then have faith in those parts that you don't yet understand, but make sense.

[15:29]

Okay, I'm sorry. Somebody else. Okay, but in addition to Andreas' question, I also have the question, if these intentions, this intentional system, if there are these conflicts and it is so complexly structured with self-contempting intentions, do you then also have to work on it? So if in relationship to Andrea's question, If we have this complex intentional system with some intentions contradicting other intentions, then do we have to also focus on those intentions that contradict the meta, as you called it, larger wisdom

[16:52]

intentions to practice, do we have to actively focus on dissolving those intentions, or what about those? Well, first of all, you're pointing out that there is an intentional, there are intentional conflicts. Yeah. Nicole is the tenzo, or head cook, at the UNASOC right now. And we are mostly taught, and we mostly want to be, fair and not selfish. So this makes it difficult for her to calculate how much food to cook. Because if she cooks too little, most people won't take as much, won't eat fully because they're being polite and not taking so much.

[18:01]

And so she thinks that, well, she's cooking the right amount because the pot's with some left in the pot. But no one would take the last bit because they were saving it for someone else. And listen, Andreas and I are there. But it's gone. So... So anyway, it's a complex system. Instinctual and cultural. And so if you notice that the intention to bring attention to the breath

[19:12]

It's easy to do for a few moments, but difficult to do for any length of time. This is one of the most powerful questions you can ask yourself. Why is that the case? Okay, so one possibility I suggested. And Nicole mentioned to me up at the coffee kitchen that perhaps the self is also an intention and that to bring attention to the breath conflicts with the intention to live in a self-referential world. So that would be a good example of the process of trying to discover how to notice something that's difficult to notice.

[20:21]

So you bring in an intention that might conflict with self if self is also an intention. And in a rather scientific way, you say, yeah, There's some reason it's so difficult to maintain this intention to bring attention to the breath. So now we might know that perhaps the self is also an intention. Aha. Well, if it's an intention, the invisible self is an intention.

[21:36]

Then we can examine to what degree it's an intention and whether we can change that intention. Or, yeah, change or transform that intention. So, that's the background. Then you had a question on top of that. Which was? You try to dissolve the conflict. Yes. What about those intentions that are in conflict with the intention to practice, let's say?

[23:02]

In practice, do we need to focus on those? Do we need to dissolve them? Do we need to work with them? What do we need to do with them? Well, first you want to notice. And if you can notice within the weaving of the tapestry of reality, And when you can see that it's a tapestry and you're the weaver, and you can see what the threads are, you can begin to change the weaving. But, you know, When a person's whole life suddenly, they realize they've woven a life which didn't make sense or is wrong. And all of your actions are based on the patterns in the fabric that you've woven.

[24:04]

If that fabric suddenly falls apart, and there's no figures within a fabric to replace it, No shaped figures designed. If there's figures, persons designed in the fabric, there's no more figures in the fabric now because the fabrics fell apart. And if your life definitions are based on the figures in the fabric, And now they're gone. When I was young, that was called a nervous breakdown. And people had nervous breakdowns. Which weren't, I would say, mental illness. Just their fabric fell apart and it took some months usually or a year or two sometimes to kind of weave a new fabric that they could act within.

[25:34]

And we could say enlightenment is a nervous breakdown. I'm sorry to have told you that. I should never have mentioned that. But let's call it a controlled or manageable nervous breakdown. And you have some more fundamental fabric to live by than the one you wove most of your life. Yeah, and that becomes the basis for weaving a new fabric. We could call that what it means to enter the way.

[26:52]

We begin to weave a new way, path, Tao, in the midst of a culture which normally doesn't support such a way or path. Okay. Yes. Yes, I remember that you gave a lecture ten or more years ago in Göttingen. These were all, I think, interested laymen who were not in the way of the political tradition. And after the lecture you were asked, why are you doing this? Then you said very simply, I'm just fine. I remember you gave a lecture in Göttingen maybe 10 years ago or so to a large group of people.

[28:08]

Really? We're in Göttingen again? I forget. You remember the lecture? No, I'm just teaching. I remember. He got me to go there. He was his translator. Oh, it must have been good. So it was for a large group of people, most of whom were not actively practicing Buddhism. How did in that bookstore? where the platform almost fell down. That was different. Yeah. And at the end of that lecture, you were asked, so why are you doing all this? And then you quite simply said, it just makes me feel good. Yeah, just, yeah. I could say that... Maybe we could say because your eye felt well, you could follow the intention to follow this path.

