based on all basic knowledge to be talked about since the prologue day. And my situation is that I've been practicing for myself for 20 years now, regular meditation twice a day. You thought it was only for yourself. I thought it was only for myself. True. Thank you. And following the basic teachings and reading about things, And until I got back in contact with you, I didn't really have a sense of a community to be involved with again. And what I wanted to know was if you have some instructions or directions for how to maintain a lay practice using these principles. I was very grateful to hear an explanation of what emptiness really is because now I understand it really is the motto of the institute that I used to work for with schizophrenics was if you don't know where you're going but you can't go back then there you jolly well are there you jolly well are okay yeah go ahead that's been pretty it'll come and so that's where I am

[01:18]

I'm not sure where I'm going and I can't go back. And what do I do being here? Sounds like German. German, please. I asked on the basis of what we discussed, also on the day before, the day before the seminar, that I understood a lot. I have been practicing alone for 20 years and regularly meditate and try to to live in the Buddhist direction, to read a lot, but I didn't find a community until I got in touch with Roshi again, where I could practice. And my question was, how do you maintain a lay practice in everyday life on the basis of what we just discussed? Maybe under Dharma Sangha we have to write now. That's where I jolly well am. Maybe we should write the slogan under Dharma Sangha, where I am happy and joyful.

[02:31]

I said, there is a motto from the institute where I used to go with Schizophrenia, that is, when you know where you are going, but you can't go back anymore, then you are stuck there. That's the translation of there you jolly well are, there you are stuck there. Valentin, do you want to add something to this question? Well, that was surprising. You shouldn't have been surprised. No, but it's also my question. Thank you, Valentin. And his day is coming up. Right, on the 14th. Well, of course I really don't know the answer to your question.

[03:58]

What I'm doing, and I can't imagine doing elsewise, is to... establish a monastic-based lay practice. And I think it's, for instance, here made a difference since we've had Johanneshof in Europe.

[04:59]

It's made a difference in the lay practice for even those who don't live here. Would you say that's true, Neil? Or what's your experience? My feeling is it's true, although I couldn't pin it down. Because you knew the Dharma Sangha before and after. You were at our first Sesshin. Yeah, it's like a sort of nucleus with some gravity, you know? Something is sort of attracting but also giving out. So I would definitely say yes. There's a difference. Is it a good difference? It's more in the direction of stability and solidity of the practices, you know.

[06:07]

So far, yes. I know people have said to me they miss when we did kind of sushines at the Haus der Stille. Because, you know, we... had to bring all the dishes, we had to gather everything, and then the people who came were the tenzo and the ino and things like that, so we all shared it much more. I know that some people miss the sashins in the house, because we always had to bring all the dishes and all the things with us, Atmar, you've been on both sides of the Dharma Sangha. What would you say about this? Well, I think it's not that much as Tzu Chi.

[07:08]

We could just sit as Tzu Chi in a house distiller, and it's not that... Much difference, yeah, that's true. But I think it's more the daily practice, you know, the early morning sitting and aboyoki, so what we are doing every day so people can rely on that and people somehow know even if they join us just for two days, what we are doing tomorrow morning. And I think that's important. Oh, you can't hear what he said? Oh, it's noisy in the kitchen. Well, I don't think it's so much that it's Sashin, that if we would continue to sit in Sashin, in the house of God, then in the end, when the thing runs, then it's not a big difference. But it's my impression that the daily practice that we do here, which really goes into the monastery life, so this total regularity, that people come here and they know, here they eat suyuki in the morning and then get up and then sit two or three times,

[08:14]

and that there is a feeling that it continues here when you drive again and you are somewhere else and you know now it's six o'clock and now the rooster goes or something like that and I think that makes that important for the sangha or that makes a feeling of a grand papsis where others participate even though they are not here Now, we met at the recent Hanover seminar, didn't we? Yeah. No, no, this woman here. What is your name? And now you're at the seminar here. Is there... Which do you like better? Is there a difference? That was a bit more lay practice. This is a little bit more monastic practice. The difference was more of... Yes, and I say it in German, it was looser and more uneducated there, so to speak, in the sense that it was not so structured, not negative, but simply, and the picture that comes to me now of this monastic shit with the customer, so I now interpret it from the strictness that I

[09:37]

but here also as a very pleasant feeling, because there is a framework that I have not experienced before. in Hannover. It was more informal and more easygoing in Hannover, but here there is a more structured frame, which I also like very much, with the ropes. Okay. Thank you. And Petra, we met in Munster, is that right? In Hamburg. In Hamburg and then in Munster. Or was it Hamburg? In Hamburg. And then you went home and you packed up your family in Austria and moved here. Yes. You want to say that in Deutsch? But you don't live here, you live nearby. And what kind of difference does it make to live nearby?

