Anyway, these two little girls in Australia, they were brought to this wooden stump and it had a whole bunch of stuff on it, branches and twigs and I don't know what, bird's nest and physical objects. And the little girls were just brought up to it. And as they were brought up to it, somebody brushed it all off the stump. And they said to the little girls, put it back. Well, you can imagine the point of this television little bit was to show that the Western girl couldn't put anything back practically. She'd sort of put a few things back. But the little Aboriginal girl just put everything back exactly as it was.

[01:07]

Yeah, like a spy reassembling a room from Polaroid film after he has just taken everything apart. Well, That's just a different kind of awareness or consciousness. And I think at a certain point you probably couldn't teach the little white girl to do it. Maybe. But if you begin to practice mindfulness and a good part of your Time is actually not in comparative thinking, but just a kind of knowing mind, a noticing mind.

[02:35]

As I often say, to notice without thinking. Your own consciousness begins to enjoy and feel the fabric of the world in more detail. And that's part of the background of Zen practice is the more you are mindful, attentive without discriminating the present.

[03:58]

You're exercising, maybe we could say, a new muscle of the mind. And it begins on, I'm really speaking here that this practice is transformative. It begins to change it. And you begin to feel the world differently. Yeah, and feel it with less egocentric, with less self-referencing all the time. Because the trick of mindfulness is noticing without self-referencing as well as noticing without thinking.

[05:03]

Yeah. So Dogen is saying, when he says the leap of the body, if you can sit, and sitting is a way you can... most directly experience this. One of the things that happens when you just sit, you drop, you can drop, some people don't, but you can drop the body sheath, the thought body. The sheath of the body or the body sheath?

[06:19]

The body sheath. Well, either. Both are okay. Okay. She knows something I don't. Okay. And then there is some kind of movement often. Your body moves toward knowing something that the mind can't get yet, can't quite follow. Okay, so that's one of the reasons why Zen practice emphasizes unstructured meditation. One of the reasons is because of the problem with recognizing, oh, this body sheaths.

[07:26]

One of the reasons which is the problem with recognizing... Yeah, I know it. I'm sorry. I'll try to improve. One of the reasons that Zen developed, in contrast to earlier Buddhism, and to stop having structured meditation, Early Buddhism tends to emphasize you do this and you do this with your mind and you concentrate, etc., and you... You know, things like that. Guided meditation. And that kind of meditation can be very fruitful and properly directed or practiced can, you know, be quite good for you.

[08:34]

But it perhaps doesn't allow this leap of the body. Because the very structure of guided meditation reinforces the body, the thought body. So Zen emphasizes, and makes it kind of difficult and sometimes sort of boring, In the most fundamental sense, the only thing you do is sit there.

[09:51]

You don't do anything. Yeah, but that's not quite true. I mean, you sit and you do try to pay attention to your posture. The emphasis is on the physical posture, not the mental posture. Not on the mental body or mental thoughts. And part of the fascicle of Zammai, O Zammai, which I think is very useful, is I've, we've xeroxed and it's in some English and a German translation somewhere up.

[10:57]

Up there, it's not outside of... And he asks the reader, the practitioner, to explore for him or herself. Are you sitting in the posture of the mind? Are you sitting in the posture of the body? Are you dropping both body and mind in sitting? And so forth. He doesn't really give you instructions, but asks you a bunch of questions like, what framework are you bringing to your sitting? And you have to work with the various frameworks. But then you also have to be able to let go of the frameworks. So overall, I would say that the posture of zazen is uncorrected mind.

[12:11]

Once you establish your physical posture, And you bring yourself into your breathing. You pretty much don't do anything. You don't correct your posture. Whatever is there, you just let be there. But that's actually pretty difficult to do you'll find unless you create a field of mind. So uncorrected mind works.

[13:14]

It's possible to realize it. When you have a physical sensation, usually a physical sensation of moving from feeling from noticing or identifying yourself with the contents of mind, from the contents of mind to the field of mind. What is that like?