[29:12]

Mm-hmm. The pronoun art. Das Pronomen, also das Ich, ja. Und was ich befürchte, ist, dass wir, also wenn ich Intention höre, dann übersetze ich es als Absicht, absichtlich. Maybe what we could say that in German now, we have those two words, absicht or intention. I'm using both of them. But he says, I use absicht. Das hast du absichtlich getan. Das hast du absichtlich getan. Das heißt, du hast es bewusst getan. And when you say absicht in German, there's this feeling, can be this feeling that, oh, you did that intentionally. You did it consciously, willfully, on purpose. Yeah, willfully. Okay.

[30:12]

You ask? No. Okay. So the crux for me is to bring the willpower to the intention. The intention is feeding by just feeling good with What is going on? For me, it's like a circle. It's not like a line. I bring my intention up to the attention, to the attention, to the breathing and influence the I, but the I actually reacts to me.

[31:19]

For me, it's more like a circle. It's not like a straightforward line, but it's a circle in which I'm not just bringing the attention to the breath, but the eye is reactive. It responds to... Yes? Okay. Ich merke das, wenn ich das Blutkabel ganz tief eintrauche in der Achtsamkeit des Atems, that at some point, let's say, this I simply returns to normal life. There is a tendency that I also want to stay there. So when I have the fortune to be deeply engaged with the mindfulness on breath, then there can be this feeling that I want to abide there, I want to stay in that. As though the world dissolves.

[32:22]

but then the I somehow reappears and kind of pushes its way back into the world and that somehow destroys this kind of mindfulness okay thank you for that episodic presentation yes When Andreas spoke about anchoring, I asked myself whether this intention or intention, let's take it from the Buddhist practice, has anything to do with this body, whether it can be separated from the body at all. Whether this intention, from a Buddhist point of view, has to do with the body or whether it's separable from the body.

[33:40]

And anchoring in that sense what that means to me is that I anchor my intention through the breath in the body so that then the body reminds me and that I don't need an intention anymore. And for me, I experience that as a kind of, as the crux, where the body is, you can't exclude the body. It's actually the body is always present with it. It's always there. Okay. So, yeah, that's where I should go. Yeah, that's where I should go, yeah. but I want to hold back before I go there.

[34:59]

And say, if you understand now, and I guess I should, somebody else want to say something before I say a few things. But I think maybe someone else wants to say something before I start laying down. And I'll keep what you said in my mind. Okay. When I'm not successful, when I can't do it, to maintain attention on my breathing throughout the day. When I... Then I wonder if there's any trick to make the breast more interesting.

[36:00]

Because it's usually the external world that draws me, pulls me out. It's usually through the eyes that I get drawn out. So maybe I should bind my eyes. I don't know. Some people do try things like that. Ah, for yourself. Doesn't work. Yeah, you need to be more of a sensualist. Of a sensualist? Yeah. Yes. Just enjoy your breath. Maybe that's why we use incense. One of the reasons, yes. It's, yeah.

[37:02]

So I'm standing. And walking around. And I'm not bringing attention to my standing. And I don't bring attention to my standing. If I bring attention to my standing, now, here I'm just trying to, again, create some shared use of the word attention, attention, etc. I mean, it's, I mean, What we're doing is more difficult than might first appear to you. It took many centuries to develop the language of Buddhism. And to make distinctions within conceptual categories that allowed you to go beyond generalizations.

[38:24]

Go beyond generalizations. Now here, what we're doing as, you know, beginners all, but, yeah. Yeah. is trying to develop a shared vocabulary in English and Deutsch, which doesn't exist or hasn't even begun to exist except in the last couple of decades. So, okay, so if I bring attention to my breath, I mean, excuse me, attention to my standing, then we could say I'm doing what I call moment after moment yoga.

[39:26]

Okay, so while I practice, I try to sometimes have to remind myself, but mostly I don't have to remind myself to do moment after moment yoga. Okay, so what do I mean by moment after moment yoga? Which I'm defining as bringing attention to standing. Now, if I bring attention to standing, I... because I've developed certain categories in which I bring attention to a family. I bring attention to my spine. And I don't even think of it as my spine, it's just spine.

[40:31]

And I sort of try to feel that there's a little space between each vertebra. And I try to feel a little looseness or stretching in the spine. And I try to feel the way my heels touch the floor both lightly and firmly. And I try to feel the way my claws touch the ground, both gently and firmly.

