Die Vase, die Puppe. Die Vase, die Puppe. The Puppe is in the Vase. Then you rub it and the genie comes out. Also die Puppe ist in der Vase und wenn ihr die Vase reibt, kommt das genie aus der Vase heraus, der Flaschengeist. So you're not conscious exactly, but you're aware. And strangely, there's some content to the awareness, conceptual content to the awareness. Okay. Somehow, there's some other kind of awareness that we could call non-observer awareness.

[01:32]

In other words, it was too fast for there to be an observer. Or yep, maybe there was another kind of observer in a different kind of time. They kind of slowed down time like some athletes experience in the tennis ball, float over toward them even though Bjorn Borg hit it. I've never had this experience, but I've heard about it. Okay. All right, now let's take... when you're sleeping.

[03:04]

You decide, for some reason I always use 6.02, you decide to wake up at 6.02 in the morning. And you don't have an alarm clock. So you decide to get up at 6.02. And you go to sleep and somehow you wake up, sometimes precisely 6.02. And a lot of people can do this. Maybe not all the time, but in an emergency. Some people can do it commonly. But you're asleep. You weren't conscious. What woke you up? These are simple questions, but Nobody knows the answers to these things.

[04:20]

And the attempt to answer them produces Buddhism. And there's a lot of scientists now trying to figure these things out, and it's the hot topic of current science is consciousness. Once a year I meet with some top scientists in these fields. Maybe I shouldn't say I don't take, but they don't know half, a third, a fifth of what Buddhism does. Okay, so you're sleeping, or let's call it dreaming sleep. And you're not normally conscious. And yet you can wake up at a certain point.

[05:22]

And you can usually keep from wetting your bed. So some kind of intention is present while you're sleeping. Now I call that, for lack of a better word, perhaps awareness. So then we have... And then there's also some kind of non-observer, I mean, there's an intention, but we're not observing ourselves having the intention.

[06:37]

Okay, so we can make, you know, we can say this much. just from looking at our own experience. The conceptual content in this, conceptual content, And down here, there's intentional content. Now, we could refine this picture further by the form of a general picture.

[07:46]

The minds we are born with. Which goes back to pre-Buddhism. Probably goes back to Dravidian culture. Before the Vedas. Before the Aryans invaded the Dravidians. And then the invaders wrote the Vedas. And then the invaders wrote the Vedas. The three minds were born with our waking consciousness, dreaming consciousness, or waking mind, dreaming mind, and non-dreaming deep sleep. Now, what struck these four Indian folks is that these three minds don't communicate with each other.

[09:32]

Is it possible to have them communicate with each other? No, not sure exactly what happened, but it looks like they experimented with psychedelics. And Southern India is a small city called San Francisco. Anyway, but at some point they also experimented with body postures. But at one point they also have to have experimented with body posture. And Buddhism comes from a tradition where body posture was experimented with and not with psychedelics. So they ask themselves the question again, is there a mind which might...

[10:49]

And they asked themselves, is it possible that there is a spirit that can include these three? These are interesting questions. So if we have three spirits, from which we all notice that we have them, you notice that cats and dogs and all these things, Und ihr habt auch schon bemerkt, dass Katzen und Hunde nicht die ganze Zeit träumen. Und ihr könnt ja sehen, wenn eine Katze träumt. Und ihr könnt auch erkennen, wenn euer Kind träumt. Und ihr wisst auch von euch selbst, dass ihr nicht immer träumt, sondern manchmal schlaft ihr einfach. Also wenn wir diese drei Geiste haben, Gibt es also einen, der diese drei einschließt oder wie bedeckt?

[11:55]

Wenn wir diese drei haben, wenn wir also drei Geiste haben, gibt es dann nicht vielleicht einen vierten, fünften, zehnten? Wer weiß das? If there's three, why aren't there five or six? They're waiting to be discovered. And even further, if maybe they're not waiting to be discovered, maybe they're waiting to be created. This is a radical and startling idea. Because it means we That means that we are to a great extent responsible for our own development or creation, or that we have it in our own hands, how we create ourselves.

