you know, factual facts of the world. Yeah, there's things there. We have many aspects, at least those three here. But when we look at it as experiential territory, it's very important to experience each separately. And to sort of sort out our private self from our public self. Not just the the way we are in public and the way we are in private as two different selves.

[01:05]

But also how our deepest, most private desires are actually usually publicly formed. They're shaped in the medium of public space. And often, for us, it's very confused because public space is not something, particularly nowadays, it's swallowing itself. And regurgitating itself. And things are all, you know, everything's in motion and changing rather rapidly. Things are in motion and changing rather rapidly.

[02:25]

You know, after Copernicus and Galileo, Western culture lost its sense that everything was centered and had a single cause. So they said that, well... If the earth isn't in the center and the sun is in the center, at least things make circles. But then they didn't make circles, they made ellipses. So it's Shakespeare, Tyner, Behrouz, all the poets and everybody were trying to What world are we describing? And then, so then they said, well, at least if the earth and sun aren't holding their place, the heavens hold their place. Yeah. The heavens.

[03:38]

Then after a while, well, there's multiple causes and unpredictability. So things are in movement. But the basic idea of the Weltraum The world room. And Buddhism is not a universe, but more something like a multiverse that doesn't rhyme. It's a Tathagatagarbha. Which is Tathagatagarbha means simultaneously coming and going and in a fertile way that's both womb and embryo. That's a rather different world to find your bearings in.

[04:38]

Do you understand bearings? Like a sailboat? Yeah. Yeah, someone else. Maybe I said too much if you have no ideas about it. Could you please say something about the difference between the private space and the subjective space? If you could say something about something more related to private and subjective space.

[05:41]

Well, for us, private space is defined usually, and none of these definitions are, you know, black or white, usually private space is defined in contrast to public space. And I would say that reading as the primary medium of extending one's identity extends private space. Das dehnt oder weitet den privaten Raum aus. I mean, the books I've read carefully... Die Bücher, die ich sorgfältig gelesen habe. Yeah. Proust, The Man Without Qualities. Proust. Musil. Musil, Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften. Yeah. Joyce, etc. Joyce, etc. They feel like they happened to me.

[06:44]

They feel like my personal history. Die fühlen sich so an, als ob sie mir widerfahren wären, wie meine persönliche Geschichte. Yeah, but... Movies, television especially, tend to extend public space. Yeah, I mean, movies, I don't know. I'd have to think about it more, but I don't feel any movie is... They moved me, but... Yeah, but... They don't feel like they're... my experience the way reading does. Again, to use an example in Japan. Private space and public space, in the way we know it, don't exist, traditionally.

[07:48]

I mean, in a village like this in Japan, At least last time I was there, which was only a few years ago. On a day like this, the entire village is in their underwear in the street. It's cooler. You don't dress up to go into public space. It's not different than your home. It's just an extension of your living room, bedroom and kitchen. And you might say, oh well, that's just in the village. And in the village also, All the walls are sliding, right?

[08:56]

They're all open all summer. And you walk by and they're watching television in this one and over here they're having a fight and over here. It's all just one big living room. And no one thinks it's a problem. And again, it's not just in the village. When I was in Japan, they had signs written in Japanese at the Tokyo airport. Please don't sit in the airport in your underwear. The Westerners don't understand. You'd have a thousand people all sitting there in their underwear, fanning themselves, you know, nobody carrying their kimono thrown off. Yeah. I mean, this is not our usual sense of public.