[14:15]

Well, it's something like the practice in martial arts and Zen of soft eyes. When you... Move the feeling of seeing from the front of your eyes to the back of your eyes. The feeling is, if you catch the feeling of it, it's like feeling the field of seeing rather than the particulars. It's also like the feeling of going to sleep. You know, as I point out when I speak about this, you can go into a room and if a kid or an adult is pretending to be asleep, you know they're actually awake.

[15:35]

Also, das habe ich auch schon ein paar Mal gesagt, ihr könnt in ein Zimmer gehen und da ist ein Kind oder ein Erwachsener drin, der tut so, als ob er schläft oder sie. Und das kann man immer herausfinden, ob das jetzt vorgespielt ist oder nicht, denn es ist ein, dem Schlafen... Thank you. It's very hard to, it's almost impossible to voluntarily create an involuntary feeling. Also es ist sehr schwer willentlich ein willensfreies Gefühl herzustellen.

[16:44]

And so it's actually useful to see if you can stay somewhat aware while you fall asleep. I mean, if you don't want to practice zazen or study zazen, study your sleeping. Why not? Every 24 hours or more often, you have a chance to bring mindfulness to falling asleep. And you can stay, you can actually stay conscious all the way through sleep, kind of consciousness, but it's not so difficult to stay conscious during the first two or three stages of falling asleep. You can notice when your breathing changes.

[17:48]

Perhaps you might notice when you start to snore. And you might even think, what the heck is that noise? Oh, that's me. Someone's snoring. But there's a kind of release of voluntary breathing. and thinking and bodily, the body she, as you fall asleep. That's one of the things you get familiar with in practicing uncorrected mind.

[18:51]

It also means involuntary mind. So in a sense you're doing something, but it's more subtle than a guided meditation program. So I think it's time for a break. But let's study the transition from lecturing to breaking with a minute or so of satsang. But let us study this transition from the lecture to breaking into the break through a moment of silence. If you're wandering around in the mind too much, you may miss the leap of the body.

[21:04]

At what moment might this leap occur? What mind allows the leap of the body? What mind is the backward step? Welcher Geist ist der Rückwärtsschritt? Yeah, thank you very much for this first part of the morning.

[22:38]

Thank you for translating. I'm glad Sophia is getting old enough to be taken care of occasionally by others. So I can enjoy the pleasure of being translated by Sophia's mother. I'm your friend. Thank you.

[24:20]

Thank you. Of course, after I talk so much, I like to hear your voices too.

[26:14]

I get pretty bored listening to myself. I don't really listen, but you know what I mean. Though I do surprise myself because often I don't know what I'm going to say. So I think, oh, where did that come from? But often you surprise me more than I surprise myself. Yeah, but first I'd like to say, you know, just... to reinforce what I was speaking about before. You know, a baby infant produces millions and millions of synaptic connections, I've read. Not that I've seen it, but I've read about it. Also ein Baby, ein Kleinkind, das produziert Millionen von synaptischen Verbindungen.

[27:32]

And by the time the baby is walking, those connections are about half what they were. Und sobald ein Kind läuft, hat es nur noch halb so viele, wie es ursprünglich hatte. And it seems that the brain edits it down to respond to the environment the baby's brought up in. It reduces to what the surrounding needs. And so we would presume that this aborigine, aboriginal girl, the editing process was different for her. No, I'm not by suggesting you might practice Zen trying to turn you into aborigines. But that might not be so bad, actually.

[28:40]

We do less damage to the environment, at least. And I've read that by some miraculous... sensory ability. The Aborigines knew long before telescopes about the rings around Saturn and so forth. And now it seems to be again from what I've read that the all through our life we're producing sometimes new neurons and synaptic connections. And this supports the experience of Zen practice that if you begin the practice of mindfulness

[29:47]

And especially if you establish yourself in a continuity of mindfulness. I think it was last night I said that one of the hard words to define in this is practice. But right now I have the opportunity to describe defined practice as the recognition of change. In other words, recognition of a continuous impermanence and uniqueness.

