Yes, I experience my, so the whole discussion and the lecture this morning in the direction, a little bit in the direction of negativity, in the direction of self. The lecture this morning sort of went into, it had a feeling of negativity towards the self. Oh, no. Go ahead. Und ich erlebe mein Selbst als, ich weiß nicht, wie ich es beschreiben soll, als etwas, was mir überhaupt die Welt ermöglicht. And I experience the self as something that makes it possible for me to live in this world, makes the world possible for me.

[01:02]

It's a feeling of space. A feeling of being here. And not so specific, but just a feeling of space. And it's less a sense of I'm gathering information than a sense of just being here. But maybe that's not what's normally meant by self. Before you started practicing, was that your sense of self? Physically, yes. Not mentally, but physically, yes. Well, I'm glad you were enlightened at birth. And what I meant to say was, if I begin to refer that to myself as a person and as a way of separating from, then a lot of problems arise.

[02:31]

Okay. Anyone else? Anyone else? Yes. I can have a good practice with observing. For me it is a kind of being a witness, this attaching point. I wonder if this is possible 24 hours a day. Even if you concentrate on other things, I find that useful as a practice to observe the attention point and I experience that like a witness and what I wonder about is whether that's possible to do for 24 hours a day including at night which I have a hard time imagining Yeah, okay. So let's keep that question in the air.

[03:53]

Well, anyone else want to say something? Yeah. I really liked your definition of self-shock. So in terms of the way you introduced the seminar this morning when you walked around the room and Well, what I do in school is I try to make use of a situation like that in order to achieve, to get some kind of surprise effect or kind of startling effect or something.

[05:11]

For example, when I'm teaching a new class and, you know, it's 10th grade and they are really loud and then there's those particular 10 seconds when really something needs to happen. And usually it's... I managed quite well to find something that I can do which in each situation will be different. But there was a whole chain of associations. A, does he want to open the window? B, does he greet Volker now because he may have left the door open? C, did I do something wrong? Am I sitting right? So I would like to be with this different being.

[06:24]

And for me it would be important to know, how do I get there, to have this feeling, ah, it's really nothing, Roshi goes around and greets us, for example, as brothers or whatever. So maybe to have this right contact. Was sagt das jetzt aus, ohne mein Rätsel raten? So, but now being from my perspective in this other situation as the student, where I'm part of a teacher doing something unusual, like you did this morning, everything happened for me just like you said, I had this associative chain coming up with, you know, I was wondering whether you were going to open the window or whether you were meant to say hello to Volker, or maybe I did something wrong and that's why you get up. That's some psychology comes in here, some self-shock. And I wonder how can I shift immediately into dropping all of these things but relating to the situation as it actually is, which in that case may have been you circumambulating the room to greet a Buddha.

[07:43]

How do I directly relate to that? Okay. Well, What I'm speaking about is, like the streets of Hannover, very slight changes of direction. And there are slight changes of direction that we do, we all are familiar with. So you might go to a play, for instance, a theater in the theater. And you might have no idea what's going on. And so you just have to sort of like let it happen and wonder what's going to be next. Or a piece of music, a new piece of music might be like that.

[08:57]

Okay, so that kind of experience is familiar to us. But when somebody like Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, Philip Glass being a long time practicing Buddhist, do an opera, Like the famous opera that's been revived in New York recently, Einstein on the Beach. Everything is unpredictable. It doesn't allow any predictability to happen almost. And they say things, and people sing things, and there's no relationship to what was sung before. So there's the change in direction where you're in a play, you don't know what's going on, and then there's a play, and you're in a play which everything, it's impossible to know what's going on.

[10:13]

You might say practice takes us in the direction of Einstein on the beach. Of course the play has very little to do with Einstein or beaches. Okay. All right. So certainly when I'm walking around the room, you can decide, particularly if I do it another time, you can have the predictability that it's going to be unpredictable. But that's a kind of predictability. But still you can kind of make your mind just open and just let whatever happens, happen. Now as Jörg says, can you do that all the time? Actually, you pretty much can do that all the time.

[11:37]

And there's a craft to it. And so the craft of practice at the level we're talking about requires a fair amount of thinking. Maybe Geralt's self should have been thinking something through with a spacious feeling. And then you enact it. And you enact it, first of all, as a result of your cognitive processes. But then you keep enacting it over quite a period of time. Now, there's a practice I introduced... No.

[13:01]

Okay, I want to put this in the context of practice as a craft. Okay, so there's a practice I suggested in the winter branches recently. which I called closely held attention. Okay, now closely held attention is something like maybe walking in the dark in a place you've never been and yet kind of feeling your way. Your attention has to be closely held or you might step into a down stairway or something. It's totally dark.