[09:57]

For them, we could say it was all private space. Nothing special to see somebody in their underwear, so who cares? The underwear is relatively clean. Yeah. Okay. So I think we have to realize there are other possibilities. We have to notice our own distinctions between public and private. How we semiotically define the space we share with others who aren't our family. In Japan, until MacArthur was there, all public baths, and they were

[11:12]

mostly public baths. There weren't private baths. For the majority of city people, we're all just mixed. Nobody thought about it as erotic. To be alone and dressed with another person was erotic. But to be naked with a whole room full of people is not erotic. So these are just different... ways to divide the space we live in with others. So as the Buddha bent and applied his attention to knowledge and vision, We can choose to focus our attention, apply our attention to our sense of

[12:50]

private and public and so forth. And perhaps Sangha, the experience of other people, is somehow different than other than transcends perhaps the distinction between public and private. So we know each other, perhaps in the Sangha, with a familiarity that is not the usual way we feel with people in public space. I mean, Sophia, again, six years old, has grown up in this room, partly, grown up in two sanghas. Everybody's a friend.

[14:20]

Jeder ist ein Freund. So she just, she goes, in the airport she goes up to some old lady sitting there, very nice, you know, nice looking with blue hair. So geht sie am Flughafen manchmal zu einer alten Dame, die also blau getöntes Haar hat und alle Aufritters und macht also... And the old lady was surprised as she went back. Die alte Dame war überrascht und hat aber so zurückgemacht. And she went up to some old lady. This was after my operation a few years ago. She went up to some old lady and said, Do you wear diapers? And the old lady said, Well, I am getting older, but no. And she said, My father wears diapers. And the old lady said, I said, Sophia, this is public space. Well, yeah.

[15:32]

Okay. But anyway, she thinks everybody is the sangha. So we have to kind of warn her, you know, that she has to really understand public space as not the same as sangha space. Okay, someone else? Yes, David. Where would you put somehow the function of churches in the Western world, related to public? In German, please. Where would we put them? Well, I'd like to talk to someone who... who really does define themselves through churches, through religion.

[16:36]

I mean... I would say for the most part it's irrelevant nowadays. I think in the couple few hundred years ago or maybe even 150 years ago. When people had their house and the town plaza and on the town plaza the cathedral. And they were in the cathedral a lot? Every day or several times a week? It probably... It had to define their relationship to others and their relationship to themselves.

[17:40]

It had to define their relationship to others. You know, the shape of the doors in a church It's not arbitrary. It's the same shape as the nimbus of the Christ figure or saints. And the stained glass windows in their shapes are often also meant to be the outer subtle body. And when you walked through such a door, it was supposed to awaken your own nimbus, your own aura. Is that the word you use, nimbus? What word do you use?

[18:57]

Nimbus is the shape of the halo. That's a nimbus. It's completely lost this meaning. You just have nimbus clouds like today. No one would use the word. Oh, really? Hardly. But if you see auras... Auras has become more common to talk about auras and about nimbus. If you see auras, white or colored around a person, they tend to take this shape. Both Buddhas and Christ figures. And if you study medieval Buddhism, statuary, just like Buddhist statuary, the clothes and the way things are made often articulate the chakras. And if you try to reconstruct a cathedral which has been sort of rebuilt.

[20:18]

the floor plan, the original floor plan, was often constructed on the basis of the chakras. So you look at one part of the church, you say, well, this... The latter part of the altar, behind the altar part, should have been there, according to... And you dig and you find out, oh, that's where it was originally. So if you're in space like that... you it's going to have to influence you how you define yourself but I don't think for most people my most people even those I know who go to church every morning and I do know some people like that yeah I do

[21:20]

They see it more as a kind of moral thing to do, not an experiential thing to do. But it's interesting, you know, sometimes when I'm with my wife's family... The male side of her family, her father's side of the family is Protestant. And the mother's side of her family is Catholic. So when I'm there, I go to church with them, right? Why not? And I much prefer the Catholic, I must say. The Protestant guy is a nice enough guy, and sometimes it's a woman, actually. The last two are women ministers. They just talk at you. They're very nice people, but they kind of talk at you.