[13:08]

If you are born with three minds, are you stuck with those three minds? Perhaps we create a third mind. Now we can imagine that it took millennia probably to ask You are probably not part of this question. So, if I might bring these questions up. We have a wisdom teacher. Okay, so, I can bring these questions up when they're brought up for me.

[14:12]

Okay, I didn't think this all up. But somebody thought about it. What time there were wisdom teachers? Just imagine, if we individually hadn't thought of it, how many millennia have to go by between some people start thinking these things and it becomes a cultural idea. In the early Vedas, there's no idea of karma. The idea of rebirth and reincarnation comes into Indian culture with the Upanishads. And it comes in just shortly before or virtually the same time as Buddhism was developing in Jainism.

[15:30]

Jainism was a school similar to Buddhism that developed at the same time as Buddhism. J-A-I. But once the idea gets formed, let me go back again. We all know our actions affect us. So why is karma such a big idea? Well, we all know our actions affect us. When you say, yes, our actions affect us, and they affect us in a certain way.

[16:47]

And certain actions affect us differently. And the effects of our actions are stored in a certain way. That's actually a complex idea. And that happens, they called it karma. And then it spreads throughout the world's cultures. And often gets extremely distorted. And if you want to study karma, you cannot study the general popularity of karma as actions and so on. You have to bring it back to a particular understanding and not a theory, but a way to practice with how your memories are stored and restored and so forth.

[18:04]

So what I'm getting at is that we now have this idea presented to us. Probably took a long time to think about, yes, we're born in three minds. What does it mean to be born in three minds? And are our minds possible? And could we even create our own mind? So we're not subject to the conditions we're born with.

[19:26]

And the cultural and personal psychology we inherit. Could we create a mind that not only relates to the street, But also transforms the way we relate to the world. We don't call this genetic engineering. We call it yogic engineering. Now it's thought that non-dreaming deep sleep is a kind of pre-Buddhist idea, but non-dreaming deep sleep was a kind of extraordinary bliss.

[20:39]

That you can't do without. And here's one reason sleeping pills don't work. They seem to interrupt consciousness, but they don't give me blissful sleep. An interrupted consciousness only is a very poor sleep. Interrupted consciousness has to be interspersed by dreams. Also dieses unterbrochene Bewusstsein, das muss durchsprengt sein mit Träumen, als ein tieferer Prozess als unser kleines Selbst.

[21:42]

Und es scheint auch, dass es durchsprengt sein muss mit diesem nicht träumenden Tiefschlaf. Und Sie sagten auch in diesem vor-buddhistischen Indien, As we forget our dreams, as we mostly forget our dreams, in a similar way, we completely forget the bliss. Some aspects of dreams fit into consciousness. So we can be conscious of those aspects of dreams that fit into consciousness. But nothing of non-dreaming deep sleep fits into consciousness. So another question they began to ask we can retrieve, remember this list.

[23:02]

I think these were acts of great courage of maturity and adulthood. taking responsibility for one's life and one's culture, saying we can participate in creating And they said, we can participate in how we create our lives. In a very fundamental way. And our culture, which trains us in the consciousness, And we've done extraordinary things.

[24:09]

But the science we've developed through educating our consciousness is not very well equipped to study this. It takes a kind of yogic science to do that. And unfortunately our brilliance, brilliantly educated consciousness, I have to say as a footnote, a footnote as big as the earth itself, Also eine Fußnote, die so groß ist wie die ganze Welt selber, dass wir wirklich unsere Umwelt zerstören, auf einen großen Maßstab.

[25:13]

Also wir sollen auch bald eine Pause haben, aber ich möchte doch mein Bild hier noch fertig machen. I think we're very lucky. We have not had to wait. We have the work of millennia right here in this room. We don't have to have many lifetimes to study these questions. These questions have been refined enough. And the practice is refined enough. We can come into an answer or a satisfaction in regard to these questions.

[26:25]

In one month. Even in a few years. So perhaps, non-dreaming deep sleep It's actually sort of appearing. It's sort of appearing in non-observing awareness. In other words, what you may be seeing when you drop your packet Also, was man unter Umständen sieht, während man mit seinen Paketen stürzt, das ist dieses Gewahrsein, das immer gegenwärtig ist, das charakterisiert wird durch einen Nicht-Beobachter.