[10:42]

Sometimes people move nearby and then never come. I've had enough. For me, daily practice is very important. For the seminars, I can somehow For me, the emphasis is the daily practice. To the seminars, I could come also from Austria, and I would come. But what is really important is this daily practice. And I have the feeling that the progress in the practice is for me also really in the daily practice.

[11:48]

This is really this framework that I can come to sit three or four times a week in the morning and really stay until breakfast. This is already an insanely big, so from the feeling already a big room of the day, where I somehow already let myself go in firmly somehow. So coming three or four times a week and staying here till breakfast gives me a very stabilized feeling. So it takes up a lot of space and time already of my day. And so that just gives firm ground. And also having now the house has also stabilized me. And three children at home waiting until she gets home from breakfast and a saintly husband.

[12:49]

Well, you know, The answer is an ongoing process here. We're hearing some of it. But I think that the question is also, what is the role of the sangha in practicing? How important is it the other bodies that practice? The three refuges are Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. They're of equal weight and importance. How do we have the treasure of the Sangha, the other bodies that practice?

[14:10]

Well, for example, in Boulder, there's been a group there. Boulder is the college town just north of Denver. The Boulder Zen group has been there, I think, 20 or 30 years or something like that. And it's quite a strong group. And it's perpetuated itself much longer than most sitting groups do. But the last, yeah, maybe, I don't know what, seven, eight, nine or more years, the main people in the group have been coming to Crestone regularly.

[15:13]

And now they have a bodily feeling of the Sangha. They've decided they have to get a place to practice that they can practice on a daily basis with in Boulder. So they're taking the daring step of buying a bed and breakfast for $1,200,000. And then they're going to run it as a bed and breakfast until they can pay the mortgage. Any of you want to move to Boulder and help run a bed and breakfast and perfect your English?

[16:22]

Yeah, we'll have a good time. Gerald? So, I think the sangha is, my feeling, is a kind of living being. The lungs don't have to be the heart and the heart doesn't have to be the stomach. But some people have to, I think, for a living, strong lay practice to develop, some people have to do the monastic side.

[17:23]

Now, everyone, I think, many people in the Sangha think, should I go live at Crestone for a while or Johanneshof for a while? And some don't feel that at all, of course. And I think there's the willingness, I mean, I... The willingness to move here, if you could, makes you a different person than the person who's unwilling to move here, if they could. I find the people who are not afraid of the idea of monasticism, but can't do it, actually, it's almost the same if they lived here. Yeah, and I think that sometimes it might be good to do a practice period, but then just to come here occasionally is just fine.

[18:49]

So the question is, how do you develop your own practice through the Sangha while you're living in your private life? Well, we're trying to create those possibilities here. And I think one of the reasons some of you come to the Sangha It's, I don't know what he's going to say, I don't care what he's going to say, but I like being there. And whatever he's going to say, it's either going to be the same old thing or too much. So we have Paul come occasionally or Atmar lead things, so there's a little bit difference, you know. And Otmar and Paul and David prove that, you know, we can all do it.

[19:57]

So maybe that's enough things about that. I don't really know the answer. I think one has to kind of feel it out. The opportunities are here, the best we can do, and here and in the United States, and one decides how to make use of those opportunities. I mean, there's two seminars I've thought about doing sometime. One is the psychological applications of Buddhist teachings. And the other is the skills and craft of lay practice. And nobody write that down because I might have to do it. So let me go back to our topic, the discovery of something we might call the heart.

[21:16]

Now I told the story of when I was in the 40s, 1940s, When I was in sixth grade, and I couldn't believe this girl meant me as who she wanted to send a Valentine to, or most. I mean, this is 1940s in America. I knew that marriage existed. I didn't know much what it had to do with love.

[22:17]

And I really didn't know if other people loved. And I had the feeling that I had lots of thoughts other people didn't, and lots of loves other people didn't, but I didn't know if other people had the same feelings or thoughts. I had lots of feelings of love and lots of thoughts, which I thought no one else shared. And I had no way of finding out if anybody else shared them. This means that in my culture, growing up, the body and the feelings associated with the body just didn't exist in any kind of cultural territory. Now, if I'd been in high school in the late 70s, like my daughter, who's now 40, in Marin County, California,

[23:35]

I would have had to ask, as my daughter might have, which boy and which girl did you want to send Valentine to? By the time my daughter went to high school in Marin County, Love affairs between the same sex were virtually as common as love affairs between the opposite sex. But there were also kids who lived in trees and things like that. Kids who lived in trees. I mean, not here, in California. Because the families were so broken apart. There were lots of kids who had no family, but went to high school and lived.

