I like to do training in basic body awareness. Do you know anything about that? In Sweden, in Norway, they use a little bit of... I don't know if that's a good idea. The teacher was very, very particular about it. She was aware. Highest in millimeters, actually. Yeah. And I was just wondering how important do you think it is? And like, you know, she tried to make you sit like that and said, you know, we should have that three-point support and this thing about the spine and everything and being a bit forward. And it was like that was the only way to meditate sort of thing. Or you could sit like this, but she never spoke about sitting on a chair. And I'm thinking, you know, if you... You can't sit on a chair. Is it okay to lie down? Yeah.

[01:03]

Okay. I think that the... First, let me say that sitting is a concept. There's no sitting that's not a concept. Okay. You can't sit without a concept. I mean, you can drink water perhaps without a concept. But like some people can't swallow a vitamin pill. But they can swallow a piece of food. But they can't swallow... So there's a difference for them of a concept of a vitamin pill and a piece of food. And I suppose probably even when we swallow there's a concept involved. But when we sit, we're sitting within a concept. And we already have a bodily concept of our body. that we sit within. So it's important and unavoidable.

[02:05]

I mean, even to be free of concepts is a concept. And to be free of concepts is essential to Buddhist practice, but to be free of concepts is a concept. So if you have some natural nature boy idea of Buddhism, there's no thinking, this is nonsense. Practice is a concept. So when you're sitting, you're sitting within a concept. So ideally, you want a sense of an ideal posture that informs your posture. But ultimately, or practically at each moment, you're finding your posture and that you're informed by the ideal posture. So the ideal posture may be to sit a certain way, but you actually are informed by that, but you accept what it's... That was quick.

[03:07]

The information got you informed by it. Yeah. Four weeks away from delivery, she's very fast. Yeah, that was quick. That's a good example of what I might think about as peripersonal and extra-personal space. Yeah, so if I see someone sitting, if they've been sitting for a long time, then I might just touch their spine here or I might just their chin slightly. But generally, if you have a concept of the ideal posture and then you find your own posture within that and accept whatever your own posture is, that's, I think, the best way to sit. So there's no right posture.

[04:12]

The ideal posture is only a way of informing the posture which you find for yourself. And that's always a process. I mean, I've been doing this, I don't know, more than 45 years, and I'm still finding my posture within the concept of the ideal posture. Does that sort of answer your question? I mean, I suppose you need to find a posture where you can sit comfortably for a very long time. Yeah, the idea of sitting for a very long time is a concept. The idea of sitting without moving is a concept. So you do try to find a posture where you can sit without moving. You do try to find a posture where you can feel an inner ease. We could also talk about, most of Buddhism is about coming to an inner ease. but you also spoke about that the posture influences the mind.

[05:15]

That's what I've been saying, right? Yeah. It's for sure. And the more your mindfulness is developed, the more the fine-tuning of posture and mind are interrelated. Okay, I don't know. I mean, someone else. I would like you to, not that you have to be Zen practitioners, but an ideal Zen practitioner always has a question ready or a statement. Because, you know, I don't want to talk into a vacuum. If I don't get, if we don't create an interactive space, it's very, you know, I'm not here just to talk.

[06:19]

I'm here to get to I would like to get to know you, who you are, but mostly I'm interested in knowing what you are. So for me, I'm interested in feeling. In a way, we could say we're all falling in space together at the same time. And in fact, on the planet and the galaxies and the galaxies spinning within, etc., we actually are all falling. The floor is falling at the same speed. And for right now we're all falling together for three days at the same speed. I guess Wednesday evening our parachutes will open. And you'll go off somewhere and you'll go off somewhere. But for now we're falling in space together, so it's rather nice to be here with you. I can open up a question that might be vague.

[07:20]

I'm curious that... When you spoke about developing sort of a fourth mind, fourth state of mind, how is that fourth state of mind connected to the concept of spirituality? I don't know anything about spirituality. What do you mean by the concept of spirituality? That's what I'm going to... Oh, no problem. That's my problem, too. For me, a part of spirituality is me being connected to something bigger than myself. So there's a difficult talk about sort of the narrative mind where I'm sort of more disconnected with myself. And if I have a sort of spiritual mind, spiritual sense of being, I'm more connected with something more than myself in one sense.

