We are sort of more comfortable and beautiful and less suffering and so forth. If Buddhism is going to be seen in that context, these expectations will tear the practitioners apart. No, I don't want to say more about that right now. That's another seminar. Is anybody saving these topics for next year? Now, Okay, you might ask, what would it be seen in a yogic culture? Well, in a yogic culture, Buddhism isn't one of the goals of society.

[01:10]

It's more just a part of the fabric of the society. And to make it a goal is more like our choosing a profession. In a yoga culture, you might decide to be a doctor or a lawyer or an artist. Or you might decide to be a realized person through the practice of Buddhism. And the possibility of realization wouldn't be limited to Buddhism. It would also be seen in the life of the artist and so forth. And the possibility of realization wouldn't be limited to Buddhism.

[02:19]

You'd see it also in the life, say, of the artist. And there's a dramatic difference between the imagined life of the artist and the imagined in the West and in yogic culture. Look at Allen Ginsberg's most famous poem starts, I've seen the best minds of my generation driven mad. Look at Rimbaud. The derangement of the senses produces his poems. Yeah, or Baudelaire or Van Gogh. How much the suffering is connected for us with the life of a productive artist?

[03:19]

Baudelaire or Van Gogh. In yoga cultures, the artist's first art is his life. If his life isn't beautiful, his art won't be beautiful. That's the view. It may not be true, but that's the view. Wenn sein Leben nicht schön ist, ist seine Kunst nicht schön. Das ist zumindest deren Sichtweise. So the artist shares in the idea of a beautiful life through his or her art. Das heißt, der Künstler nimmt teil an dem schönen Leben durch seine Kunst. Okay. I don't know. All of this is important to me.

[04:20]

I don't know if it makes sense to you or important to you, but it's really different what kind of context we live in. The latter part we shared with you? What kind of context we live in. Okay. Now let's go back to the little time we have left before lunch. To thinking about this wide definition of the mind I've been using. Okay, so say that this sad body location Now, I said that there's a sad body, no, how do we put it, a sad, sad mind location in the body.

[05:31]

Maybe it's not a sad mind. Vielleicht ist er nicht traurig. Maybe it's only a sad sensation. Vielleicht ist es nur ein trauriges Gefühl. Maybe we call it, oh, I have a sad sensation in my body. Vielleicht nennen wir es, ich habe eine traurige Empfindung in meinem Körper. My mind stays the same. It's hurting, but boy, it's not located in this sad sensation. Also... Mein Geist ist der gleiche, außer er tut weh, aber er ist nicht... The mind is... My mind stays where it usually is.

[06:37]

It's not located in my sadness. Okay. Mein Geist bleibt, wo er üblicherweise ist. Er ist nicht lokalisiert oder verwurzelt in diesem Traurigen. This physical sensation is only an epiphenomenon. What does it mean? An epiphenomenon is something associated, like if you have a disease, you might have something that accompanies the disease, but it's not part of the disease. So that when you're sad, Yeah, you do have this feeling in your stomach, your stomach's upset. But that's just what happens when you're sad. The yogic culture would say your mind is in your stomach. Now, is there any usefulness to redefining Is there any usefulness to defining mind this way?

[07:51]

Well, if you realize or experience this sensation as part of your mind, then you have a new way to deal with your sad mind. The outer circumstances or inner circumstances that's making you sad remain the same. And time will change that. Two or three days later, you won't be so sad. Even though the conditions, internal and external, that made you sad may be the same.

[08:58]

But you can also have changed the location of your mind and your body. and you change your mind. Your mood changes. So because there's this kind of connection in yoga culture, we call it the mind. Now, I want you to get that, not just intellectually, I want you to understand this not only intellectually, but also experimentally. Or experientially. Then you can really make use of the Buddhist practice. Now, if mind can, if mind has a location in the body, and it can also be the whole of the body, and it can also be the whole of the body,

[10:40]

And when we feel mind is the whole of the body, we don't have the sensation, for example, of our feet being down there. Feet and hands and chest and head all seem to be In the same location. Okay, so now what I'm trying to establish is that mind can have... Minds are not just thought space, they're also located in the body. Or whether, let me say it in a better way, yoga culture says all minds should be experienced in the body.