[27:36]

Und deshalb können wir es vielleicht das nicht-dualistische Gewahrsein nennen, The subject-object distinction isn't there. Observing quality is not there. Strangely, there can still be content and intention. So, maybe you're tasting it every now and then, all the time. And it said that if during the day you haven't had this kind of blissful sleep, you won't be medically and physically healthy. Like it's the ultimate tonic. And sometimes the Buddha is shown in the medicine bowl, but the medicine is non-dual awareness.

[28:45]

So we have this medicine all around us all the time. But how are we present in each moment? So this medicine flows through us. And when it flows through us, it seems to, to some it can flow through others. So, we created this posture we Buddhists are doing today. Actually, just going back to Mohenjo-daro, which I believe is 3,000 years before Christ.

[30:03]

This is an archaeological site which has been excavated quite thoroughly. I found a little seated figure across a Buddha-type figure. So while this is much more ancient than Buddhism, Buddhism has particularly refined the mental postures which open you to the possibility of additional minds and inclusive minds. And so, my drawing. So what time is it?

[31:29]

Must be time for a break. Maybe it was time for a break half an hour ago. What time is what? But they've already cooking, 12.30. Yeah, so it's 11.18. Let's call it 11.20. And let's come back at 10 to 12. Yeah, and then around 12.30 we'll have lunch. Is that okay? Okay, thank you very much. Thank you for translating. You're welcome. You know that we have mind not in plural in German. Mind? You can't say it in plural?

[32:30]

Geist? No, because if we say Geister, it means ghosts. Oh, that's good. So mind in plural becomes ghosts. Yes. So sometimes it's good just to use the word mind. No, I use Geist, but I make a different ending. Different plural ending. Yes. Good. So, even though I'm trying to make sense... There's always a faint possibility I'm not making sense. So I'd like to have any suggestions you have that might help us all make more sense of this. suggested or questioned.

[33:36]

Yes. Oh my God, the greasers. The power team. Women are always first. When you brought up the three states of mind, which was developed in earlier times, the question came up for me, why did they have the problem? I mean, what was the problem? What is the motivation to work on this? Because, I mean, life must have been rather demanding for them. As for us, I mean, and in connection with that, I feel that I too have to work on the problem. What is my problem that I start meditation? As Roshi presented these three mental states, the question came to me, what was the problem for these people in these earlier times?

[34:40]

What was their motivation that they worked on these questions? And in connection with that, the question is also for me now, what is my problem? No, I suppose I guess most people in all times have dreamed, awakened, fallen asleep, dreamed, etc., and not thought much more about their life from there. Yeah. But there's always Socratic types. Socratic?

[35:47]

Yeah. Who ask disturbing questions. Wasn't Socrates called the gadfly or something? Anyway, he was, as you know, forced to drink hemlock. Yeah, or nearly forced. But I think lots of people ask questions. And perhaps, let's hope, there's a few of them that get old. And finding some satisfaction in the questions They look like sages, or they look like something's better in their life.

[36:53]

Yeah, but I don't know. But anyway, these questions get asked and pretty soon they pervade the culture. As most of you know, I think we're in a very primitive state of culture. Partly just because we're such a new culture. There's been I mean, tens of thousands of years of people living in small groups. Many, many, many millennia before people really thought about trust, love, things like that. Such ideas in which larger cultures and civilization are built. solche Ideen, aus welchen größere Gesellschaften gebaut werden.

[38:11]

Und erst wenn man groß genug Gruppen hat, können diese Sprache, Literatur und Philosophie schaffen. Das geht nicht sehr weit zurück. We just had dinner, lunch, and dinner with her 96-year-old grandmother. Recently we had a similar meal with my 94-year-old mother. And both we saw that their memory stretches back through other people to, you know, 1850 or so anyway. And earlier. And earlier. And I'm planning to live to 2050. And I won't say optimistically.

[39:28]

But she or some of you certainly will live to 2050. And that's a kind of consciousness unit, 200 years. Know each other, know what life was like together. Ten of such units brings you back to Christ. Fifteen bring you back to Buddha. Or twelve and a half, actually. So that's something, I think, you don't learn much in 200 years. Und das ist erstaunlich. Und ich glaube, man lernt nicht besonders viel innerhalb von 200 Jahren. Es hat sehr viele Jahrtausende gedauert, bis man gelernt hat, in großen Gruppen zusammenleben zu können.

