you actually begin to live in non-aggressible feeling, not your thoughts or your emotion. So it's like you lived in a big farm, and sometimes you're in the barn, and sometimes you're in the house, sometimes you're sitting in the apple tree, but all in all you're in the farm. It doesn't mean you're not sometimes in one of the other buildings or in a particular thought or emotion, but you always feel home because you're always home in this non-graspable feeling which accompanies everything. When you begin to feel that or change your internal residence to non-graspable feeling, you almost don't have anxiety anymore.

[01:02]

Because you always feel pretty much at home. You feel undisturbable. Okay, so consciousness, as you begin to go back and forth among these, you begin to be able to be conscious here and be conscious here and here. Consciousness isn't limited to here. So here the knives become conscious, here the spoons become conscious, the forks become conscious. I want to own a restaurant. And then, I mean, going back to what you said about if a person thinks, you know, they may be just thinking here and unable to let this go into their thinking, or they prevent this level to go into their thinking.

[02:58]

Now, what a Zen teacher would do in such a situation which is probably not different than a therapist could do or might do is to join his or her thinking with the student or the client's thinking. And then once joined, turn your own body over to all the feelings associated with that thinking. So you allow yourself to feel the thinking going along with the thinking that the person's doing that they can't feel. Maybe you should call it thinking, but feeling.

[04:16]

Now you go along with the feeling that's arising from their thinking. Which might create the territory for them to begin to feel what they're thinking. Or let feeling pass through. oder das Denken durchzulassen. Okay. Now, all of this has to do with, and that's, again, part of this koan, and part of all Buddhist practice, is developing this kind, this craft of consciousness.

[05:17]

Ja, und all das hat also damit zu tun, was Buddhismus, also das Kunsthandwerk des Bewusstseins bezeichnet wird. Okay, so I'd like to give you one example of the structure of consciousness itself, and then we'll have a break. A standard example of mine, and I may use it a little differently, is you're thinking a lot. You want to concentrate your thinking. So you bring an object of concentration on. And you begin to focus on that object. Could be your breathing. It could be this.

[06:21]

It could be your decision to have a seal, to be sealed in being time. So you might have a phrase you repeat, sealed in being time, sealed in being time under your breath. And language like that, mantra-like phrases, can be used to guide your state of mind. Or just now is enough. Or first breath of mind. So eventually you become rather concentrated on this. So let me take this away.

[07:28]

And you can maintain your concentration without the object of concentration. Okay, now what is your object of concentration? Consciousness itself. Okay, now I would distinguish those are three kinds of consciousness I've just pointed out. The first is leaking consciousness. We could even say wounded consciousness. You're distracted with no energy, you're dispersed, leaking consciousness. The second is consecrated on an object without ambiguity. Das zweite ist ein Bewusstsein, das auf ein Objekt konzentriert ist und ganz ambiguitätsfrei.

[08:37]

We could call that nourishing consciousness or completing consciousness or intact consciousness. Und das könnten wir ein lehrendes oder vervollständigendes oder intaktes Bewusstsein nennen. You feel nourished by it. Man fühlt sich genährt dadurch. You don't feel depleted like you do in the first one. Man fühlt sich nicht ausgelaugt dadurch wie bei dem ersten. Okay. And the third one, when we take the object away and the object of consciousness is consciousness itself, I would call that sealed consciousness. It doesn't need an object for its impact. Okay. So when none of it is With a client. A friend who's freaking out. What does he do? He can shift, if he has these skills, into the distracted consciousness.

[09:37]

or into this nourishing or completing consciousness, in which his consciousness begins to bring a focus into the field of consciousness, which the two of them are sharing. But all this depends on his being able to maintain She's really going to do this, sealed consciousness. If Norbert's home base in this is sealed consciousness where he doesn't need anything, doesn't need any object of perception, in himself he is self-organizing, This is very refreshing. And he then can be quite confident to go in very crazy spaces because basically the structure of consciousness, the seal consciousness is present in the midst of what are really the

[10:54]

And the client or the friend freaking out will feel a wonderful confidence that they can freak out because they can feel the sealed, intact consciousness of, you know, Now, the greatest act of generosity in Buddhism is the giving of sealed consciousness or the sharing of sealed consciousness with your friends. So in Buddhism it's felt that if you really love other people, you develop this consciousness because of the greatest gift. So that's it for a few minutes. Not just when you sit.

[12:46]

Your body is cooperating and trying to teach you this sealed consciousness. Because it's what makes your body, body-mind most happy. So in a way we could describe sitting as letting the body-mind find its own happiness. And then mindfulness is to bring that happiness, that discovered happiness, back into your life. What I'd like to suggest is that it helps me a great deal if there's some discussion among you on these things.

[14:44]

And I think it helps you too, actually, to see what each other think about these terms or how we talk about it. And of course, you'll have your own concerns or interests, but I'd like to bring up one kind of folded question. Which is, first of all, can you imagine living in or being able to live in a sealed consciousness whenever you want? What would be the benefits? And what would be the dangers? So why don't we have a break of, say, 15 minutes, and then I'd like us to get together in groups of maybe 9 or 10 people and just for a while chat with each other about these things.

[15:53]

Okay, thank you. Does anyone want to bring up anything from the... I like this room. Does anyone want to bring up anything from your discussion that we might consider tomorrow? Yes? Anybody moves a finger, I think you're ready to speak. At the end you were discussing a point, we had a question, is the sealed consciousness necessarily positive?