[11:50]

Anders gesagt, die yogische Kultur sagt, alle Geiste sollten im Körper erfahrbar sein. For support, I always like to use our favorite genius, Einstein. Um das zu unterstreichen, ziehe ich immer unser berühmtes Genie zur Rate. Who said he got his ideas from his body. Der sagte, er hat seine Ideen von seinem Körper bekommen. All right. Now, I would say not all thought space minds have much of a location in the body. They have a weak location in the body. But they have one. They have to have some kind of location. Now, practice is to strengthen the physical location of the mind and the body.

[13:06]

Now, I watched, in Budapest, I had fun being with this Korean Zen master who lives in Berlin. Yeah, and he, following his tradition, did absolutely everything with chi, with ki. machte alles mit Qi. There was not a single word, breath, shoulder movement that wasn't packed with energy. Da gab es kein Wort, keine Schulterbewegung, nichts, das nicht voll mit Energie war. That's one tradition, is you simply limit yourself to only Qi-like expressions, if this makes sense to you. Dass man sich beschränkt No, this is one way to practice.

[14:41]

And, in fact, it's the only way to practice. But in my lineage of my teachers, Suzuki Roshi, Yamada Momon Roshi in Japan, And the time I've spent with the Dalai Lama, they're all much softer. But still, there's the sense of body and energy in all one's actions. And that's part of what I'm speaking about with this path of the breath last night. That's one way to come into this territory. Okay. Now, if I hope you can stay about five more minutes.

[15:57]

If... Sofia, stay out there a little while longer. If... I hope you can stay five minutes longer. Sofia, please stay out there a little longer. Sotto voce. If mind has a physical location, and practices to make that physical location the foundation of the mind, and if you do this, if you find you do this, thoughts do arise from the body instead of arising from the mind, from the thought space.

[16:59]

Okay. So now we've pretty much, I hope, established, at least as a topic, That mind has a physical location. And both our state modes of mind and the physical location of mind can be changed. Der Zustand des Geistes wie der körperliche Ort des Geistes können verändert werden. Das kann der ganze Körper oder Teil des Körpers sein. Und natürlich sind Chakras auch Teil davon, wo wir unseren Geist lokalisieren. Now, the jump I want to make now

[18:01]

If the mind can be located in the body, is mind only inside the body? Can mind be located outside the body? Yeah, probably so. Ja, wahrscheinlich schon. So, when you experience in Zazen a feeling, as I spoke of yesterday, your boundaries disappearing, wenn ihr in Zazen etwas spürt, worüber wir gestern gesprochen haben, und zwar eine Art Grenzenlosigkeit, it doesn't feel anymore like the body is inside the mind, dann fühlt es sich I mean, it doesn't feel anymore like the mind is inside the body. It now feels like the body is inside the mind.

[19:05]

And it feels more like the mind is attached to the body. And it feels more like the mind is attached to the body. Yeah, it might be attached to the cheekbones or the cheeks. Well, there's various places you can feel it attached and even stretching. Now we really have to stretch our Western definition of the mind. And we have some tension between the Western definition of the mind that's shared by our whole culture And our experience in zazen, when it clearly feels like the body is inside the mind,

[20:12]

And now it begins to make a difference what the outside, what your external world is like. Now, I don't think this experience is unfamiliar to us, even if you don't practice Dazen. And I would say, I'd guess, if those of you who've decided to be painters, say, or architects, probably you had experiences as a child where you felt your mind touching or being located as well in the outside world. I don't understand. You probably had experiences as a child where you felt your mind being located or at least touching the outside world.

[21:36]

Now, the best locations in the outside world are locations which nourish the mind when it returns to the body. And we call that the experience of beauty. When something you look at, a painting, a tree, returns your mind nourished, That's beauty. Now, this sense of the mind being wider than the body is always the case perhaps, but we only experience it occasionally.

[22:58]

There's a kind of fine tuning when we experience it. And that fine tuning, yeah, happens only sometimes even in zazen. But you can get so you can tune that almost all the time. But when is it stabilized through your external world? No, we could ask... Valentin and Andreas, if there's some difference in doing a seminar here than doing a seminar in Hannover. In other words, does Johanneshoff and the Zendo and so forth stabilize this wider sense of mind more than being in Hanover does, just in a nice conference center?

