So tell me, please, something about your discussion. Oh, dear. You were all talking earlier. Maybe I should leave and then you keep talking. Yes. I would like to tell you about an experience, and I already told that in my small group, but I would like to tell it again. I was in the practice period in Creston this year, In addition to many other wonderful experiences or experiences I also have, when I talk about what has changed and what was special at that time.

[01:08]

From a certain point I had the experience That I, with all these practice periods, body... from a certain point onward, I had the feeling that I was falling along and inside kind of the practice period body, I mean together with all the others, just falling along. Following along, flowing along?

[02:10]

Falling through space. And I remember when Hoshi Watanabe told me that he felt himself in the momentary appearance. I was reminded of that experience in practice period when, Rashi, you talked this morning about feeling the self in the momentary appearances. Now I'm back in my everyday life and I do not always have the feeling that I'm falling through space at the same speed as everything around me. But what I have taken with me as a very important knowledge, and I have already succeeded,

[03:27]

But what an insight I had and which I've brought with me and occasionally succeed in practicing. that I could say to myself in the middle of my discursive thinking, I now put my mind into my hands And occasionally, I mean, it actually happens when I say that to myself, and it changes a great deal. And your hands just start talking away?

[04:39]

Okay, thanks. Someone else? If these four functions are the ones that define the self, Then we developed these without knowing about them and also put the content into them. And the contents we kind of picked up from our surroundings and how we were brought up and just put the contents into these functions.

[05:40]

And if you take continuity as an example, then in most cases our thinking, or the stream of thought that runs through our head, is filled up very quickly, i.e. what I am. And through my practice it is partly the case that through and through practice, at least for a certain time, I can find the continuity in my breathing instead of in discursive thinking.

[06:54]

And it works quite well when I'm not directly active or reactive with other people? So in situations, even in everyday situations, where I'm kind of present but don't have to do much, I can manage that. But in situations where I have to act directly or react directly on somebody or what somebody says or so, then I cannot do it. Okay, so let's say that there's these so-called two truths.

[08:10]

And there's the conventional truth and the fundamental truth. So you can also say that the conventional truth is the awareness that it's the conventional truth. The Yogacara has three categories. The imagined, which is you take it as real. And the conventional, which you know is conventional, these are entities, these are ways people function. And the fundamental is to know that things are... you know, constructs, interdependent constructs.

[09:22]

Okay. Now, we develop a way of being in the conventional truth where perhaps we shift back and forth between it being really the way we live as if it really were that way. And we sometimes live knowing it's just conventional, it's a kind of theater. But a real theater where there's real consequences. And then sometimes we know it as, let's say, the fundamental truth.

[10:24]

And let's keep it simple here and say the experience of the fundamental truth is when you feel your continuity not in discursive thoughts. So the actual condition of practice is not, oh, it would be better to only be in the fundamental truth. the actual condition of practice is to know you're in the midst of these two. And the going back and forth between the two and the feeling sometimes being fooled by it, sometimes knowing it, etc., And the shifting from discursive thought as continuity and the body and phenomena as continuity has its own chemistry.

[11:48]

and the difference between the usual practitioner the usual adept practitioner who can do this is the bodhisattva ideally and we move in that direction has the freedom of moving freely among these categories according to the situation. And being able to do that is called compassion. So Stefan, finally we've used the word freedom. He said he came here for the freedom as well as the self and he hadn't heard much about the freedom yet.

[13:07]

And I said, no, I should have said that patience is best defined in Buddhism. is energetic readiness. For whatever will happen. So I'm hoping you're practicing energetic readiness. I've called it all the time. Someone else is. I mean, mostly I don't want to speak to what you say, I want to listen, but you gave us such a good example, I thought I should expand on it. Yes, Atma. In our group, these categories of the four functions wasn't enough.

[14:12]

So the psychotherapist wanted to make a difference between ego, self and I. And where does the unconsciousness in the Freudian sense, where does that come in? And physically, the question arose, I mean, it's all in our brain, so what's the anatomy of the brain where it all happens? Well, I do experience the brain, but the details of the anatomy elude me during Zazen.

[15:32]

I can see that something like gerification happens, but without Ellen or Eileen Luters, I would never have described it as gerification. I think we can, through practice, make a pretty detailed map of the configurations of mind, let me put it that way. Or we can say that consciousness and awareness and perception are structures. Perception.