[40:30]

Und ich hoffe, es braucht nicht mehr zu viele Jahrtausende, bis wir lernen, nicht mehr unseren Planeten zu zerstören. and stop slaughtering each other. I think most of you know that more people have been killed in wars and by intentional killing than in all centuries combined in this last century. So I think this wisdom activity we're involved in is essential to society and culture. But if I understand Christina, she also, correctly, she's also saying, but in the end comes back to, why should she bother to sit silent? Why should she practice?

[41:39]

She's got two children, an interesting husband, the other half of the dynamic duo. I don't know. We have to, each of us, come to that decision ourselves. Eric? Please. As you asked this question, I remember my eldest son was five years old and he woke up in the morning and suddenly called me and said, Mom, I woke up, I slept, and then I woke up. Tell me, is it possible to wake up from having woke up?

[42:44]

And it was my first time in my life where I said, oh, it was the first mistake in Buddhism. It's 20 years old. And then I said, oh, it's a question. And it's this question . It's love philosophy. German. German. I think these questions are obvious. And children can come up with it. Just out of wonder. But we forget. I remember a little kid, I saw him swinging once. And he was singing, every day I do, every day I don't, every day I do, every day I don't.

[44:11]

Since you brought it, one other story in my life. My daughter Elizabeth was, I've told some of you this before, she was falling asleep in the car. She was still in the baby seat. I was driving. And her head was almost hitting the dashboard. And I said, Elizabeth, watch your head. She said, I can't see it, you watch it. Not as profound as your kid, but you know.

[45:16]

Proud parents have to do our best. Thank you. Yes, Eric. Well, we can notice certain things about mind. And we can try to point out quite a few of them. And I think you can try to point them out to yourself.

[46:24]

And then we can start drawing some conclusions. Does it make sense we should practice? How should we practice? Certainly, what I was mentioning last night About looking at Dan, I have one kind of mind. And looking at Michael, I have another. Dynamic duo, a third. And oh, that's Batman and Robin, by the way. Oh, sorry. You were called the dynamic duo. And when I look at all of you at once, it's a different, somewhat different mind arises. And I can physically feel it. And when I look at all the trees, I have another mind arises. So as I said again earlier this morning,

[47:28]

It's not just that mind has different content. The mind is the content. Der Geist ist der Inhalt. Is conditioned by the content. Ist bedingt durch den Inhalt. Along with memory associations and genetics and so forth. Natürlich mit den Erinnerungen, Assoziationen und auch der Genetik. And you can, as again, physically feel the associations. All Yogacara teachings and Zen teachings are based on the experience that all Mental phenomena has a physical component.

[48:55]

And all sentient phenomena, all sentient physical phenomena has a mental component. So it means you can feel your states of mind. And your body is actually much more finely tuned than your mind. So, Just finishing, for most of what I said last night was about the moment-by-moment mind of consciousness. Yeah. Then we can see if that applies to dreaming mind and non-dreaming deep sleep, but that's another question. Yes, sir. Where is your question coming from?

[50:09]

What makes you think we should draw a line or not draw a line? Yes. Oh, just now. Yeah. German, please. Yeah, but the fact is there's a difference between body and mind. And that boundary shifts around a lot.

[51:27]

And it's a field to be cultivated. We cultivate the relationship between body and mind. But you can feel it. I mean, mostly we can say thoughts are mentation. I'm not going to talk about breath practice. And we have an intention to pay attention to our breath. Also wir haben die Absicht, auf unseren Atem, unsere Aufmerksamkeit zu richten.

[52:32]

But intention has less body in it than attention. Aber Intention, Absicht, hat viel weniger Körper oder Biss als Achtsamkeit. So if I say intention to you, wenn ich zu euch sage, Intention, you say, oh, what is he talking about? But if I say, attention, your body, so right there, the boundary Between body and mind is more body and attention and less body and intention. And practice is to bring more and more body into each word. And after a while, if you've been practicing enough, you almost can't think completely imaginary thoughts.