[31:15]

And most of us, by habit, are coasting in impermanence. I mean coasting in permanence. What's coasting? Coasting is like when you turn the engine off of a car and just roll down the hill. Okay, so most of us do what? They coast in? We coast in permanence. We turn mindfulness off and we roll along assuming the road's always going to be there. That's mostly true unless you're in the San Francisco earthquake. Cars were left hanging over the... So that we could say that the establishment of mind in continuity of mindfulness is practice.

[32:34]

The establishment of mind as a continuity of mindfulness, as a continuous mindfulness, is a definition of practice. Now, you might think that's a heck of a big job. I have enough trouble keeping up with my thinking. But that's the problem. If you take energy out of continuous thinking, continuous mindfulness is quite relaxing. And I wouldn't say you're coasting now in impermanence. But I would rather say that you are continuously nourished by uniqueness.

[33:58]

The illusion of permanence is the main delusion. of Buddhism, delusion of what Buddhism means by delusion. And this is called ignorance. And it's interesting. It's called ignorance and not evil. And that's interesting. It's called ignorance or ignorance and not evil. Ignorance is the closest parallel we can have in Buddhism to evil. And it's interesting because the assumption is that if you

[35:00]

stop coasting in permanence and the belief and assumption of a permanent self and the grasping and rejecting that goes with that most of the behavior we call evil disappears Just imagine how many worlds are waiting for the baby's millions of synaptic connections. How many environments, how many languages? At that age, the baby can accomplish any world within itself.

[36:15]

But by the time the baby's walking, it's already established a particular kind of world and begun to enter a particular kind of language. But by the genius of this practice, establishing a posture we're not born with, we can establish a new kind of mind that we're not born with. and through the practice of mindfulness, enter into an environment, a unique, impermanent environment, that even at our advanced ages, I mean some of our advanced ages, we can begin to transform through the plasticity of the brain the way mind and body itself work.

[37:53]

So it's the plasticity of the brain which enables the change of body and mind. Yeah. Okay, that's right. What a remarkable treasure. That's why people get involved in this practice and you really see the treasure. It's hard to do anything else. You're like the Count of Monte Cristo. Do you know who that is? You have that in German, too? He always should go to this island. Of course, mine is going to the unnumbered. non-countable Monte Buddha.

[39:26]

Sorry, let's forget that. So, even these beads, if I want to work you know, writing or wondering what to say in a lecture. I often try to work at my computer or whatever, read with the beads on. And if I really want to change my pace, I actually make them long like this. Then they drip on the keyboard and they... knock over my teacup.

[40:31]

But actually I have to be in a different kind of mind to do that. I can't assume anything is permanent, especially my teacup. I first learned about beads when I went to the Near East in the... Yeah, when I was 19, 20, 21, something like that. And I liked... I really loved the pace of the Near East. It was quite wonderful. That's the first time I met what I would call a truly extraordinary person.

[41:33]

The kind of person you want some kind of human being like that to exist on the planet. Eine Person, wie man sich wünscht, dass so eine auf dem Planeten existiert. And his name was Shukrila Ali. Und sein Name war Shukrila Ali. And he anticipated my meeting Suzuki Roshi. That I don't anticipate it means he knew in advance. No, no. I, by seeing him, it made me prepared to meet Suzuki Roshi. Also das... And the beads to me represented, I could see that they had a different kind of pace of life in these funny earthen cities. Off and on for two years, when I could get off my ship, I wandered around and ran in Iraq and so forth.

[42:50]

I'd love to go back, but right now I wouldn't be welcome. Somebody want to say something? The vital path of the leap of the body. Okay. recognizing the contents of mind towards the field of mind. Is that what Dogen calls the leap of the body? Well, it's not unrelated, but I would call that something like maybe the leap into the field of mind.