[16:48]

But how that maps on a neurological description of the brain, I have no idea. Now, how would you add ego or... the unconscious into this list. Oh, you want me to do it? Yeah. Who brought it up? Who can say something about it? No one's admitted. I want to. I'm happy to add or subtract or Okay, we'll come back to it, because I'll think about it.

[17:52]

Someone else? Yes, if I may briefly follow up on what was also the case, it was this positive remark that it is not a matter of the subject itself now simply to say, write it out, there is nothing, that is now forgotten. What was noted positively, or as positive, was that here in our discussion so far, it's not about just saying the self is negative and let's do away with it. Yeah, well, good. That you made clear that we do need these functions of self, that they have kind of their value. happy or content with that that I mean well it's more than just value they have value on top of being at the same time essential also these functions are essential and therefore valuable and if I would like to conclude my own remark and still find how

[19:28]

I'm adding my own remark, but at the same time, it's also important to experience to be free of yourself. Okay, Ulrich. You have spoken of the two functions that observe each other. Consciousness is aware of consciousness, self knows about self or spirit knows about spirit. You talked about these self-reflexive properties, that consciousness is conscious of consciousness, and awareness is aware of awareness, and mind knows about mind.

[20:42]

And we are occupied with these four functions, die mir nur bedingt als vier Funktionen selbst erscheinen. which to me seem only functions of the self only under maybe certain conditions. evolution or something like that, to be a function of the self for the first time, or to take over these functions of the self, or to give in to them, or something like that, in childhood.

[21:46]

It seems that the self kind of takes possession of these four functions through upbringing and acculturation. but now when we take a look at it, we look at the functions from a point of observation, with the knowledge of the self. And when we now take the observer position, we take these four functions into view, and then? Oh, and taking them into view, with that we look at the self. Okay.

[22:52]

So my question is, I mean, somehow, where do I put these four functions because I have to take them away from the self? You don't have to, but I've delineated these four functions because you can... keep them as functions but not as functions of the usual sense of self. Okay. Well, you know, about the time of the, I don't know, Sufi camps, and maybe the three of you were around when I was at that time,

[24:24]

I can see the long gray hair and the beards. You shaved your beard off. That's more or less the time I came up with these four functions. And so it's just a review for the three of you. Okay. But still, you don't use... I've never used these up. You can keep using them. But at that time I also had the four functions of the Bodhisattva. So I had eight altogether. And that was... Interesting, but it wasn't as useful as a way of practicing as this.

[25:48]

So after a while I stopped using the four dimensions of the Bodhisattva. but one of the functions of the self is an editing function and the self edits and selects what it's going to notice and include And my own feeling is that our highly conceptualized world has increased the editing function of the self. In other words, what I'm saying is, in the contemporary world of the last couple of hundred years, a lot of the fuzziness of awareness and consciousness has been eliminated.

[27:22]

So I think that from a Buddhist point of view we would consider the unconscious as a function of self. Created by the editing. called repression, suppression, and so forth. But if I was going to speak about that, which, you know, if we had another few days, then I'd introduce the eight vijnanas. and speak about the Alaya Vijnana and Manas and Chitta and so forth.

[28:42]

Because I'm not trying to give an entire description of the human body, life, mind, aliveness, etc., if I could. I'm trying to give you, discover with you and share with you tools, instruments that will let you in your ordinary activity usual activity and the word ordinary means to weave so the weaving of your ordinary life I'm trying to give you, suggest to you, threads you can weave into your ordinary life.

[29:52]

Like noticing attention. and to notice attention it helps to ask a question what is attention and notice when your attention is voluntary when your attention does its own thing and you just follow after it. I find, for instance, that my physical attention, my bodily attention Ich stelle zum Beispiel fest, dass meine körperliche Aufmerksamkeit almost always knows what I'm going to do more than my conscious attention does.

[31:08]

I mean simple things. I make my breakfast usually. And I'll have a bunch of things on the table in front of me, you know, orange juice or tea, cereal. And I'll think, I have to put all these things away. Or I'll think, I don't want to put them away, I'll just leave them because I want to go start working. So I stand up, but yet my hands have things in them. I'd actually planned to leave them there.

