It's been wonderful to be here in the midst of all and each of you. And I thought it was quite special when it looked like Siegfried and I could do this together. But it took a while to find a date that worked. So in the end we decided to combine the Dharma Wheel meeting with the constellation. And it turns out to have been a wonderful way to introduce constellation practice in a more direct way into our Sangha.

[01:03]

And it fits in with my own thinking for some time now about ceremonies. And the whole question of ceremonies in Zen practice is rather, at least, complex. And, you know, in Japan, mostly it's about ceremonies. Buddhist practice, Buddhist life. You go to a Heiji and they're really teaching you as... Ceremonies for, takes a few years to learn them.

[02:28]

When you go to Eheiji, what they mainly teach you are ceremonies. And you need a few years to learn that. And that's partly or largely because that's what the people in Japan want. They want ceremonies. They don't want sasen. And the main reason for that is that it's what people in Japan want or need. They want ceremonies. They don't want sasen and so on. Yeah. But at the same time, ceremonies can be deadly and boring and contentless. But kind of one of the interesting mistakes, in a way, institutional mistakes, they make in... Japan, is that until you've received full acknowledgement as a practitioner and a teacher, they don't teach you the ceremonies.

[03:38]

Yeah, it's initially taught as part of the transmission ceremony that Yeah, but I have to go into more detail. But at the same time, every monk, priest, the first thing they're asked to do is perform ceremonies, but they're not supposed to perform ceremonies because they're not fully transmitted yet. And for the monks or priests in Japan, the first thing they are told to do is to carry out a ceremony. But at the same time, they don't know it at all because they haven't been taught it yet. so that when somebody gets ordained here in America or here in Europe, almost immediately friends start saying, will you marry me?

[04:45]

I mean, will you perform the wedding ceremony? And when here in the West, in America or in Europe... So I think if we want to explore ceremonies, which I very much, as a young person, was completely uninterested in, even against... But I realized it's part of my job. And that Sukershi in particular wanted me to have a feel for it. So I think one of the entries is to recognize there's a boundary between ceremonies and non-ceremonies.

[05:57]

But again remember that everything's an activity. So boundaries are activities. Even scientifically, boundaries are activities and membranes and things. And boundaries go both ways. And if you recognize the boundaries, you may also recognize that there's almost nothing that isn't a ceremony. Ceremony means something like religious usage or something like that. Or ritual. So, yeah. So what isn't a ceremony?

[07:22]

When you have a cup of coffee in the morning, or at least as many people do, isn't that a kind of ceremony? And it makes a difference whether you've had a cup of coffee, not only because of the caffeine, but because it's also a ceremony. And when you say I love you to your spouse, isn't that usually a ceremony? Yeah. And if it is a ceremony, does the ceremony of saying I love you to your spouse or child, in this case I'm using the example of your spouse, doesn't it harken back, harken back?

[08:25]

Harken is to call, call back, call back to the marriage ceremony. Mm-hmm. And when you say to your partner or your partner, I love you, or to your child, isn't that enough? And if that's a ceremony, isn't that enough to go back into the wedding ceremony? Yeah, and... And... It may even harken back to when you, harten back as well as harken back, harten back to when you first recognized you loved this person. Is it important, harten and harken? No. Pure nonsense. I mean not pure nonsense, impure nonsense. Isn't it important? Now, if that's the case, then somehow the marriage ceremony or when you first recognize you love this person is kind of buried in you

[09:26]

It reappears in the... I love you, I'll see you tomorrow or whatever, later in the day. In America, when we leave the house, we say goodbye. In America, when we leave the house, we say goodbye. In Japan, you say, I'll return. In German, too. In German or in Japanese, you say, I'll return. These are ceremonies. These are ceremonies, a kind of ceremony. I think sometimes of our experience as something like a

[10:51]

I said the other day a balloon you know you see the printed on a balloon something and then you blow it up and the print gets bigger and bigger And then you can't read the words, because what was printed on it was when it was not blown up. Quite hard to print on a blown-up balloon. So let's imagine a big rubber sheet that you stretch. And you have some experience, and this rubber sheet represents the time of your life. And you have some experience that is printed on this rubber sheet.

[11:54]

And then, you know, a few years later, you have another experience printed on the sheet. And maybe there's actually several layers of rubber. And these things are printed over many years. Sometimes they're vivid experiences. Sometimes they're hardly noticed. Sometimes they're actually holes in the rubber sheet. They're traumatic experiences. Oh, yeah. And you don't see it. But then maybe I would say consolation practice, I'm a fan of consolation practice, consolation practice creates a situation where you can bring the sheet of rubber back together and suddenly you can read what happened.

[13:26]

And I think that the exhibition practice, and I'm a fan of the exhibition practice, that this is a possibility to bring this big rubber band back together so that you can read what was printed there. And it's suddenly maybe a mandala. And you didn't know that this experience and that experience actually in some underlying way have been working in you as a mandala that's not seen until you let the rubber thing come back together. So sometimes a constellation or a real ceremony, like a funeral ceremony if it's real, It allows all your experience with this person who's died suddenly to come together in a form that you realize has been working in you without your knowing it working in you.