[14:04]

Or similarly, maybe a simpler example, you're just walking carefully with a flashlight in a situation you've never been in, in a building or a forest or something. You have to keep your attention very carefully related to the flashlight and the beam of the light, etc. That's something like the feeling of closely held attention. So you, a similar example would be, you do Zazen. And if you're familiar with Zazen and do it fairly regularly, when you finish Zazen, sometimes maybe you don't want to get up. there's a kind of nice feeling in the body of sitting.

[15:19]

Okay, now the practice of closely held attention is to kind of get a bodily feeling for that feeling you had when you were sitting zazen. A particular kind of satisfying experience. Maybe you feel relaxed or complete or something. Then you see how long during the day you can hold that attention without losing it, even though you stopped as it. And it's almost like a little stream you're following or a golden thread in a fairy tale.

[16:20]

And if you're a mature practitioner, A distraction like, oh, I'd like to listen to the radio or I'd like to maybe do this or that, doesn't come up. But of course, it does come up. But still, for half an hour or 45 minutes, you can keep that feeling while you're making breakfast or doing something. The kind of attention which allows you to do that, we can call closely held attention.

[17:20]

And it's a way, you could say, of taking care of the stream of non-self. Because there's no self-reflection in this feeling of satisfaction. The more you have thoughts like, I had this feeling, then it disappears. So it's a kind of holding to an inner... An inner attentiveness.

[18:47]

In some ways I'm speaking about levels of practice which are both beginning levels of practice. but because it's also preparatory for the most advanced practices, we're at an interface, a conjunction of preliminary practice and advanced practice. So another kind of example is if I look at this bell again, the bell is, of course, me looking at it. So every object is a mind object.

[20:08]

Okay, so it's the mind seeing the object or the senses experiencing the object. So a basic practice of Buddhism is to make the senses feeling or knowing the object, also the object of attention. So it's called the simultaneous arising of an object. In other words, simultaneously what arises for a somewhat skillful practitioner is the kind of object of the mind that arises through seeing the object.

[21:12]

ist eine Art von Objekt, das durch den Geist auftaucht, in dem das Objekt auftaucht. And the object. Okay, is that clear? War das klar? Crystal clear. I mean, it must be clear that this object doesn't exist in your sensorium, independent of your sensorium. Es muss ja klar sein, dass dieses Objekt nicht außerhalb In the most ordinary experiences, you only see the object or hardly feel the presence of mind at all. If you're driving a car, and there's somebody in front of you, it's probably not wise to think, well, that's only my mind, etc.

[22:29]

But I can remember in the early days of my practice, I actually had worried about that because I'd be coming into an intersection and I was so much in the midst of mind, it's not just something appearing in my mind, oh no, no, I'd better stop. Okay, so we have the physical object. And we have the mind arising bell. The mind bell. We have the... The physical bell and the mind bell. And perceptually they're inseparable. But you can shift till you emphasize the mind more or the bell more.

[23:35]

Now, as you get more skillful at practice at the craft of practice at closely held attention you can feel the mind knowing the bell. So you can shift more into the feel of the mind knowing the bell. And then the bell is just an appearance. It just appears and it thinks... It's a bell and you can ring it and all that. But you're experiencing it as the mind appearing in the form of a bell.

[24:52]

Okay, then I look at Nicole. And then I look at Nicole. And she's Nicole now, appearing in the mind form, appearing as a form in my mind. And then they have a similarity. I mean, Nicole and this bell are quite different. Except their head and their bell is about the same. Me too. So, if If I get in the habit of this.

[26:08]

Okay, so the bell appears and what I feel is the appearance of the bell as mind. And when I look at Nicole, I feel the appearance of Nicole as mind. Now, as I said, Nicole and this bell are quite different. But the appearance of each in my mind is quite similar. Okay, now this may seem, again, stupid or irrelevant or who cares? You don't apply for a job with this kind of description of your interests. Okay. But if I do experience it that way, There's a kind of the sameness the experience of the sameness of appearances the experience of the sameness of appearances

[27:49]

becomes now an experience of both emptiness and an experience of inter-independence. Or I would rather say actually inter-emergence. Okay, so if I have the experience of intermergence or interemergence... Was that two different things? Well, interemergence would be a kind of word made from two English words. Yeah. And I just merge them further and call it just intermergence. Oh. Just say intermergence. Because when two things meet, they aren't just together, they actually make something new.

[29:04]

Intermergence. Sounds good enough to me. So, if I have an experience of everything that's happening in this room, as an experience of appearance first, or simultaneously, well, if I have an experience of everything as an object and also appearance, and by experiencing everything as appearance, I experience everything as not having a solid identity, That is one way to describe an experience of emptiness.