[32:19]

But the act of standing up, I began to have, and I had things that made one trip to the refrigerator. And I had to make another trip to the sink. And then it can become quite a bit more complex. Because some things had to go to the trash. And my body decided which ones go where and etc. And I just followed along. Okay, good. Do what you want, body. So that sense of letting the physical intelligence, which is a knowing intelligence, It's decided that I have enough time to start working in five minutes instead of now. And it's decided to go to the trash first rather than the refrigerator. So I'm always exploring this, trying to let my body have more and more decisional power.

[33:44]

And I really had an insight into this earlier this year or last year. When I... I spoke about it actually a little bit when I was in San Francisco. Because I had this good meeting with, kind of welcoming, good meeting with San Francisco Zen Center as in August, was it? And Paul was there as my chaperone. And bodyguard. And disguised as a chaperone. Anyway, what interested me is things Suzuki Roshi said. which I've been pondering for 50 years, or 55 years.

[35:23]

In this context, I'll mention this again. I was the Doan for, I don't know, most of two years. And one time I said to Sukhiyoshi, now when do you speed up when you're hitting the Mokyo? He said, you don't speed up. I said, oh, you don't. Okay, you're the Zen master. I didn't know. Okay. And the next day, you know, or a few days later, he happened to do the Mokugyo instead of me.

[36:42]

And he... I was listening carefully. He seemed to speed up. So it took me a long time to understand and to see a difference between intentions and mental postures. So I'd explored vowing, intending, and so forth. But to define our mentation as a mental posture was not new to me, but its relevance was new to me. Meditation is really difficult to translate.

[37:56]

Mental activity. Okay. And I realized suddenly what he meant was that you have a mental posture of not speeding up. And you hold that mental posture. But of course, you're starting out people chanting. And at first they're not all together. And as they start coming together in the chanting, they naturally tend to go faster.

[39:01]

So the Mokugyo leads that or participates in that. But if you look at not clock time or stopwatch time, but time as proportion, the proportions remain the same. In other words, Now the chanting and the mokugyo are in the same proportion, but they're quicker by clock time. So the mental posture of don't speed up. makes a more subtle responsiveness than trying to speed up.

[40:19]

So I used to teach that mind and body are experienceable are inseparable but experienceable separately. And that experienceable separateness can be woven together. And within Buddhism, Zen is a particular way of weaving the experienceable separateness together. But now I would say this is, you know, okay, but it's a little coarse.

[41:33]

And this only took me 50 years to get... But now I would say that the practice of Zen is to allow the mind and the body and phenomena a an interdependent connectedness. So if I then now carry this mental posture of mind, body and phenomena

[42:41]

Geist, Körper und den Phänomenen are, to the extent that they're woven together, in dem Ausmaß, wie sie zusammengewebt sind, they're not woven together as one fabric. They're woven together as three different kinds of fabric. They're interrelated as three different kinds of fabric. I promise to talk about freedom when you come back. I'm just kidding. So I think that's rather different and related to what we're talking about these two days. So now we could say that self as observer is an observer which observes the intelligence of the body separately from the intelligence of the mind. and observes the dynamic of interdependence, inter-independence and inter-emergence, allows the three to function

[44:16]

separately and together. Okay. Yeah, I of course could say more about that, but that's enough, right? For now. Okay. Someone else? So spontaneously I try to see a relation of these four functions to what happens in my everyday life. and I could notice how I practice with my body or my bodily practice.

[45:39]

So continuity in my bodily experience allows me to perceive continuity And I practice martial arts. So if I don't do it... So if I don't practice my martial arts for some time I wouldn't say something is missing, but I very soon feel separated from something.

[47:02]

And I can compare that or equate that with a state of mind. And so far it is relevant for my practice. I mean, to review again, I think you can bring the thread of what is attention and don't automatically think attention is just part of consciousness. Or there's also bodily attention. Your body is attending to something while your mind may be attending to something else. The body can have its own alertness while you're doing something else, of course.

[48:16]

And there's bodily attention as well as conscious like attention. And the attention is like a magic wand. When attention is given to something, it changes what is being attended to.