[41:34]

Because, I mean, I don't know, I'm not a doctor, so Dr. McNeil here can tell us. Dr. McNeil... It's still Scottish. So it is that the feet are a sensing mechanism related to the brain which establishes your balance. Die Füße sind ein Sinnesmechanismus in Verbindung mit dem Gehirn, die dein Stehen informieren. So I want my feet to be quite responsive to standing. Und deshalb mache ich es so, dass meine Füße ganz sensibel sind oder reagieren auf dieses Stehen. Iyengar, the famous almost maybe the most famous yoga contemporary, yoga teacher who brought yoga to the West big time, who died the other day, Iyengar.

[42:47]

He said something I read in his obituary. said something like, how can you know God or know the self if you don't know your big toe? And I often say something similar. He said, if you don't know where your feet are, how do you know really anything? So one of the basic teachings in Zen is that your feet, your ankles are always about a fist apart. Let's see. Let me check to see if I'm doing it.

[43:48]

Cute, huh? Oh, perfect. Well, I simply have taught myself to whenever I stand, always have my ankles that far apart. And people come to Dokusan, which is when you person to person have meetings with teachers. And of course, the first thing I noticed Because I'm sitting down and they're standing up and they're standing up. Well, I'm not going to pay much attention to this guy's practice.

[44:50]

He can't even keep his ankles apart. And then I have an intention to be compassionate. So I think, I'll give the poor fellow another second chance. So then I take seriously their practice. But in any case, you don't learn these things unless you make yourself a little rule. The little rule to keep your ankles about that far apart. Or your gassho that far from your nose. The legitimate person would be in here. We measure our body with our body.

[46:00]

Okay, so I'm standing here. Or something's standing here. I try not to always say, I'm standing here. I don't want to reinforce the pronoun. Okay. Ich versuche nicht immer zu sagen, dass ich hier stehe, weil ich dieses Pronomen ich nicht verstärken will. But language makes it difficult to not say, I'm standing here. Aber die Sprache macht es mir schwer, nicht zu sagen, dass ich hier stehe. You sound awfully arcane to say, there is standing here. You think you are a statue? Well, if a pigeon lands on me, I'll be sure. Okay. So there is standing here. Yeah. And I intentionally doing moment after moment yoga.

[47:13]

Bring attention up my spine. Actually makes me feel rather good. It's sort of more interesting than many of my thoughts. And I see if my shoulders are relaxed. So that's the bringing attention to the center. But I don't have to do that. In order to stand. I'm standing without bringing attention to standing. And I'm walking around and I might sit down, I might stand up.

[48:13]

I'm not doing that through attention. Well, there's a certain kind of attention. I don't want to knock the flowers over at things. But I'm really letting the body do it. The body just lets me walk around and stand. So what do we call that? We could say the body's doing it. But let's say the intention is doing it. I formed, or an intention formed, to stand up. And you saw that I got off the cushion, stood up, and stood up. So let's say that intention is doing the standing without my having to have attention to the standing.

[49:25]

Also sagen wir mal, dass die Aufmerksamkeit das Stehen vollzieht, ohne dass sich Aufmerksamkeit zu dieser Aufmerksamkeit bringen muss. The intention to stand created an intentional domain in which various kinds of standing can occur. The intention to stand or the intention to stand? The intention to stand. Okay, die Intention zu stehen hat einen Aufmerksamkeitsbereich gebildet, in dem dieses Stehen stattfinden kann. All right. The point of all that is, once you have fully or rather thoroughly developed the intention to bring attention to your breath, At some point, you don't have to bring attention anymore to your breath because intention does it.

[50:38]

So a person who has developed the ability to be consistently attentive to the breath... is not bringing consciously noticeable attention to the breath. They're bringing an intentional attention See, there's no word for this in-between thing. So it's kind of attentional attention or conscious attention and there's non-conscious attention non-conscious attention which functions non-conscious attention which functions through intention.

[51:59]

So after a while, I don't have any sense of bringing conscious attention to my breath, but attention rests in my breath. Because some people think because they forgot about bringing conscious attention, they're not bringing attention, but that you can't have conscious attention only because the consciousness has a job to do. Yes, Dr. McNeil. Yes, but if my notion of myself is limited to being a conscious being, then also my intention would be limited by this notion, and so this would just be a threat or... Wouldn't it be neat to speak Deutsch first?