[44:04]

It's a kind of leap. These kind of changes are, they're not gradual, they're shifts, little shifts or leaps. And they're little enlightenment experiences. Yeah, sometimes unnoticed. But if it occurs at a particular time in your life, particular situation in your life, the same experience can be a big enlightenment. Okay. Someone else. Yes. Several times you've talked about body, mind and phenomena. Often I have the experience when the differentiation between body, mind, and including phenomena in that experience is not so clear for me, differentiating.

[45:25]

Okay. Is there a sense that you have of this experience of phenomena included in body-mind or body-mind is a vehicle toward which we can enter this experience of phenomena as part of as well. I'll shorten it, hopefully I won't ruin it. He says, for him it's not so clear what the separation between body, mind and phenomena is. He asks, are body and mind something like a vehicle to understand the phenomena, or are the phenomena contained in body and mind? Well let me, for the newer people here, let me use this as an opportunity to speak about an essential practice, an essential aspect of breathing practice.

[46:37]

Yeah, I'm sorry to go through for you older folks. Sorry to go through this little shape again. Anyone can do it. To bring your attention to your breath. It's very difficult to bring your attention to your breath for very long. Let alone continuously. So this produces a question, a way-seeking mind to question. Why is something so easy to do for a short time so hard to do for a long time? Yeah, because I'm convinced this is the case. We established the permanence of self in, I would say, three main ways.

[47:50]

We have to establish it somehow. And one of the ways is we establish a continuity from moment to moment. And if we lose that continuity, we feel crazy or like we're having a breakdown or something, if you really lose the continuity. And that continuity is established in our thoughts. Und diese Kontinuität, die ist etabliert oder verankert in unserem Gedanken. We have to constantly know where we are, what we're doing. In America, when you're giving testimony in a court, you have to answer what day it is.

[49:11]

Because you might not be a good witness if you don't even know what day it is. I think it's a four and nine day. On four and nine days we have a kind of half a day off. Four, nine, nineteen, eight, you know. I'm in trouble. So we establish our continuity in thoughts. And we will feel deeply disturbed if we lose that continuity. So we can't establish continuity in our breath. Und das ist der Grund, weshalb wir unsere Kontinuität nicht in unserem Atem aufbauen können oder schaffen können.

[50:34]

But if you persist, and that's part of the practice of mindfulness, bringing attention back to your breath, then it jumps back to your thinking and comes back again. jumps back to your thinking, comes back again. And after a while, it jumps to your thinking and comes back by itself. And shortly after that, it just rests on your breathing. And now you're establishing self through the continuity of breath rather than thinking. That's a revolutionary change in the establishment of a new kind of non-self-self. And it's something completely available to each.

[51:44]

And I won't spend any time suggesting what concomitant accompanying changes go along with the ability in body and mind and the ability to concentrate on the breath. At that point we start finding a continuity in breath, in the body, and in phenomena. And we always find ourselves context-related primarily, which is different than being related to some permanent idea of a given world.

[52:54]

This koan I probably will get to about following the fragrant grasses. And pursuing falling flowers. This we hope, I hope to pursue a little later in the seminar. Okay, someone else? Anyone else? Yes.

[53:56]

I have the feeling that the topics body and mind, body and mind, are not only, as I experience it, individually drawn, individually treated. I have it back there. I have the feeling that this topic, body-mind, aren't individual things which you relate individually. So that they are patterns of a social context and not so much of an individual one. Well, I think it's very difficult to separate social context from individual context. Look how much we're alike.

[55:07]

Yeah. But of course they, well, let me just say, from the point of view of practice, When you sit down in meditation, you are working with the body directly, first of all. When Dogen talks about dropping off mind and body, the distinct experience of a separate mind and body disappears. But that's pretty mature, realized practice.

[56:21]

But it may occur to us something like that at various moments. And we could assume that's the fundamental actuality. But for most of us we experience our body in a different way than we experience our mind. You get into a car. Your mind is doing one thing, your body is doing another thing. And so forth. Yes. So is this kind of disappearance of this body feeling or something like a kind of going into or melting into a bigger body of everyone.