[14:47]

And consolation sometimes allows us to see and read the text that's been stretched beyond recognition. Well, the opposite can happen. You read what's happening in your life, and when you stretch it, it's another message. Now I spoke to Siegfried the other day about the funeral ceremony in Zen Buddhism. And as I have said, a ceremony in Buddhism isn't because there's nothing but us here, and it's all an in-here-ness.

[16:18]

The ceremony has to be about the ceremony. What else could it be about? There's nothing for it that it could be about. And I spoke in our Dharma Wheel meetings about this. Okay. So now the Dharma, the funeral ceremony is conceptually on the grid of the Tetralemma. Now, the Tetralemma is a logical concept within Indian and Hindu logic. And it's also been an important aspect of Madhyamaka teaching and practice and Nagarjuna's teaching.

[17:35]

And the Tetralemma Underlying concept of tetralemma is simultaneity. In other words, even though things are spread out, you're born here and you die here and so forth, they actually overlap. It's also clearly a generational concept of our aliveness and identity. For some reason this year, I mean, in Crestone we have really about, in our part of Colorado, we have about 11% of the usual rainfall.

[18:38]

Aus irgendeinem Grund ist in diesem Jahr, also in Creston in Colorado, da wo wir leben, da hatten wir dieses Jahr nur 11% des normalen Regenfalls. It's so bad that everyone is sure that it's real likely there's going to be a fire and our center will burn down. And I fought for forest fires, and it's hard to fight them, I'll tell you. I come to Germany and I see all this German water is... is filling the trees. We don't have that in Colorado. So I had to move everything that's valuable that I could from various buildings into one building, because there's only one building we might be able to defend.

[19:57]

And that's why I had to get everything that was valuable to me out of different buildings and put it in one building because there is only one building on the campus that we can probably defend. Yeah. So for some reason there's also, I don't know why, lots of rabbits. Instead of rabbits all over the place, five or six rabbits you see a day, you see ten a day, fifteen. And I always recognized that this is a rabbit. Because it looks like a rabbit. It's a generational being. It has the right kind of ears and all that stuff. And each one is very cute. And they're kind of brave. They stand right beside you. But it's a generational being.

[21:30]

They live and die, and the owls and the hawks are contemplating. They live and die, and the owls and the hawks are contemplating. So we're generational beings. And recognizing our generationalness is part of birth and death. So the tetralemma is that there's, if we talk about alive and dead, there's alive and there's dead. And there's both alive and dead. That would be third. Alive is one. Dead is one. Alive and dead is the third. And neither alive nor dead is the fourth.

[22:38]

Tetra means fourth. Okay. When I bow to the altar or to you guys or whatever... underneath that is the ceremony called the Brahma Viharas. And the Brahma Viharas is a teaching of practicing kindness or unlimited friendliness. Or practicing empathetic joy, even in your opponent or enemies, if there's such a person. Success. And then the third is equanimity.

[23:45]

The practice of an immovable, undisturbable, even-mindedness. die Praxis einer unerschütterlichen, unbeweglichen Gleichheit im Geist, Gleichmut im Geist und Mitgefühl. which really in Buddhism means to dedicate your life to the happiness of others, the well-being of others. So like the wedding ceremony may underlie the saying, I love you to your spouse before you go to work, Underlying the bow, when we bow to a friend or acknowledge somebody at the airport, you know, etc., is actually your own feeling of these four, called divine abodes, or unlimiteds, appearing in the bow.

[25:15]

And similarly, if you bow to something or someone, your feeling for these four so-called boundless, these four boundless, the Brahma, Vihara, lies below. It's just a vow, but underlying it is this ritual or teaching or grid of the four Brahma-Viharas. So here's the funeral ceremony based on treating the person who's died as dead and treating the person who's died as still alive. And treating the person as both alive and dead. Treating the person as neither alive nor dead. Now, you know, I, excuse me, my daughter says, every time you mention that you're going to die, I get $20.

[26:44]

I seem to owe her quite a lot of money. Because a few years ago in my 70s, I might be in Amsterdam and I'd say, geez, it's really nice to be in Amsterdam. I haven't been here a long time. I like that hotel. Maybe I'll stay in that hotel next time I'm here. And then later in my 70s, I'll never be back in Amsterdam again. I'll never stay in that hotel. And at some point, the endless future disappeared. Which conveniently thrust me more directly into immediacy. But in any case, what I'm saying right now is, yeah, okay, I'll die, and I think probably each of you will, too, at some point.

[28:16]

As I said the other day, once you're in an airplane that's running out of gas, you've got to land. And once your parents gave birth to you, I'm sorry, now it's your problem, you have to die. You have to land. Now what do they call it in East Germany? The word for coffin is earth furniture, isn't it? I'm having a little cup of coffee. Excuse me right now.