[30:24]

And that also lets things flow back and forth together, and we can call that interdependence or intermergence. So now I've done the best I could to conceptually explain this to you. Now, the actual practice of it over a period of time, the incubation of it, puts you in a world that's quite free of negative and positive self. And you function primarily within the umwelt of immediacy.

[31:31]

And not from the associations of the past and things like that. Unless you need to use the... a cognitive process for some reason to solve some problem. Okay. Now it's something like, I don't know if you... I often suggest you study how you go to sleep. Yeah. So I... I... I'm very familiar with a shift in, a bodily shift in breathing and, yeah, bodily shift which includes a shift in breathing.

[32:33]

Which means I can go to sleep. It's like, To go to sleep, I find, you have to kind of disappear into your own body. And until I have this signal that I can disappear into my own body, and I don't know if it's my own body, but disappear into this body, Until then, my consciousness is outside my body. But at some point, there's a shift in, as I say, bodily and breathing shift. And the consciousness which is outside my body, sort of thinking about what time I have to get up or what I have to do, etc.

[33:58]

That kind of just folds in, and it folds in with this bodily and breathing shift. And I can almost immediately tell, I mean, I go to sleep so fast I can't even notice when I go to sleep. I think now I'm going to notice when I'm gone. Then I have to bring another kind of attention into the sleep. Okay, now what's interesting why I'm mentioning this is if I have an experience of the bell as an exterior object and then simultaneously as a mind object And then primarily as appearance.

[35:10]

These are your appearances, etc. There's a shift, I feel a shift in my body, much like going to sleep. But I don't go to sleep. A kind of awareness appears in which everything is... floating in space, waiting for it to be brought together. You come into a mind that's prior to content. Okay, the bell appears in my mind. But prior to the bell appearing in my mind, my mind is ready for anything.

[36:13]

It's ready for whatever appears. Without anxiety, without paranoia, without attachment, without desire. And that would be from the point of view of Buddhism, the experience of non-self. Now, I think that unless you practice quite a bit, this is a little bit hard to gather. But it's possible. And it's possible if you practice with people who do this and know this. And you have a chance to sometime in your life really get a bodily feel for it. And it helps to get this bodily feel for it.

[37:19]

If you've really thought it through, intend to make it possible. Excuse me? intend to make it possible. And you have a closely held attention to the possibility. Okay. Now I can say something else about the closely held attention as a dynamic, but let me stop right now. Maybe it would be good to take a break. But I'd also like to ask, is what I'm talking about accessible, or is it just too much an experience of people who've practiced a lot? Because the basic concept of practice here is or the big framework of practice is to get a cognitive grasp a conceptual grasp on the possibility

[38:41]

Yeah, I mean, you first have to get the conceptual that this is a mind object as well as an object. And you've got to know that well enough to begin to notice mind appearing on all perceptions. You have to know that it's possible. And you have to believe it's useful. Or you have to have some sense of its possible value. And then you hold that as a mental posture. Now you don't hold it as an intention. If you hold it as an intention you try to make it happen.

[40:06]

If you hold it as a mental posture, then the world shows you that it's possible. Because this way of practicing assumes that the 10,000 things are interpenetrating, interactive, and so forth. And they're always showing us Buddha realms. But we don't know how to notice them. You didn't know how to notice that I was circumambulating you as a Buddha.

[41:32]

And maybe we don't know how to notice ways in which our experience is already the experience of a Buddha. And I could define Buddha here as the ideal human being we hope exists somewhere, maybe in ourself too. Okay, so generally, self doesn't pose the... So there's a kind of suspending of the concept of self as continuity. That doesn't mean you don't function in various ways that have to do with something like self. But you've suspended the sense of self as continuity. And you've let maybe like this mind which is almost asleep, aware but not an external awareness.

[42:40]

Well, I shouldn't say external awareness. What I should say is an internal awareness, which is also external, but not externalized. No, of course, whenever I'm teaching, it's what I guess you can call teaching. I'm experimenting with what we can do and talk about. here the main point is to get a cognitive grasp of it and then not say oh I can't do it it's too difficult or something but you get a cognitive grasp of it then you hold that cognitive grasp as a presence in your activities

[44:04]

Almost as if you're holding your hand in a flowing stream or something like that. Various things begin to stick to the hand and flow. But you can't predict when they're coming down the stream. Sometimes something comes down the stream and you catch something you didn't expect. Yeah, so it's anybody... never practiced before can get a cognitive grasp of this. But it's the practitioner which knows how to enter it into the mind stream of the 10,000 things. And Zazen practice is the way you learn how to hold yourself in the mind stream.

[45:42]

Okay.

[45:42]

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