[57:53]

That's a dimension of it. I mean, this dropping of mind and body is also an experience of a kind of big body that we share. But in general we don't want to try to define these things in advance of our experience of them. Except to the useful degree to which we already have the experience, and if we can notice that we already have this experience in some seed-like form, we can tend to let it bloom. Yes. So when I moved out here last year, I said I would like to experience my practice now in a town or a city.

[59:14]

But since I know that I am learning here in Friedrich, So since I have discovered that I'm very sensitive to noise, Gerald and I, we decided not to move right into town, but a little bit adjacent to town. So now we go once or maybe twice, we walk into Tang and I just notice it is really loud. So then of course I don't really think much about practice when I go there, but I do kind of watch my breathing to have a support in this noise, but it doesn't actually really work.

[60:45]

So last week I went to town and it was in the evening and since recently shops close at 8 o'clock and I went there before the shops closed. I was in a house in the town of Renten and the road was full and the people were walking through the town and there was still something to do. They were completely confused to get something in the last moment and it was right. So I walked through a street which was full of streetcars and people racing, and you know it, they just have to get the last few things before the store is closed, and it was really not. I've been there. Han.

[61:50]

And suddenly I hear the, you know, hitting a han. Whoa. And this sound... I was so surprised that I waited a little bit. So then I was waiting for a roll down because I just couldn't believe it. And in the moment when this roll down occurred, everything kind of slowed down. So everything kind of became more quiet or more silent and I just heard the roll down and then the continuing hits on the horn.

[62:52]

And this sound accompanied me in that evening. and to experience something similar and not with this, for me, familiar Han and roll-down before Zazen. I went the next day into town again. You rolled down into town. I just focused on something So I just went there and concentrate on something that I enjoyed or liked. At that time it was just the streetcar which went around the corner and did this kind of sound.

[63:54]

And in that moment, what you just described with the breathing machine, that this phenomenon of the noise, So in that moment that happened, what you just described with the breathing or the breaths, that in the moment of that sound... I could say one. I could move through the city, be in the noise, but not really being disturbed. So I could somehow let myself fall into it. I could move through the city and was not disturbed by noises. So my question is, what did really happen? By slowing down, by noise and all, and I love a lot, I miss a lot, but the knocking of the hand, which reminded me, of course, of my practice of being here and crystal, gave me something, yeah.

[65:05]

Can you explain it by what you explained? Yeah, Deutsch. Well, I would just say that you discovered something. And through the long craft of your practice, you were with some subtlety able to enter into your mind and establish a continuity of of mind wasn't disturbed by the sounds around you.

[66:15]

And really it's hard for me to say anything other than just to, in a way, repeat what you said, except to note that this is a craft Practice is a craft. And much of the fruits of the craft often come out in a situation where we need them. It reminds me of when I asked Sukhiroshi how to practice heat yoga. He said, it has to be very cold. You know, one time I took a taxi in San Francisco for some reason or other and I wanted to go to the Zen Center building I was reminded of this recently for some reason.

[67:29]

You know, the Han, which she spoke about, is this wooden board which we hit, you know, clack, clack. So I tried to explain to the taxi driver, I said, you know, it's that big brick building on Bush and Laguna that's on the left. Oh, the woodpecker building. Also, da hab ich ihm versucht zu erklären, weißt du, das ist dieses große Backsteingebäude zwischen Bush und Laguna Straße, darf da liegen. Ach, ich weiß, das ist das Spechthaus, meinst du auch. Because he'd driven by when we were hitting the Han. Yes, Alan? I just had a question for Gisela. Was the sound of the Han in your memory, was that a hallucination in your memory?

[68:29]

You don't call remembering Zen practice a hallucination. No, the Shimabu people, they have a show there on the second floor. I looked after it. And they actually have a building and they have a wonderful show upstairs. And there is actually a lot of music. So now Gisela checked if it wasn't a hallucination and she found out it was a Deshimaro Zen practice place. Was nearby? What she heard there. And it was a beautiful... Really? Really. But it can be hallucinating. It could be. You just hear... I mean, I've had this experience. You hear something in a stream of sound, in white sound. You can hear... the ongoing, bells-going conversations, or you can just hear a couple bops, and it triggers your bodily memory of it.