[49:20]

And there can be a deeper engagement with something through attention. Und durch Aufmerksamkeit können wir uns tiefer mit etwas befassen. And then you can also bring the thread of noticing continuity. Und dann kann man auch diesen Faden dessen, dass man Kontinuität bemerkt. And the thread of noticing the decisional process, I'm calling agency. So we have those three threads. And I'm also suggesting, as the work of this seminar and the work in your the weaving of your ordinary life, is to notice these four threads too.

[50:34]

We have continuity in both, but in a little different context. So it's relevance as your narrative story. Relevance as your narrative story. Notice when something fits into your story or doesn't fit into your story. And I don't know quite how to speak about this yet. I say yet because I guess something in me by bringing forth the word yet.

[51:46]

Something has decided that I'm going to work on this in the next days. Irgendwas in mir hat entschieden, dass ich in den nächsten Tagen daran arbeite. How do we shift from a narrative formed in the past? Wie können wir von einer Geschichte, die in der Vergangenheit geformt wurde... Then we say in the present, is that me or is that not me? How do I understand that, etc. ? And it's well observed how memory is molded to fit your sense of who you are. So how can we shift to the engagement in the present?

[52:51]

the engagement with immediacy as a re-engagement of one's story or a new beginning of the story how could we keep saying to ourselves the story begins now So the story that was is still there. But the story is constantly being revised without your feeling, it's not me. I would say that Bodhisattva is one who has a constantly revised identity. Ideally, I would, for instance, be now quite a different person than I was younger, simply through the experiences of knowing you.

[54:21]

And the more fully I know you or thoroughly or in an engaged way the more we create an intersubjective field the more whatever the complexity of self is in my case that yes, I can feel a similarity with when I was ten years old. But the potentials of that ten-year-old and circumstances that were not in the potentials of that 10-year-old, have created a future that could not have been anticipated.

[55:48]

Now, in that sense, we could look at, Suzuki or she would say to me, self covers everything. and maybe I can come back to that tomorrow but that is an experience that everything is included in what is now who you are at each moment and that's not an experience of selfishness but selflessness because self covers everything. And maybe I'll just throw one more thing out here that perhaps we could best speak about this in Buddhism.

[56:55]

is that there's a self-continuum but not a self. There's a continuum in which self-like functions happen. in which your experiences are being accumulated and in which there's memory and so forth. But that continuum is continually revising the experience of self. In that sense there is no conventional self. Inherency or permanency. I'm sorry I got carried away there.

[58:16]

Someone else. What came to my mind through what you just said? I would like to get that into this table somewhere. Maybe another function of self or put somewhere in that list. What about knowledge? So I can name things, I know what things are and that experience feeling is nourished through science, natural sciences. So, Isn't it also a function of self that says, I know this is a tree?

[59:34]

Because also my relationship to the tree changes through being able to name it and to know stuff about the tree. So what you're saying is we could consider creating a category called knowledge. And that knowledge then is part of our decisional process and so forth. Well, at present, and I'll think about it more, that for me falls into the narrative of not only your story, but all of the information you have that you use to make decisions. How you make something relevant.

[60:42]

When it has to be part of memory, like accumulated experience. Yeah, that's all where memory would be here too. Yeah, so knowledge would be where memory is. But wisdom would be to call it bombing instead of treeing. I mean treeing. Okay. Anyone else? I think maybe we have to do a funeral today for self. We can have a campfire tonight and burn the self. Okay, so I think that's enough for now. Or enough for forever.

[61:56]

Because you don't use these things up once you start using them. I'm in. Each of you is a being.

[64:21]

An individual being. But your being is an expression of beingness. And beingness arises from beings. I'm speaking in English and Katrin speaking in Deutsch. Both Deutsch and English are the creation of beings. So we're both individual beings but by speaking English and Deutsch we're speaking the language of beings and in that sense we're being beings and not just

[65:37]

individual being. And we're also all of our ancestors and our parents and our friends and our cultural identity. So another exploration can be the experience of being as an expression of beings. You can feel this so catalytic edge. When you're an individual being, expressing the whole of beingness,

[66:50]

We can't separate ourselves from also being beings. Maybe it's also an experience of they-ness or us-ness. Are you a they-ness to me or are you an us-ness to me? Seid ihr für mich sie oder wir? I choose us because it's more fun, it's nicer, it's cozy. Ich wähle wir, weil es viel schöner ist, gemütlicher. And it's wiser. Und es ist auch weiser. Thanks for watching!

[68:14]

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