[53:11]

Oh, yes. Yes, yes. If my idea and my concept of myself is limited to being conscious, then it is... the power or the intention is limited to it and therefore weaker, actually. If I don't have at least a half or as a possibility, maybe not a formed idea, but a possibility that I have a further being than my consciousness, then I don't have the possibility to deepen or strengthen the intention so that it then also holds when I no longer think about it. Sounds good. When I don't at least have the possibility that I, whatever it is, am wider than my conscious being, then only then can there be a deepening or widening of the intention which then has the power or the strength to sustain even when I'm not consciously thinking of it.

[54:19]

That's right. That's right. And we start mad. Because we start, let's say, with a thought, I want to stay with my breath, I want to be present with my breath. And if this just stays there, it just disappears in a short while. If it doesn't go deeper, it stops. We live in a culture which assumes the truth of the so-called Socratic dictum that we should know oneself, know thyself. Yeah, but they forgot the footnote.

[55:25]

And the footnote is, you cannot know thyself through consciousness. Now, if that footnote had been there, we'd all be living in a Buddhist culture now. Because as soon as you really recognize you can't know oneself through oneself or through consciousness, then you clearly have to have some way of knowing that is wider than consciousness. And then, how do you create a knowing wider than consciousness? And then Plato, having read the footnote, he would have said, let's get out of the cave and just do Zazen.

[56:37]

Yeah, and we'd be living in a different world now. Right? Right. Hey, I've just rewritten history. This is good. And that has been strengthened by Descartes, our translator. Deutsch, bitte. Oh, you did? Okay. Found it longer in English. It's usually longer in Deutsch. Let's be translated into German, I think, therefore I am. That's the poison that Descartes gave us. But it doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah, yeah.

[57:37]

I mean, it could have been, I think, therefore there must be something here. Es hätte ja auch heißen können, ich denke, also muss es hier irgendwas geben. The I am part is the problem. Dieses daher bin ich, also bin ich ist das Problem. I think, therefore I om. Ich denke, daher sage ich om. I om. Okay, someone else? Noch jemand? Ah. So I think you see the standing intentional, the intentional definition, intention, The definitional intention carries a kind of attention.

[59:00]

is a kind of attention. It's not the same as consciously noticed attention. So we really could talk about the distinction between awareness and consciousness here. Again, one of the examples I use. If you're walking along in your trip and you fall and you are carrying packages And one of the packages is a glass pitcher. And you don't want to fall against a glass pitcher that might break, particularly if it's against your body.

[60:22]

And you don't want to fall against a glass pitcher All this information is present to consciousness. But because you purchased it as a Christmas present or something, the picture... And you consciously know you're carrying it. But when you slip and fall, you have to calculate how to protect the picture, how not to hurt yourself when you fall, and so forth.

[61:29]

And that happens like that, way faster than consciousness. Like if somebody throws you a ball, you're making actually very rapid mathematical calculations of the curve of it to put your hand up in the right place. We can say that's not consciousness. But it's awareness. So when you fell, it wasn't consciousness, it was awareness that brought that information together and didn't let you break the glass pigeon. So now I've made a distinction between awareness and attention.

[62:33]

So we could say now I form an intention to bring attention to the breath and then allow that attention to transform into awareness. But the awareness is what instructs, no, excuse me, the attention is what instructs the awareness. And while I was continuously aware of my standing just a few moments ago,

[63:35]

there was a difference between being continuously aware of my standing and bringing attention to my standing. Okay. Let's erase them. Erase always. Okay. Okay, so what I've made a case for is bringing attention to the breath rather continuously. And it's this, I would say, if I might be, even if I'm prone to exaggeration,

[64:56]

that bringing, discovering attentional constancy in the breath is the single most profound, psychological, and maybe even physiological thing, medically physiological thing, you can do in this life. And maybe I'm not exaggerating. But at least it's in that direction, for sure. Okay. In a parallel way, If you can discover how to bring attention to the continuity of self instead of the continuity of breath, or in addition to the continuity of breath, this then opens up the teaching of Buddhism.

[66:36]

dann wird das die Lehren des Buddhismus öffnen. But we can't really do much of anything until you personally have the experience of the continuum of self. So now I'm... I'm using sometimes continuum, sometimes continuity, just exploring the difference. Now, it's fairly easy to notice the breath. The diaphragm moves, the chest moves, etc., And the self doesn't have a diagram.