[69:34]

But that's great. You know, in Japan, what's nice is... Wait, wait, I have to translate. Oh. It could also be a hallucination, so to speak. In such a... I don't know what white noise is. In such a noise where all noises... In Japanese cities, the average person practices Jodo Shinshu, Jodo Shu Buddhism. Also in Japanischen Städten oder in Japan praktiziert der Durchschnittsjapaner Jodo Shinshu. And Nijiranchu.

[70:34]

Und Nijiranchu. And they chant Namu Ho Renge Kyo commonly or Namu Mirabutsu. Also die rezitieren Namu Ho Renge Kyo oder Namu Butsu Do. A practice I did for... a year or so. But anyway, you walk along the street and you hear people with their little tiny mokugyo, the wooden fish. And there are streetcars and the mad taxis in Japan and so forth. From the second story windows sometimes you hear cluck, cluck. It's a nice feeling. And you hear from the second floor of a window also this cluck, cluck and namu amida butsu, namu amida butsu. It's a nice cluck. Herbie Hancock, the jazz musician. Herbie Hancock, the jazz musica.

[71:36]

Practices Nichiren Shu. So before he plays, instead of doing what some musicians do, which is take drugs, he and some of his group get together and they chant. Before they go out and play. And two or three times I joined them because a friend of mine used to be the girlfriend of one of the musicians in Miles Davis' group. So he told his musicians that this guy with a couple of people was going to come and join them before they played. So for half an hour I sat, Virginia and René sat, and we chanted Namo Renge Kyo, Namo Renge Kyo.

[72:51]

And after we finished, he turned to the others. He said, I told you not to worry. I told you they were pros. Because we just fit right in, you know, and it's fine. Okay, we're supposed to have lunch in a few minutes, so let's sit for a moment or two. The vital path of the leap of the body.

[74:59]

This phrase alone can be established in your mindfulness. lifting up through your body and simultaneously relaxing down through your body. And relaxing into your breathing.

[76:01]

letting thinking mind settle out of your body as water goes into sand. We ought to thank Frank and Chris and whoever else while missing the seminar or participating in the seminar by cooking in the kitchen for us.

[77:29]

Thank you too, all of you who said something. And I hope I can thank some others of you. I think we need something open for at least a little while. Hi.

[79:42]

Good afternoon. Any questions, anything? Anything you want to start out with? Hmm. You usually have lots of quotes. I depend on the center there, Andreas and you. Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah, but in the afternoon you have another quota. And my Valentine, yesterday I only got one Valentine, and that was Valentine. And he keeps moving around the periphery here.

[80:45]

I can't keep track of him. Okay. What? Oh, good. I have a question. I have this question. What is a song or a soul-like thing for the Buddhists? Does it exist? Well, we haven't... Buddhists have established self and non-self.

[81:45]

And also the experience of no-self. I would not say that the Buddhists have established non-soul or an experience of no soul. But, and if you, for instance, as a particular person, Or myself. Have some experience that I find useful to call soul. Now, an experience. If I ask somebody who really feels strongly about soul, let's say in contrast to spirit, Then whatever their experience is, they can have that experience as a Buddhist as well as anything else.

[83:04]

But that's an experiential level of what one means by soul. But is there some kind of teaching built around that the soul survives death. There isn't. But however, in Tibetan Buddhism, which emphasizes reincarnation or rebirth... It might be hard to distinguish what they mean from the idea of soul. So I guess what I'm saying, if you have the experience of soul, you don't lose it as a Buddhist. In general, your experience just becomes clarified through practice.

[84:38]

Okay. Dare I ask someone else now? May I dare to ask someone else? I had a visit from an older teacher one year ago, who was over 80, with white and gray hair. It was an Easter seminar and there were a lot of people there. I was in the middle of the seminar and he gave me a little candle. He said it was light. For me it was so... I was very angry, I was very scared, but somehow it pulled me there.