[29:18]

Okay. Yeah. So... Yeah, I'll die. And... But I hope this pizza house room will remain... The brick columns and the windows, it will all remain after I'm gone. And this room and this floor of chestnut wood is all part of my existence right now. But it'll be here when I'm gone, and it's here now. So it's both alive and dead. So I'm living in the world in which I won't live when I'm dead. Can you please say it again?

[30:42]

I'm living in the world in which I won't live in when I'm dead. So I'm in a situation where I feel the simultaneity of aliveness and deadness. So in a funny way, the grid, and grid is also how electricity is delivered to a community through the grid, the grid of the funeral ceremony of the Tetralemma underlying the funeral ceremony, It's also underlying right now, not just our funeral ceremony, right now it underlies everything. alive, dead, neither alive nor dead, both alive and dead.

[32:03]

So there's not much, the boundary isn't very clear between the ceremony, the acknowledgement which happens in a ceremony, and the acknowledgement that could happen at every moment. And the simultaneity is there of our lived life, generational life, is there in the constellation. Some of you don't know what the Dharma Wheel is. And the Dharma Wheel are the senior practitioners that I've been practicing with for a lot of years.

[33:05]

So we brought, by chance, worked out the dates to bring these, the Constellation seminar together with the Dharma Wheel meeting. And I think it's been a good thing to do. Very, very good thing to do. But I'm also stopping all formal teaching as of this year. But I don't. I mean, even though I feel somehow I'm alive but already dead. It's interesting, Buckminster Fuller went down Charles River in Cambridge when he was at Harvard.

[34:28]

What did he go down? To the Charles River, which runs through Cambridge. He's the one who invented geodesic domes and stuff like that. I knew him slightly, but not very well. But he went down to the Charles River planning to commit suicide. And he decided... Why don't I just live as if I'm dead? He got up and walked into the complex, created life. And if I remember correctly, when he died, no, his wife, anyway, maybe his wife died, and he came to see his wife, and then he died, and she woke up, and then she died, you know, something like that.

[35:56]

In any case, one of the possibilities is to be alive and yet dead. And it's not an accident the word nirvana, which means enlightenment, also is the word in Buddhism for death. Someone might have an experience of turning 360 degrees in their life, ending up in the same place, but totally different. Or rather different and spend the next years exploring that difference. So anyway, I decided to I mean, I'm quite used to being alive, so I'm going to continue.

[37:34]

I'm not used to being dead yet. But I've decided to stop formal teaching. And I'm going to maybe put four or five days, four and maybe five days aside a month. And whoever shows up, maybe Dharma wheel people will have first choice or maybe people who ask most often. I don't know. I'll meet with them and we'll do something. We'll all be pretending maybe we've returned from the dead. But we won't be wearing masks or anything like that. And for me it means I can start talking about things like I was able to yesterday in the Dharma Wheel meeting.

[38:45]

Then I can't talk about in the Ordinary seminar. And which is somehow about the fabric, history of Sangha life. And since I'm already dead, it doesn't matter whether anybody understands it or not. The important thing is I can say something about it, and if it's understood, if it's not understood, it's irrelevant. Was wichtig ist, dass ich über diese Dinge sprechen kann.

[39:48]

Und ob es verstanden wird oder ob es nicht verstanden wird, das ist nicht so richtig. So to bring this Dharma Wheel gathering together with this consolation gathering has been a wonderful ceremony. Das Dharma Wheel zusammenzuführen mit dieser Zusammenkunft, dieser Aufstellungszusammenkunft, das war eine wunderbare Zeremonie. It makes things more vivid. You know, this 360 degrees is kind of a real situation. Like you practice, you see everything, and you can't... The words you'd use to describe your life is exactly the same as you would always use. But now everything is in three degrees plus or exponential. There's a vividness and multidimensional valency to everything that is, the words are the same, but the experience is so immediate and vivid and you're not distracted anymore because the immediacy is so totally engaging.

[41:07]

It's a wonderful ceremony. And I think now, because we're going to end at lunch, I believe, so people can travel and do things, we won't retire to a Dharma wheel meeting, but maybe we do a meet together after a break. Is that all right with you? You better translate. Yes. Yeah, auf jeden Fall. Okay.

[42:20]

That's a ceremony too. And thank you for, even though you have this endless cough, that you translate it. Thank you very much. You're very welcome. This is a new way to wear it. Yeah, thank you. I mean, if you're going to do it, I'm going to do it. Yeah, I'm a trendsetter. Yeah, I'm going to see if I can do this. This is a beads given to me by... Oh, what was his name? Wonderful man. Then he became... He began to... Smuggled drugs into San Francisco and then he overdosed. Terry Gregg. So I feel a ceremony with him.

[43:24]

Yeah.

[43:24]

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