[24:59]

I mean, they built little shacks. One built a shack in a tree and lived there, and the teachers in school never knew. So there was a huge change in what families were in marriage was and the bodily reality was different. And I remember a big shift By the time I was in college, it was the middle 50s. A guy named Leo Radice with the intellectual backing of Paul Goodman. Paul Goodman, yeah. published a magazine in which assessed all the teachers not on their teaching ability, but which ones you could love.

[26:20]

And which one's bodies were present in the class in a certain way that others' bodies were not? I mean, it caused a real shock in the Harvard community. And which teachers were sleeping with which teachers and so forth? And students. It's exactly right. It's exactly right. And it's interesting to me that this teacher and friend of mine, Ivan Illich, one of the important parts of his life was when he lived together with Paul Goodman. And he says, I loved Paul Goodman, he says. And Paul Goodman was, you know, a friend, acquaintance of mine when I lived in New York. So there's some kind of strange lineage here. Um... Yeah, and I think Bush represents somebody who's trying to, say, divide the world into good and evil and the world into good relationships and bad relationships and so forth.

[27:56]

And the good thing, I think, about Bush, if there are any... And I think he's the last stand of this culture, which is dinosauric. Let's hope. Let's hope, yeah. Okay. Now, just to go more into this sense of the bodily mind, in tantric and yogic Buddhism, which is the background of Zen practice, and the foreground too often,

[28:57]

And when I do a ceremony and I take a little dish and I sprinkle, I take a leaf and I put it in the water and I bring it here and then I do that three times and then I sprinkle it on you. Yeah. My daughters make fun of me. They say, oh, there's my pup. Once I came into a ceremony with one of these big Tibetan-like hats on that you wear in Zen ceremonies. And as I came in, this wasn't my daughter. She's sort of my daughter, Nora. She said, here comes the wizard. I'm trying to do a serious ceremony right here.

[30:20]

There may be some truth to it, because This sprinkling of water is rooted in the idea that the water disc, the water discs exist in the heart. And it's thought in the esoteric understanding of the five skandhas, which I haven't talked about, is that the form skanda is located in the third eye. Because the third eye is where you see that everything is simultaneously impermanent and empty. And feelings, Gandhi, is located in your hara, in your tantandem.

[31:30]

And from that point of view, if you do get a feeling for this horror, you really do feel how you can feel other people and affect other people. And now I'm not saying that these things are right or you have to worry about them much. I'm just trying to give a little more complex body picture than heart and mind. So the form skandha is here, the feeling skandha is here. The perception skandha is here. Because here is not just the lungs, not just the heart, but also the lungs and the breath.

[32:49]

So the heart area is the area of the spirit, of breath. Now, it's also related to the practice teaching within the Eightfold Path, that you enter the practice of the Eightfold Path through, first of all, developing mindfulness. And then you bring that mindfulness practice to speech. Because speech and the throat is the chakra of consciousness. Not the brain.

[33:53]

This is consciousness. Because this is where it's changed into... I mean, this is the area of consciousness as ideas, but this is the area of another kind of consciousness. I'm sorry to confuse you. Let's just say, okay, this is consciousness as ideas. Also hier in der Kehle ist das Bewusstsein von Ideen. Where thoughts, feelings, etc. take form. Wo Gedanken, Gefühle eine Form annehmen. So mindfulness is brought to speech. Also Achtsamkeit wird zum Reden gebracht. And when mindfulness is brought to speech, some of you know this understanding already, this teaching. Und wenn die Achtsamkeit in die Rede einfließt... You're actually weaving the body into speech. You're integrating, implicating body and speech.

[34:57]

Dann webst du... It's reflected in the English word conspiracy, which means to breathe together, also means the bodies are conspiring. So, you know, in our language we see a lot more subtlety than in the words, than there is in the ideas, the frame of ideas. Okay, so when you weave breath and speech and thus body together, you generate a truth body. And I think the simplest way to get this feeling is why lie detectors work a large part of the time is because it's very difficult to make the body lie.

[36:13]

And if your thinking is speaking and my speaking now in my breath, if my speaking and thinking is related inseparably from my body, our, our are thus linked, it's very difficult for me to lie to myself. And I think of, I mean, I'm sorry to use, you know, our favorite genius, Einstein said all his ideas came out of his body, feelings in his body, which he brought into his thinking, and they opened up in his thinking. So then if you have a body-mind-breath relationship, which we can call a breath body or a truth body,

[37:15]

which is assumed at the center of our practice that you develop such a body, then you bring that truth body or breath body into the practice of the rest of the Eightfold Path. Then there's a chance to transform your views. that turn into intentions and behavior and speech now in another sense. You transform your views into intentions, and then into speech and conduct in another sense, and then livelihood. mindfulness and concentration.

[38:46]

And so the chest area, heart area, is called the wind basis of consciousness. Wind. Wind basis. Now, when breath is called wind, it's emphasizing breath as prana or subtle breath. Because if you're used to living in your body without your feet being way down there, do you understand my remark, your feet being way down there? Oh, my feet are down there. But in relationship to what? You locate yourself here. I suggest a very subtle yogic practice. Next time you're in the bathtub, wash your feet with your eyes closed.