[85:40]

Yes, I don't know either. I didn't get it, but the candle was really great and so on. The candle was in my eyes and again... You need to let her translate. I can still do it, but you want to feel it. A few years ago, I've been at a seminar during Easter, and that was with a fairly old teacher. He was more than 80 years old, and he had... Very old. He had white gray hair and in the middle of this seminar he distributed to everyone a little lit candle and I was like really afraid and I kind of threw up. trembled but i was drawn towards it and then i received my candle and my heart was beating real fast and then i took it and i retreated a little bit and then i cried

[86:52]

Because you talked about the body and the mind, as if I were a part of his body, his spirit, or what he felt. As if I had a taste for it. I think it was quite different. So when you speak about this body and mind, it feels maybe to me like that receiving this, at the same time I received what is maybe his body and mind or something, or at least it opened me to something which I think this might have been it. Certainly it could have been something else, but that's how it felt to me. Yeah, sounds ... I wish I'd been there. I would have taken a candle too. So it wasn't anything big, you know, it was just getting this candle, but still I was afraid.

[87:56]

But everything went on fine. So this, you're speaking today about it, that kind of reminded me of this and it seems to me that this is somewhat an explanation what happened at that point to me. Yeah, it sounds very delicate and, yeah. That sounds very delicate or fine. Fine. Anyone else? Yes, I have a question.

[88:58]

Yoga has been mentioned very often. It seems to give some points of practice. In yoga and in tibetan buddhism or hinduism they say I am not the body and I am not the spirit. Compare the body with the house and the spirit with the tool you have. You mentioned yoga many times, and it seems like there are some kind of interfaces between yoga and Zen. And in yoga and Tibetan Buddhism, I think you say, I'm neither body nor am I mind. And you say, my body or the body is the house in which I'm living and mind are the tools you can work with or you can use these tools.

[90:07]

And the question goes on. The goal or the meaning of the sitting practice is actually that, or at least I understood it, that one makes the mind so clear and so smooth Okay, so... As far as I understood what they mean is that through sitting practice or the goal of sitting practice is that you get so still the mind that you're able to reflect your soul. And I really think this is a very beautiful image, though I must say I have not experienced my soul so far. Maybe we have. Well, certainly I think all of these teachings rooted in India are in a larger sense yogic teachings, yogic practices.

[91:18]

They share, yeah. And there are Buddhist schools which, you know, maybe I'd have to explore it, but maybe say something similar to what you said about the mind is tools and the body is where you live. But certainly late Buddhism or Mahayana Zen wouldn't say that. But certainly the later Buddhism and Mahayana Zen would not say this anymore.

[92:21]

Dogen, for instance, doesn't say you have a Buddha nature, you are Buddha nature. So that you don't, because it has often been phrased, you have Buddha nature as if it's something inside you. Like you have a stomach or you have a stomachache. So wie man einen Bauch oder auch Bauchweh hat. But in Zen we'd say, you are a stomach. You are the stomachache. Und wir würden in Zen sagen, du bist der Bauch, du bist das Bauchweh. And that way of saying it leads to a different concept of practice and different experience. Und diese Art, das so zu benennen, führt zu einer anderen Art Praxis und anderer Art von Erfahrung.

[93:23]

Can you define a difference between mind and spirit, which is a difference we can't make in German as well? That's part one of the question. And the second one is, I hardly ever intend to use the word spiritual. And I really still don't understand what could be meant by spiritual. I understand when you... I can pretty much follow when you... When you describe the workings of the mind and describe how we study the mind, I get a good feeling what you say. But usually you can say it more precisely than I can think it. I get a feeling for it then. What is meant by spiritual? Spiritual in contrast to what? Okay, so, kurz auf Deutsch, the spiritual and mind is the same word in German. Also, Nico fragt, was ist der Unterschied zwischen Spiritualität und...

[94:30]

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