[22:49]

But the Catholic priest, who, I don't know, not particularly an unusual person, he kind of doesn't talk much, but he enacts. what Christianity is supposed to be about. Yeah, it's interesting that the trades who built the cathedral, all these rules about the chakras and things, were completely kept secret in secret manuals and so forth because somehow they wanted the influence to be on the people but not to know why and how they're influenced. And these rules, for example, how a cathedral was built in detail, were kept secret in books that were not publicly accessible, because they wanted to have influence at that time, but they didn't want to know how it works.

[23:58]

In general, in Buddhism, you don't design the buildings to represent spiritual experience. The rooms are usually pretty straightforward. But you define the altar to represent spiritual experience. And things, sometimes you hang on, if you study the things that hang on the columns in Zen temples, there's a cloth and there's kind of stripes and, you know, etc. We have two simple ones hanging on the pillars in Crestone Mountain Zen Center. They are usually an externalized chakra system hung on the building instead of on the body. And even this, when you have this, that's a kind of star, astrological thing.

[25:12]

And that is related to the top of the spine here. This is meant to connect Heaven and earth through the spine. Hi. But heaven and earth in Chinese cosmology is not like our heaven and earth. Again, it's this heaven and earth were once together like an egg. In China.

[26:16]

They were joined. And in fact they were copulating. And it was very hard to get them apart because they were having a good time. And you had to press them apart and hold heaven up there and earth down here. So heaven wasn't thought to be something fixed that doesn't change. Heaven itself is moving. So there was no effort to say, well, the sun is in the center or the earth is in the center or the heavens don't move. It was all thought to be moving. It was not the feeling that the sun is in the center or the earth or whatever. The idea was that everything was in motion. And out of that image comes the yin and the yang. And out of that comes the I Ching and the five ranks in our soto lineage. And now you know everything you need to know.

[27:17]

It's interesting that gypsies, for example, in France, where they have been able to keep a little bit of their culture, not like in Romania, that they know a lot about secret places around churches and in churches, and they have really secret places where they meet, although there are no Catholics and no Protestants. They just feel more about that and they know more about the history and how it is planned and they meet in churches, although they're priests and they don't water in there, but they have secret places around churches. Yeah. Well, I mean, churches are supposedly, they're traditionally built in feng shui or geomantic power spots. Yeah. Oh, you didn't, you should translate. In France there is an approach to the Zygoner culture, which also meets regularly. And it is very interesting, they have secret meeting places, which are often around cathedrals or also in cathedrals and pass on this knowledge, although they are not Catholics and also not Protestants.

[28:36]

But it is such an overcrowded culture, which they can still feel and which they still live out in their culture. About Feng Shui? Feng Shui, yeah. Feng Shui, which is actually not the same as geomancy. Also, es geht jetzt hier um Feng Shui, sagt man bei uns. You pronounce it differently. Feng Shui in hinsicht geomancy ist diese Kraftfeldergeschichte, denke ich, so in der Erde mit Linien und Feldern und so weiter. geomancy is more involved with ley lines as if there's some kind of permanent subtle structure in the earth feng shui is this room has a certain pattern that affects us but if I move this to here the whole feng shui is changed But I know in England, I don't know about the rest of Europe, it's probably true, cathedrals were often located, churches, local churches too, where great ancient old trees were nearby.

[29:56]

And in that world, churches certainly affected everything. But now, I mean, a disaster for the world is the United States President. You know what that means, right? W. He's George W. Bush. So if you... with a different initial than his father, right? So when you're for Bush, you go... W. W. But he is doubled because he believes in the infallibility of a God who instructs him. So he's in complete denial about what's going on in Iraq and Afghanistan.

[30:59]

It's a war that's gone on longer now than the Second World War. And he's in denial, in that denial, psychological denial, And that denial is supported by his belief system. Because while the earth may not be at the center of the world anymore, he still believes in some kind of infallibility. Excuse my little political speech there. Recently I saw a little movie about German police people being in Afghanistan.