[53:35]

Almost anything you think you know is possible. Because the words are so linked to embodiment, so felt in the body, that they have a reality in the physical world. So we'll come to these things as I go through these five fundamentals. So does someone have something else you'd like to bring? When I look at Eric and this Eric mind arises... You must be very familiar with that mind. And then... When I look at the trees, there's a tree mind arising.

[54:56]

But it's not like there's Eric mind and then there's tree mind. It's possible sometimes that one gradually replaces the other. It's several layers of minds somehow. So is there something connecting also there? Or are they sort of independent and happen to be on top of the other? Deutsch, bitte. Wenn ich Erich anschaue, dann gibt es diesen Erich-Geist, also diesen, mit einem speziellen Geschmack. Das Erich-Mind, das stinkt. Das stinkt. Oh. Das spezielle Erich-Mind. And when I look at the trees, then there is this tree spirit.

[55:57]

But it's not like the Eri ghost is there and then all of a sudden there is another ghost, but it's often the case that the tree spirit, when it comes into contact with the Eri, then slowly comes in and the attention is then... It's got a little bit of tension. And... So it's like because of inattention, the other moment kind of falls in, or is there a connecting element between the two? Or are these night types independent or overlapping? Yeah, well, the Abhidharma, one of the three baskets, so-called baskets of Zen, early Zen, or early Buddhism, developed in response to just such questions.

[57:02]

And there's a lot of disagreement, so... Again, no one really knows. But we live that which we don't know. But we can live it somewhat differently. We can live it with more clarity. No. I think when you start to practice, And when you get more and more free from the idea of a continuous state of mind, and you get more and more free from... identifying, needing a continuity in thoughts.

[58:12]

In thoughts, yeah. In thoughts, through thoughts. Okay, let me go back and use this question. It's a chance to tell you something about how mind is thought about in Buddhism. Again, keeping it rather simple. Okay. If I put sand in here, or mud, or I don't know what, if you dye something, pine cones, Things that don't float, because that would confuse the metaphor.

[59:14]

Pine cones we have to take out. Pine cones we take out. Okay. Okay. There's a tendency when you put things in water for them to sink to the bottom. Now, it's partly the result of what you put in, of course. But since we're talking about the mind and not about the water, This is just a metaphor. Let's use it metaphorically. When you put something in here, if it's still, it tends to sink to the bottom. That's considered a causal condition of water and not of what you put in the water. Das versteht man als eine Bedingung oder Eigenschaft von Wasser and not of what you've put in.

[60:27]

Und nicht dessen, was man da hineingetan hat. Also man gibt verschiedene Sachen in den Geist hinein, verschiedene Inhalte, and completely out. They tend to settle down or calm down. In short, the mind has a tendency toward clarity. Toward purity. Okay. Now, certain minds... Certain conditioned minds have a tendency not to become clarity.

[61:28]

Certain minds don't become clear. Those minds tend to lock in and stay and resist clarity. Die verhaken sich dort hinein und die widerstreben der Klärung. Okay, so they resist the basic condition of mind, which is to become clear. Also die widerstreben oder die widersetzen sich der grundlegenden Eigenschaft des Geistes, dass es klar wird. So karma is a condition that tends to make my states of mind not become clear. So you try to deal with your karma, not only because you want to be more psychologically free, Or free from the patterns of past actions, past intentions.

[62:37]

But you also want to be free from that which keeps the mind from becoming clear itself. Okay. Now, minds which are dualistic, which are comparative, which are identified with thoughts, and when those thoughts are identified with the continuity of self. tend to resist completely the inherent tendency toward clarity of mind. Okay? Most people's minds who don't practice are like that.

[63:57]

You said it. She said it. All right. You didn't say it in German. That's all right. Okay. I heard you say that the body is more finely tuned than the mind. Does that mean that the development of the mind is completely dependent on some sort of physical practice? Okay, we have to talk about what we mean by finely tuned. But we have lunch in two minutes. And we're deep in the Abhidharma right now.