[24:13]

Does the minion friend help stabilize a mind of friendship? Who dresses the same as you. Does other Sangha practitioners help stabilize the fine-tuning of this wider mind? Now I'm not saying we should always live in a monastery or have a monastic style life. But I think it's useful to know that this fine tuning of a wider mind It involves a fine-tuning of the context you live in.

[25:18]

That's enough. For now. Thank you for translating. That was fun. So, we're going to sit for a minute. If you have to leave, it's okay. Okay. If I say anything, my wider mind at the back of the room can translate. Let the mind, free of its moorings, like where you talk about, free of its moorings in thought space.

[27:49]

Let the mind free or let it go from where it is tamed in thought space. Now, what time do we... Do we start at 2.30 or 3 o'clock?

[29:29]

2.30. 2.30? Okay, boss. Chef. How was your discussion? Did it get anywhere? Did it extend beyond the body? All the way to the chainsaw. Now I'm not suggesting that we this afternoon radically revise our worldview. If anyone wants to, you can, but you know. But I am saying let's not ignore our empirical experience. I mean, the virtue of Zen is it's our experience.

[30:38]

It's shaped through our experience. And the teaching, the shape of the teaching is to let the truth of Zen, whatever its truth is, shape itself in your experience. Is that possible to say? Yeah, I mean, I'm losing it, but... Okay. The shape of the teaching of Zen... ...is not to give you a map... ...but to create the conditions in which you can shape, through your own experience, this teaching.

[31:53]

...is not to give you a map... For example, one of the expectations of me as a Zen teacher eine Erwartung an mich als Zen-Lehrer, is that I only teach what I've experienced. So there are parts of Buddhism I don't teach because I haven't experienced them. Teile, die man in der Tradition finden kann. But if I'm going to teach and practice with you what I've experienced, then I certainly shouldn't ignore my experience.

[33:12]

dann sollte ich auf keinen Fall meine Erfahrungen ignorieren, wenn sie nicht genau deckungsgleich sind wie unsere üblichen Erfahrungen. I should trust my, and I do trust my experience to lead me out of the worldview I grew up in. Now, I say that as a kind of idealistic scientist Zen practitioner. In fact, I mean, though I've always held that view, It's actually been hard to follow it. I've been very reluctant.

[34:21]

You know, I have to get a lot of evidence before I step too much out of our world view. I have to absorb it for a long time. Before I say, okay, yeah, I accept that. This is my experience and it's not what I expected, but it's my experience. Then it takes me another few years before I'll teach it or talk about it with you. Of course, somewhat less years before I'll speak it to people I've been practicing with a long time and who already have overlapping experiences.

[35:29]

So what I'm saying is, I hope you would have the same trust in your empirical experience. But I'm also saying it's probably going to take you a long time, like it did me, To really accept the consequences of your empirical experience. If it's going to make a big difference in how you live your life. Or a significant difference in your view of the world.

[36:39]

And we kind of have to have a sort of spiral in our awakening awareness. We go out Our experience takes us out beyond our usual way of thinking. And then it comes back into and is integrated in our experience or absorbed by our experience. Then it goes out a little farther and then comes back. So there keeps being this process of, whoa, is that my experience? And what does that mean to me?

[37:46]

Et cetera. And then, of course, there's the practical skills of opening your worldview while living in the shared worldview of others. Okay. Does someone want to share your experience or something from your group? If you don't want to, I want you to.

[38:48]

Yes. Oh, not you again. No, it's okay. It's okay. It's okay. I know this before. That's the reason. In our group there were different forms of experiences or experiences. So we had in our group various different experiences of an extended body feeling from virtually everybody. So in the end we came more to the question, we tried to find out, do these experiences happen through an intention or through intentionlessness? Then came the word, we must have trust in, for example, practice, what we do.

[40:08]

At the same time, that was an example from me, where I could not remember that I heard in Rojima in 1993 in Münster, where he said a sentence, the subtlest state of mind is to be completely satisfied. So then we said one hand you need to have trust in practice or in what you're doing. And in Andreas' specific case in 1993 in Münster, he remembers one phrase which he said that was, the most subtle state of mind is to profoundly leave yourself alone. And that's something that I thought was completely strange to me, and at the same time I have a resonance and seem to know it, even though I don't know it. And that's something that might draw me to such a practice. So this, on one hand, was something he knew.