[67:50]

The self doesn't have the lungs. The self you can't feel coming in and out of your nostrils. So how do you create a sensation or experienceable sensation or some way to notice the self? Okay. Well, I would say, very simply, notice when you feel selfish and when you feel selfless. Yeah, it's like, you know, you're driving across the middle of the United States, it's flat, flat, flat, and you come to a little hill, and the town calls itself a big hill, it's about as high as this room,

[68:54]

It's like when you drive through the United States and you always drive straight ahead and then you come to a small hill and the city next to it says, but that's a huge hill, it's about as high as this one. Everyone in town says they live on a hill. It's like a Dutch person driving a car in the black forest. They came to see a hill. And they go around the corner. I'm joking. But it's true. Sometimes you get to the head of such a line. And it's a Dutch car. Actually a Dutch car. So let's just say you notice the hills. We'll get to how you notice the flat later, but let's notice the hills first.

[70:26]

So you notice she didn't take the last cookie. And you've noticed that you didn't want to be selfish and take the last cookie. Und du bemerkst, dass du einfach nicht egoistisch sein wolltest und diesen letzten Keks nehmen wolltest. Ihr Kühlschrank im Johanneshof steht voll mit letzten Keksen und letzten Kartoffeln und letzten irgendwas, die einfach niemand nimmt. So the abbot can come down and open the kitchen. Okay, I get a cookie and I get some potatoes. So you notice when you decide not to be selfish. And sometimes you might notice when you feel afraid.

[71:29]

And you feel afraid because somehow yourself is under attack. Or it could be you feel you're being criticized or something. So you notice you don't feel so good. Or maybe you notice that when you think about something you kind of put down various people kind of to put yourself up. And then you notice you actually... putting these other people down to put yourself up, but you actually don't feel up, you feel kind of shitty.

[72:40]

I mean, excuse my language. So you start noticing an invisible topography that surrounds you of the landscape of the self. This invisible topography that arises from your attitudes. Your attitudes. I mean, an attitude, at least in English, is quite a good word, because the attitude of an airplane is that Like this, toward the airport, this, that's the difference in an attitude. I remember in the first year or so of going to Sukhirashi's lectures, twice a week,

[73:41]

Ich erinnere mich, dass im ersten Jahr, als ich zweimal die Woche zu Suzuki Roshi's lectures, äh, Vorträgen gegangen bin. I suddenly stopped, I can remember, stopped in the middle of one lecture and I talked to myself. What the heck is he talking about? And I thought, it's attitude. Everything he's talking about, what attitudes you have toward this or that, and how it affects your state of mind. And so you're just trying to create a feel for the topography, the landscape of self. When you emphasize self more.

[74:58]

When you emphasize it less. And the difference in how you feel. And when you use the word I. People who do studies of pronoun use, for instance. If a person writes to somebody they consider above them in status. They use the pronoun I a lot. I think of you and I would like to come to visit you and I hope it would be all right with you, etc. Ich denke an dich und ich würde dich gerne besuchen kommen und ich hoffe, dass es für dich in Ordnung ist.

[76:08]

He's not thinking I'm lower status, but that's how he dresses himself. Er denkt nicht, dass er sich dem anderen untergeordnet fühlt, aber er drückt sich aus, so als ob er das tut. And then let's imagine a professor. He writes back a note which says, fine, come see me anytime. Thursday at 10 is good. Thursday at 10 is good. He doesn't use the word pronoun at all. Pronoun I at all. And then I'm telling you a real anecdote of a person. But then there's a very famous professor coming to town who used to be his teacher. So he writes to him and he notices he keeps saying I when he writes to this person who used to be his teacher.

[77:10]

I would like to see you when you come to town on... And then he notices that when he writes to this professor himself, that he also constantly uses this pronoun, I. I would like to see you when you come to town and so on. So he noticed himself that he considers this person higher status than he is, just by his use of the pronoun I. So we see I, the pronoun I, as a weaker position, in fact, if you study the use of the pronoun. Also, sehen wir dieses Pronomen ich tatsächlich als eine schwächere Position, wenn wir es benutzen. So, just notice when you use the pronoun I. Also, bemerke einfach, wenn du dieses Pronomen ich verwendest.

[78:19]

And when somebody says to you, are you Florian? Or are you Iris? You say, sometimes. I mean, you may not say sometimes what you think sometimes, but right now, for you, I'll be Iris. I'll be Florian. You have to create some way to notice the continuum of self. And once you do that, there's lots of practices that can enter into that topography. Okay. Let's have lunch. And it's almost one o'clock.

[79:23]

Shall we come back at four? It's all up for dread, man. Three? How long does it take to find lunch somewhere? Eat? A restaurant?

[79:42]

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