[32:02]

German police being in Afghanistan, not soldiers. Okay. Oh, they're teaching Iraqis to be policemen. Afghanis to be policemen. The report was by a woman and she said how completely different this world was for her. She was a policewoman? Yes. If she wanted to discuss something with someone, even very official things, this seemingly public space, she always had to go to private rooms with the people first, had to be invited by the speaker, then they had to drink tea together and eat in a row. Even when she wanted to talk about something completely official or public, she had to be invited to tea or for dinner, enter private space, and by this establish the possibility to get into a public conversation or public report.

[33:33]

A priority was completely different order to achieve something in time. Time was important and it was more about spending time together. Yes, that's right. I know that's right. I mean, can I tell you a little funny anecdote? John Denver. You know that as a singer? Unfortunately, he died in a plane crash. new plane he'd purchased. But he came to see me once in Creston. And he wanted my advice on how to relate to the Japanese in order to make some progress on their stopping whaling.

[34:34]

And I said, well, yeah, arrange a meeting in a geisha house. He said, what? Because decisions are made in private space. And Gesche's house are primarily about business people meeting in a private space defined by women. But it's mostly just they meet with other men there and drink and talk and have fun and make decisions. And a close friend of mine's girlfriend, a woman I know, her close high school girlfriend was one of the leading geishas in Tokyo. So I said, I can set it up for you. He said, oh. In fact, the artist out here, Mayumi, where we have some of her, it's her best friend.

[35:54]

Well, we seem to be getting off the topic or much deeply into the topic. Yeah, so now you can go back and say, well, we had a good discussion about Sangha, and we somehow ended up in a geisha house. But it's the difference between when you make, like the Afghanis, you make decisions in subjective private space. There's no other place you can make a real decision, because that's where you can have commitment and bonding. The Japanese, excuse me for all I know, I don't know the rest of Asia very well. The Japanese simply don't understand Western contracts. Because a contract has a reality in public space.

[37:08]

But private space, or subjective space rather, can change, but the contract doesn't change with the subjective space. A contract has a reality in public space. So you make an American company and a Japanese company sign an agreement. It says, according to the business partner, there's a certain percentage will be... But the whole situation changes, and now the contract is unfair for one of the people. But Japanese will say, throw the contract in the wastebasket. We'll change it to what we would do if we were writing the contract now. The Japanese would say, throw that thing away, we'll rewrite it the way we wrote it, if we knew how the situation is now.

[38:20]

The Westman would say, we have a contract, and the Japanese would say, yes, we made an agreement, but it took place in a movable space. I know one of the big American companies, Honeywell, had agreements with Japanese companies before the Second World War. And then during the war, the American company, Honeywell, Well, everything will have to start anew. Everything, governments changed, the war, etc. And so they went to Japan and the Japanese company said, oh, we've been waiting for you.

[39:22]

We've got so many million dollars saved for you because we had an agreement and we've been keeping track of it. The contracts were long gone but the agreement for them was still real. Again, we define our world through public space nowadays. And ourselves. And when we are practicing meditation, when we have experiences that don't quite fit private space or public space, we tend to think of them as not sort of real. It's more like a dream is not real. But we ought to look at it.

[40:24]

We ought to look at it. Perhaps these experiences are not in any category we can recognize. Or there's a category of experience we don't know about yet. And that's not to be looking for something mysterious, as I said earlier in the Hindu tradition. But to look at actual the facts of our experience, but not deny them, or feel they don't have categories we understand. Okay, I think that's enough for today.

[41:30]

So maybe we can, in fact, we're supposed to be ending soon. So maybe we can sit for a few minutes. Change the feng shui of the room. Yeah. Look for some, notice some categories. Sematic, sangakic, Samadhishe, Sanghishe So shift your, bend your attention primarily to the realm of sound, to the space without distance,

[43:12]

Who are you in this space? What satisfies you in this space? What relationship to others and to objects do you have in this space? Welche Beziehung zu anderen und zu den Objekten hast du an diesem Ort? To the circulation of the breath. To the circulation of the blood.

[44:25]

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