[41:09]

It was completely new to him. On the other hand, there was a resonance of almost knowing it. So this thing or phraser kind of drew him to practice. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, too. Well, we're sorry together. I'm not authorized, but he'd like to start telling from his group. Oh, this is very Zen to not be authorized. In the beginning we weren't clear or sure and we never got clear or sure. What is counted to an outer body experience or a bigger body experience or not? So he wants to take some sample experiences now.

[42:25]

Okay. There was a classical out-of-body experience from an accident, which typically you can read of or something. Someone in your group had? Yeah. Anybody or somebody in our group. Mm-hmm. Then there were experiences that you can make so easily in nature, like at a lake or in the mountains or at a sunset or wherever, where such a feeling of resonance or of melting arises. Then there were several examples which you can have in nature, like on the lake, mountains, sunset, where there's a kind of resonance you can feel or a kind of melting with this.

[43:38]

Then some people who paint, they have experience, and they should correct me, of melting with what they are doing. And Gerald came up with the example that if you look at a flower, for instance, and don't rationalize it and don't name it, that you can kind of meld together with what you're looking at or observing. That's all for the moment.

[44:50]

That's a lot. That's enough to change a few lives. Okay. Someone else. Any more unauthorized people here? I'm an unauthorized human being. That stuck with the job. Yes, thank you. You came to a point where we talk about that we can talk only about the borders of our experience, and not really of the experience itself.

[45:53]

It is too sudden, it is too tiny, because the thinking mind is too coarse, too... the conclusion of that in news that nobody can speak the real truth from unity because when it's spoken it falls apart in duality. So we can maybe speak from that point of view but this act of speaking, speech breaks it apart, the whole of the experience. Deutsch, bitte. Deutsch, bitte. I know when you start speaking English you forget the word Deutsch.

[46:54]

We can hardly talk about very intimate inner experiences, or can only describe them, because our thinking, which we have developed so far, seems to be too rough an instrument. Yeah, that's of course true. But our noticing can become more subtle than our thinking. And part of our yogic practice is to develop the skill of noticing without thinking.

[48:08]

Something I've been emphasizing recently. Can I tell you a funny story about my doing that? A friend of mine, a close friend of mine, his name is Michael Murphy. He wrote the book The Future of the Body and also translated into German, The Quantum Mensch. He didn't choose the German title. The Future of the Human Body. And he's the founder of Esalen Institute in California. But he's also a very gifted natural athlete. Er ist ein sehr begnadeter Athlet. Und liebt Sport. Und er war bei den San Francisco 49ers beim Fußballspiel. Und sie haben versucht, das andere Team zu beeinflussen.

[49:28]

And in fact, I don't know if you know this, but some of the football teams, the Chicago football team was famous for hiring psychics to help develop supernatural powers in the players. Michael wrote a book called The Psychic Side of Sports. Übersinnliche Seite des Sportes, danke. Which has now been republished as called Zoning or something like that. Jetzt heißt das Buch In the Zone. In the Zone, yeah. Okay, so Michael's at this football game and he really was trying to get the other team to mess up. Und also Michael ist jetzt bei den Spielen dabei und er möchte wirklich dieses andere Team in Chaos.

[50:46]

He began going like this, you know. Okay. And he pretty soon had his whole section of several hundred people all going. I don't know if it affected the other team or not. But the next day the newspaper in the sports page had a small headline. Michael Murphy falls dead at the football game yesterday. It was a different Michael Murphy. It still made him nervous. It still made him nervous. That reminds me of another story.

[51:50]

It's such a good opportunity, I'll tell it. When I went to Eheiji, the monastery in Japan, when I entered it was really hot. And gigantic mosquitoes and sweat. So I bought, I got the lightest robes I could. But this robe I bought, now I wouldn't have gotten it, but those days it was made of some sort of plastic, right? And it wouldn't stay together when I folded it. And you're supposed to always have your robe together in a certain whole number about how the robe is supposed to fit the body.