[39:56]

Also, ich werde euch jetzt eine Übung vorschlagen, wenn ihr das nächste Mal in der Badewanne seid, dann wascht mal eure Füße mit geschlossenen Augen. Ja, sie werden ganz andere, wunderbare Objekte. And somebody else's feet even become more wonderful. No. Can I wash your feet? In the Catholic Church in the old days, when you came to visit, the abbot himself came down to the entryway and washed the feet of the visitor. And the fourth skanda is located in the feet. You need to know that. We talk about the feet as the heel breath, that you actually breathe this subtle breath through the feet.

[41:10]

And when I asked Suzuki Roshi, how do I find my own responsibility? How do I find my responsibility in a question and answer ceremony in the early days? He said, under your feet. And I understood that in the simple way you would understand it. And it's only later that I realized this whole sense of healed breath, of the world as the mind of grasses and trees. As Dogen talks about the mind of grasses and trees, this world we live in, which is also our embanked memory. In this sense, this skanda of associative thinking brings together memory and so forth up into this wind basis of consciousness.

[42:35]

This knowing that we call associative consciousness, associative mind, up into the wind basis here of perceptions, consciousness as perceptions, Now, again, I'm not trying to teach you something you should learn this or something. I'm just trying to give you another picture of the body as alive in the world and where we live. In contrast to just heart and mind. And when you live in your body and not in your mind, and live through your body, and don't think there's some outside realm which is going to help you, this is all you've got.

[44:12]

This is all you've got. You've got to find everything here. So the body becomes alive through the view that everything is here. Now then there's the idea of Cupid, Eros and the Aizen Mio. They all carry bows and arrows. And iconographically are quite related. Iconographically are quite related. Eisenmio, which is quite important in Japan for artists and courtesans and, you know, dyers, people with dye cloth.

[45:16]

And Aizenmyo, A-I-Z-E-N, and M-Y-O-O, which means Tathagata or Buddha or something. And he's sometimes called the goddess of love or the god of love. And it's also said in Tantric Buddhism that a goddess who is the mother of all Buddhas lives in the heart. And it's called the diamond realm. And diamond realm also means clear light. So it means this diamond realm, this source of all the Buddhas, when it's transformed, is the clear light.

[46:23]

I apologize for telling you all this stuff. Maybe it's a little bit interesting. But I don't know how much it has to do with our practice. But look, I'm trying to show you a different world than we've grown up in. And then there's a kind of the ritual of the five arrows. The ritual of the five arrows is you ask Manjushri to shoot you with five arrows like Cupid. And each skanda in this ritual, or this kind of way of looking at it, is the seed of one of the five Jnani Buddhas. Only when these arrows, one pierces the heart, one pierces the throat, one pierces the head, one pierces the temple, one pierces the legs.

[47:39]

This is also the background of often an arrow is shot in the koans. When the arrow penetrates you, then there's the possibility of the alchemical change of your passions into a Buddha. Now, someone asked me a while ago, am I going to talk about making love? And I said, I did. But we use the word making love, manufacturing love. And the understanding in the way I'm speaking is that making love, when it makes love... is when you move passion to this chakra.

[48:53]

And otherwise, in this kind of yogic, you can move the location of passion to different chakras. And the desire, compassionate desire to realize enlightenment through others is when you move that passion to here. To the third eye and the heart. When making love doesn't manufacture love, but we're making lust... In that sense, making lust and making love are actually two different things.

[50:07]

They might overlap now and then. But there's a different sense of when making love produces love. Then how do you find the way that love continues and manifests? And how can this love manifest and last? Okay. Is that enough for this seminar? As I said, it's a work in progress. So let's sit for a few moments. Thank you for translating. You're welcome. You know, when we fall in love, it changes our view of a person.

[52:53]

And as I hope most of you know, it changes our view of the world. That's the kind of perceptual change that happens through this wind basis heart consciousness. And how are our bodies mixed up in the sangha? And some sort of feeling relationship to each other that we can be open to. And again, sometimes it has a physical or erotic element. And sometimes it's just a feeling of connectedness and empathy.

[54:09]

But the practice of the Sangha is to bring this feeling into how we can all help each other practice. How this love that comes up can be a way to love through one person or all people, each other. This would be in a wide sense a discovery of the heart and compassion of our practice. The compassion of knowing how to relate to the best possibilities of each person.

[55:12]

Yes, the compassion to relate to the best possibilities in another person. Thank you very much for practicing with each other and practicing with me.

[56:42]

And with our wonderful translator.

[56:45]

@Transcribed_UNK
@Text_v005
@Score_76.86