[08:26]

Well, here's how I would look at it. You have a concept of something bigger than yourself or more than yourself. I don't know if that's true. I know that connectedness is true. So from my point of view, I'd say, I feel better when I feel connected. Then I would explore connectedness. What is connectedness? When do I feel connected? When do I not feel connected? I would be very careful. For me, it would be baggage to add that connectedness is to something bigger because I don't know if it's something bigger. It may be just something other. But connectedness, I mean, yoga culture is about connectedness. Spirit, of course, spirit, soul, and psyche are all related to, epistemologically, to breath.

[09:33]

And in almost every culture where equivalent words exist, there are versions of the word breath. So one of the most basic things is connectedness to breath. Now, through connectedness to breath, we may imagine spirit. But you know, Buddhism is, strictly speaking, Buddhism is rigorously non-theological. And so it doesn't mean there's something bigger than ourselves. There certainly is, all of this is bigger than me personally. But why do I feel that I am not you? Why do I feel I'm not you? That's an interesting question. So, I don't know if that... It's a response to what you said, but I can't call it an answer. Shall we have a break? Yeah. So it's ten, and we started at nine, so...

[10:35]

you know, not so many of us, so we don't have to line up for toilets, but shall we have half an hour? Okay. And if anyone wants, it's coffee or tea or fruit downstairs. Great. Okay. Look, can I say one thing? When I do this, I want to say what this is. To give you an example of yoga culture, if I'm going to do these things, because I get in the habit of doing it, it's kind of embarrassing. I mean, I'm at the airport counter and I'm getting a check. Oh, thank you very much. But where that comes from is in a monastic practice, how it's understood as a yogic practice. In, for example, with Crestone, where our center is, or Yohanesau, when you meet someone, say that I'm walking along and Ravi is here, you don't have to go.

[11:46]

When I see Ravi, the custom is I stop, Generally, my feet are together this much. There's lots of little rules like that because if you don't know where your feet are, you don't know where your mind is. So there's rules about where your feet are. Generally, the stance in Zen is always your feet like that. When you bow, your hands are far away. You measure your body with your body. Because there's no natural. There's no idea of natural. Your hair is not natural. It's a decision. My hair is a decision. I have a hair don't and not a hair do. So the other person, if they're walking or if you're obviously sitting there, may bow too. But what I do is I stop. And basically what I'm doing is there's an imagined liquid around me.

[12:51]

I think liquid is the best metaphor. And I bring that liquid together and you know you can feel actually sometimes you can get your hands and you can feel a kind of spongy material between your hands almost and you can extend that. Now, consciously it's a little hard, but if you just let yourself feel it, there's something. And sometimes you can get that wider and wider. And that feeling has a lot to do with healing practices and martial arts practices and so on. So there's a kind of feeling you bring that together and you bring it together here, spine, but in front of the spine, as if the spine is. And then you bring that up through the chakras. And the chakras, again, why do Chinese and Japanese cups have no handles? Because they want you to use two hands. Because two hands, when you do things with two hands, you are working with the bodily space that's articulated outside the body as the chakra. If you watch Japanese people... Would you say that sentence again slowly, please?

[13:57]

I'll come back to it after. Okay, good. If you watch Japanese people... when they drink tea, they'll hold the cup here, they'll drink, and then they hold the cup here. Those are chakras. That means in your ordinary activity, you're activating the extended chakra body. So that sense is in this, so you bring that together, you bring it up through the chakras, you feel it with your heel, bring it up to here, through the heart chakra, and then you bring that up into a space, and then you bow into that space with the other person, letting your personal space disappear. So you merge your personal space, you merge your non-conceptual space, non-personal space with the other person's non-personal space. It's very nourishing. And then you stop. So there's a kind of flow of nourishment.

[14:59]

And then you go on. So when I do that, I have a feeling of entering into a non-conceptual space with you. Well, let's have a break.

[15:12]

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