[52:57]

And you're supposed to learn how to hold your body or release your body so that everything is in a certain kind of pattern. And this robe will just slide all over the place. So I got some little Velcro and I... Stuck it together with a heel clip. The first Zen monk in history to have done such a shocking thing. So I couldn't let it be known that I'd done this. So I always kind of went... And people kept looking.

[54:05]

Every time I had to shift my robe, I'd go... I was caught. I did shift my robe to a different... So anybody else? No. Yes. I'd like to hear more about that, bro. I might still have it somewhere if you're too warm in the sender. Yes. Everyone has the experience that he had before. In almost every language there is an experience. In our group, everybody spoke about their experience and everybody, almost everyone had an experience.

[55:14]

Which they had in an accident, motorcycle, ski or in all kinds of accidents. So everybody explained their experience and then I had the feeling that what we tried to speak about was a definition of truth or something like that. And what role practice has to clarify truth? Okay, thank you. It's interesting, it seems like quite a few of these experiences have arisen, have resulted from accidents.

[56:41]

Yeah, okay. Someone else. Yeah. That was in our group the same. Somebody recounted also a typical out-of-body experience. How can an out-of-body experience be typical? Yes, but I understand. That's when you can see yourself from above. And that happened during an illness or disease. And someone said after the death of his father.

[57:43]

was his ehrgeiz, so that he lost all ambitions and goals and everything from his life. Or they got less strong. and his life got much more peaceful. So at a certain point this experience got less and the ambitions and goals came back and it was impossible for him to repeat this experience. intentionally repeated. Then they explained or told about situations of great danger. And there's suddenly a kind of strange stillness in which you then do the right thing.

[59:27]

And then later you don't have a feeling or experience of shock. Then they had some less spectacular experiences described. And someone noticed that there seemed to be experiences which are in relation to dramatic circumstances So this ordinary or not so dramatic experience usually during meditation. Like you mentioned that the inner sides and outer sides get somewhat permeable.

[60:56]

That sounds, you hear a somehow touch your body and aren't experiencing something separate out there. And I try to describe this experience that I know a kind of gentle, tender look also a limit disappears, namely in the sense that things can really be as they are, without me overloading my expectations.

[62:03]

So we're also kind of border dissolves where things can just be the way they are without my expectations shaping. So that sometimes it almost feels like things start speaking and they want to be taken care of or that the room wants to be cleaned up or something like that. And that's where we started to talk about how a feeling of connection arises, or that the border between me and the things around me So then we kind of said that through connectedness things kind of come to a kind of order or conclusion or it kind of comes from itself.

[63:22]

Then there was this kind of skeptical question with the observation that many artists live in a creative chaos. and aren't inclined to listen to the room asking to be cleaned up. They're missing the clean-up gene. Yes, but that was perhaps a side issue, but it was at the end of our conversation the question that on the one hand there is the experience that the things can speak to you in such a way that you can bring them into the breath, but on the other hand Maybe there is a relationship to such a chaos that exists where you discover relationships in a certain connection that are so to speak creative.

[64:56]

So that was just the end of our conversation, these two sides. We looked at that one side, things kind of in connection, being in connection with things, they can kind of try to be organized. And on the other hand, how maybe being connected with a certain kind of chaos, this can also, some kind of creativity or something else can come out of that. Will you, in looking at it with a feeling of connectedness, you can discover maybe relationships and be inspired by unusual relationships? So I want to add that often as a key to this connectedness we have the breath or use the breath. In our group we noticed that you can't intentionally call for these experiences.

[66:38]

But if they occur more often, we can trust them more and let us go in there more easily. Now, these experiences you're reporting to me are experiences that various of you have had in your lives. Now, let me ask those of you who had such an experience, to what extent has that led you to practice or been a part of, supported you or... influenced your practice?

[68:07]

Please raise your hands. No. No, it didn't. It did. Yeah, it did. There's only two people with more experiences than that. It did, it did, it did. All right. It has influenced your practice. Maybe we should put up billboards. Had an accident? Practice Zen. www.dharmasanga.com Okay, is that all the groups or is one not? Were these all groups or is there one more? Yes, please. I would like to say that I was not affected by an accident, but with the practice these, for me, good conditions grew.