[65:08]

And Michael is left hanging in the taste of Eric's mind. So we have to resolve this problem before we go to lunch. Or his food will all taste pretty funny. Okay, so it's great to have dinner with these three. Okay. Okay, so the more a person is free from or in the direction of freedom from conditioned states of mind, consistently, constantly reified states of mind, They experience the difference between Eric mind, actually it's an Eric Michael mind.

[66:23]

Because you're a part of this. So the shift from the Erich Michael mind to the Michael tree mind is experienced as a fairly big distinction. And you can feel the distinctions, a little bump almost shifting from Dan to you to... Yeah, but the more you have the view, as I say, before you perceive and conceive, that you have a mind that Dan comes in and Mikhail comes in, you don't experience the difference as much. As long as you have which view?

[67:36]

As long as you have a view of a screen that's permanent. that you have the view and the experience that you bring the same mind to Dan or to Michael. You don't perceive much distinction or you may almost perceive no distinction. But if you change that view a little bit if you have some wisdom teaching if you have some experience of samadhi you can feel mentation bubbling up in the field of mind. You can feel in between the contents of mind.

[68:37]

What comes from ordinary practice? You do more and more notice the distinctions in modes of mind. which allows you to be more and more free in each moment. Which is what Dharma practice is. Dharma practice is to find tiny freedoms in each moment. And karma practice, which most of us are doing, is to find connections and surfaces between the moments. But there is a kind of transposition of the content of this moment to the next moment.

[69:47]

But how we create the sensation of duration When the world is like this, it's a big question. Very hard to answer. But in fact we do. So one of the functions of mind is to create duration. But how we experience duration changes with practice. But that's enough. Without getting too complicated. But those questions, I think we should ask ourselves.

[70:49]

And let them come into ourselves. Just keep asking them to you. Um... Rilke says something, questions are like unopened boxes or something like that. I forget his phrase. And he implies they're more fruitful if we don't open them. So just for one moment to go back to this drawing, this posture we try to do, folding our legs together, And lifting through our body.

[71:58]

And yet accepting our posture. We're almost trying to lift ourselves up above ordinary consciousness. And your body, you could understand your body as lots of acupuncture points. As it makes a difference where you put a needle. So it makes a difference how your posture is. And as your posture gets more refined, through the posture, just as lying down creates sleeping and standing up makes waking, This posture itself can fine tune us into a fourth state of mind.

[73:03]

And as I say, even your chin is sort of like a dimmer switch. You lift it up and more thinking. Turn it down and emotional constriction. You get it just right and the fourth mind is tuned in. I'm not only joking. Okay, maybe I should try again to come back to this sitting posture. Now, some people feel this is somehow Asian.

[74:04]

Yeah, to me it's no more Asian than biology is Asian, or Western, rather. Through biology, western science, we study the body. Through biology? Yeah. We study the body. We study... Through biology, western science, we study the body. Through botany, we study plants. Through yoga, we study the mind-body. Perhaps one meaning we can say of original mind It's a way of saying the mind is not cultural.

[75:07]

Essentially it's not cultural. And when you study the mind-body, you're studying something that's universal, pretty close to universal for human beings. whether we're here in Austria or in China. Okay, as I said, you can sit in a chair or lie down, whatever you want. But some postures work better than others. We want to remain awake. And sitting up helps us remain awake.

[76:07]

But somehow we also don't want to be involved in activity. So this is a way of being awake but not involved in activity. And as you know, heat and consciousness are closely related. And a dead body is cold. So we fold our legs together partly to fold our heat together. And also it gives us a structure that supports us.

[77:15]

And so you don't have to use musculature to support yourself. So for those of you not so familiar, you can also sit this way. You can also put a pillow between your legs or something. It's quite a nice way to sit actually. Early Chinese culture and Japanese culture until recently was designed around this posture. In Japan, the houses were designed without furniture, so you had no choice. You had to sit in meditation. And they designed clothes that didn't work in chairs or Volkswagens.

[78:24]

Can you imagine if they had designed cars before they changed their clothes? You'd have to sit like this in your car. It would be really hard to get to the brake. You'd have to have the brake in a different place. Anyway, it was assumed by the culture that this posture, it was good to sit in this posture. Someone told me, not an hour ago, if I get it straight, that in Ireland you say, God made time. And God made enough time for everyone.

[79:24]

Say it another way. Oh, if God made time, you made enough of it. I like that. And the Japanese thought God made these legs and this posture. And it puts us into a mind of, we could say, fundamental time. The problem with this posture is that you do need musculature to support yourself. As your feet get cold. But other than that, it's pretty good. Okay. Now, in this posture, if you learn to sit in this posture or some version of this posture, we could say that if you generally get good at it, it's about, we could call it a compassionate posture.

[80:56]

And it's about acceptance and deepening your life. And you come into a calmness of mind and body. Now, if you develop the posture further, So you can feel a kind of verticality in the posture. A kind of lifting feeling through the body. And some Buddhas are shaped like this in the back and some are like this. And the more compassionate Buddhas, Amida Buddhas are this way and the yogic Buddhas are this way. And when you emphasize the verticality and the preciseness of the posture, then we could call it a wisdom posture, where the emphasis is on transformation and extending your life. And it's simply healthier to keep extending your backbone.

[82:31]

It's younger up there. When you get old, you kind of like... I'll be like that soon. But for a while I'm going to practice verticality. It's surprising that such a simple thing is actually really healthy and good for you. Es ist wirklich erstaunlich, dass eine so einfache Sache gut und gesund für einen ist. And you come into a kind of energy rather than just calmness. Und man kommt in eine Art Energie, nicht bloß nur Ruhe.

[83:32]

So the main posture of Zazen, yogic Zazen, is your backbone. Also die Haupthaltung von yogischem Zazen ist eben dieses Rückgrat. First it's a little creak. A little stream? Yeah, a brook. And after a while it's an autobahn. But cars aren't going so fast. Anyway, it becomes a kind of highway. Your whole back opens up. Now, if you've noticed by listening to Buddhism, if you know anything about it, as an inner science, it's always dialectical or dialogical. Dialectical form and emptiness.

[84:53]

Absolute and relative. And this is often expressed as a dialogue. Or a pulse. And one manifestation of that is feeling a dialogue in your own posture. On the one hand, this lifting feeling. And at the same time, accepting your body, accepting your own posture. Or a lifting feeling up through your backbone. You're not curving your back in, you're lifting through your back. And that lifting feeling is also through the back of the head and back of the neck. And as I said, small things make a difference, like just whether your chin is pushed in too much or up too much.

[86:13]

And we put our hands together. Usually at least we are left hand on top of our right. And our thumbs together. And your thumbs can be against your stomach or vertical. Your thumbs are lightly touching. You can also just put your hands together. And generally it's good that you want your arms to be parallel to the sides. And a little space, like an egg or so, but under the arms. A brown egg or white egg, doesn't matter. But not a goose egg.

[87:14]

Duck egg, a chicken's egg. And so that decides where your arms should go. Yeah. If you have a long torso and short arms like the Japanese do, they sit way up like this. And I can always tell people, the Japanese teachers, Because they're Westerners with arms like a monkey, but their arms... I say, put your arms down. So you put them somewhere. My arms, actually, I have a rather long torso and fairly short arms. I have to hold my hands up a little unless I have Peter's desk here.

[88:21]

Yeah, I could use two of those, one here and one there. And it's funny, you know, on the one hand we're informed by the ideal posture. And we're Buddha posture, shall we say. And yet at the same time we accept our posture.

[89:24]

And acceptance comes first. You're informed by the ideal posture, but you basically accept whatever posture you have. And you're not always trying to correct your posture. But as you get familiar with this posture, which is somehow artificial, or an artifice or an art, After a while, the ideal posture begins to call you. It's not just a matter of accepting your posture. The ideal posture begins to want you to... You want to sit in the ideal posture.

[90:40]

Your body and mind just feel better. And again, this is a posture, not a position. It's not a position you're taking. It's a posture you're arriving at. You leave it and you arrive at it. And sometimes we really arrive at it. It kind of takes over. And our sitting begins to sit itself. Zazen means sitting and zen is absorption. So this absorbed sitting so fully absorbs you.

[91:46]

For sometimes only a few minutes. But the posture itself begins to teach you. Now you're really talking then about the wisdom of the body. With body and mind really finding their companionship. when body and mind really get to know their friendship or companionship.

[92:32]

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