[69:12]

So for me it's not an accident which led me there, it's practice which led me there. Led you to an accident? So through practice I got these good experiences and these good experiences drew me again more into practice. Ideally we should be able to practice Zen without having to have a motorcycle accident. The point of Zazen and meditation and the teaching is to free you from the necessity of having an accident to realize the truth. To avoid the accident or to make it unnecessary? Unnecessary to have an accident, but if you do, you might as well. Yeah, because I wouldn't want to say, well, I'm going to have some seminars and I'm only going to accept people who've had accidents.

[70:38]

You know, I know two people who've had very serious car accidents. Well, one walking and one on a bicycle. And they both had very strong, what you'd have to call, enlightenment experiences. Which influenced, of course, them deeply. But particularly, especially in one case, It did so much physical and brain damage, the accident, that they could never really, so far have never been able to integrate the enlightenment experience.

[71:40]

This person lives in a kind of enlightenment, but they can't integrate it into their life and lead a normal life as much of a normal. It's getting better every year, though, but it's been about eight, ten years now. I think this example shows that we do need the ordinary structure of consciousness in order to function and to integrate our even and modern experiences. I believe that this example shows that we need our normal consciousness to integrate these enlightenment experiences into our lives. Yes, that's interesting. Does anyone want to say anything else?

[72:59]

I would assume also that practice and also Sharing this experience with others and recognizing others' experience is part of a process in which you can let this experience tell you something about your life. For many people, they put it aside.

[74:28]

It's in a special capsule which they don't let leak into their life. Let me go back to Michael Murphy again. He also wrote a book called Golf in the Kingdom, which is published in German, I think. He's been meditating for many, many years and a great deal. And being an athlete again, he also got on to the fact that athletes have experiences that are very similar to experiences in mystic and religious traditions.

[75:29]

And so he began to kind of keep his ears tuned to when somebody might tell him something about that. And just one case, there are many cases that are similar to this, but one case of one of the most famous football players came up to him I'd like to... Hey, Mike, I hear you are interested in these things. Can I tell you about something? Yeah, Mike said, well, yeah, sure. Well, let's have a beer. Okay, so they have a few beers. So he tells them this fantastic story about experience he has on the football field.

[76:42]

American football. And then a few days later, Michael saw him and said, let's continue that. I have some questions I want to ask you. And the guy denied he'd ever told him. And I don't remember exactly, but it was like only a year later when he got kind of drunk, he admitted he talked to him about it. And in those days, athletes didn't even tell other athletes about these experiences. But they do seem to occur at the... upper, outer extreme of physical, mental abilities.

[78:01]

And they do seem to happen more often to people who practice something a lot. And in fact they have done studies of who are the really most successful people in art or music or something. And given a certain level of talent, the ones who practice the most excel the most. in their own professional practice. Yeah, in music or sports. But nowadays, it's 15, 20 years later, it's commonplace for athletes to talk about these things.

[79:05]

So it's a huge difference. And slowly, you know, this globalization is kind of, on the whole, I don't like it. But we do have from more people from all over the world a willingness to share experiences that were confined to an elite few in disparate traditions. And there's a certain permission that occurs when you find out somebody else has certain experiences.

[80:14]

And others' experiences open up your experience. There's no question that sitting together is more powerful than sitting alone. Sitting alone is very powerful, but something else happens when you sit with others. So and that's what Sangha is about, of course. It's Sangha, we could say, is those who together open up their worldview.

[81:39]

Through meditation and mindfulness practices, and through wisdom teachings, coming closer to recognizing in themselves and in others, the mind of Buddha. What we could call, what we can call for now, the mind of Buddha, this topic we're avoiding. And what time are we supposed to have dinner? Six. Six, okay. So why don't we sit for a little bit and then we'll have a break. I think we've had a fruitful day.

[82:55]

Why don't you open all of them? The last one has no handle. Yeah, you can't open that one, I guess. Thank you. Thank you for being so open with your experiences.

[86:17]

And trusting the potentialities of practice. And for having the patience to open up, discover the possibilities of practice. And patience to open up the possibilities of practice. It does take patience. And faith, really faith too in practice.

[87:20]

and all resting in your deep intention. intention to realize this Buddha mind.

[88:31]

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