[16:56]

Does it mean if I have the sealed consciousness, do I act positively? Or is it just a quality which can go in both directions? Some tell from the old experience, It's positive, but theoretically we thought it could go in both directions. Okay, and in the language of Deutschland? You lick it, and then you... The question is, if you want to feel conscious, can you live in a positive way?

[18:11]

Or is it more of a skill that can go in both directions? Well, I will say that this is at the center of the debate in America right now, although it's not I wouldn't say it's understood that this is at the center, but I would say what you just brought up is the center of the debate in America now about the relationship between morality, Buddhism, and psychotherapy. And it's the underlying debate in this koan, which means that it's a debate within the development of the Zen Buddhist tradition.

[19:42]

So maybe we should leave it till tomorrow. OK, anything else? Yes. Yes, first this sealed consciousness, whatever that may be, but this sealed has been a negative word for us, yes, actually something enclosed, as if it were so airtight, we had difficulties with that, because I might have thought that this is just a counter-interpretation of this leaking consciousness, but still it was difficult for us to understand that positively. For us it was difficult to have a positive association with sealed consciousness. It felt a little bit like making it airtight. And maybe you meant it just in contrast to leaking consciousness, but we had difficulties to really relate to it in a positive way to that term.

[20:46]

Yeah, I did too. in trying to understand the Silk Consciousness, maybe I will end up in a being which I may be anchored, and it's a very bodily feeling, but we were talking about it and couldn't decide maybe is it this, or is it something before that, or how it disconnected with the dear body feeling of being anchored. Would you talk it? Yeah, yeah, good. Okay. Let's let Andrea say it in German. Yes, the question is, is it the same, is it a preliminary step, does it somehow come together, what are the differences?

[21:55]

I had some problems understanding what sealed consciousness is, but I also had some problems when you told us that should it be good or should it be bad, should it be positive or negative, with both of these expressions, something being good and something being bad. Because I think it's something that relates to your personal experience when you say this is good and this is bad. And if you start explaining the first thing, you also have to explain what's good and what's bad. Yes, true. Okay, German. I had a few problems with the term BVC and consciousness. But I have more problems with when someone says, is it positive or is it negative, or is it good or bad? Because for me it is a term that has a lot to do with the personal experience and with the personal experience. And I think that's probably different for everyone. Okay, good.

[23:00]

You mean the media consciousness we've spoken about before? What's the relationship? Yeah, I would like to know, in order to understand still consciousness better, what you mean with being intact, this intactness, and how this relates to what you explained before in terms of immediate consciousness. Okay. Good. Yeah. Yeah. And I would like to have you explain again the connection between sealed consciousness and compassion. I didn't explain it, but I will. Yeah. And my feeling is that this here consciousness could have something to do with the trust that life lives itself, that therapy makes itself.

[24:31]

And a thought that I also brought into our group very late on, where we had to break up, My experience in the last six weeks, in practice, in forensic psychiatry, with murderers and rapists and so on. And how can you, on a therapeutic level, with my normal neurotic clients, I have a lot of this trust, I can trust that I live the life, the therapy. Well, I have a feeling for sealed consciousness that maybe it means that life lives itself, and therapy lives itself, and that actually I can trust in these processes that they kind of lead themselves. But also these last six weeks, I've worked in forensic psychiatry.

[25:37]

That means I had to deal with murderers and rapists and people like that. And I feel this kind of attitude, life lives itself and the process processes itself. I can work with that attitude with my normal neurotic clients. But in a situation like that, it's maybe not the appropriate tool. So, you know, that's my question. Yeah. Yes? I have a personal question, not from the group. It's concerning the topic, cause and effect, going back to the text also, and the feeling, whether we can escape this cause and effect. and whether it was not anyway the karma of this enlightened being to come back a fox, to become a fox.

[26:39]

And this is also the question for clarity, how much freedom and also responsibility do my clients or do I myself in a therapeutic situation have to change things? My question was about the connection between the core choice, cause and effect, and the question as to whether there is a freedom at all in our responsibility to exclude this cause and effect, for example in the text with the people, with the enlightened ones. When you got the answer, did you look at the camera anyway, which now had to become a fox again? Okay. Well it's interesting, you know, when we discuss something like this, Often it is that one thing gets picked up by everybody.

[28:00]

And it's often something that falls into a nice phrase like sealed consciousness. And it's often something that we feel we don't understand. And it's often something that we feel we don't understand but actually feel we're close to understanding. This is the whole point of Koan's study and this kind of practice is to not understand but feel close to understanding and put yourself in the midst of that. Now, if we were all practicing in a monastery... Now, I'm mentioning a monastery because I think that monastic life is great, though I like it.

[29:03]

I'm mentioning it because it's been considered the main vehicle for the teaching. Okay, now, in a monastery-type practice, most of the things we've talked about, we wouldn't talk about. Because the life is so designed that you can't do it unless you develop sealed consciousness. You sit enough and a schedule dominates your life enough that you the dynamic of how you survive becomes different. So after a few years, it's clear that people know most of these things I'm talking about, but they don't necessarily know they know them.

[30:26]

And when do you know these things when you're a practitioner? When it looks like you may become a teacher, then these things are discussed with you so that you can teach. So you not exactly direct your student's progress, but you'll be able to understand your student's progress. What was the second thing you said? Don't direct the progress. But you understand the progress. Okay. So why am I teaching you these things? None of you are becoming, or very few of you are becoming Buddhist teachers. Because you're lay people, I'm teaching these things to you.

[31:54]

But you're lay people without teachers, so you have to teach yourself. For the most part, you're without teachers, so I'm trying to give you ways in which these teachings serve as permission for you to teach yourself. And I'm trying to present them to you, not so much that you kind of do it or trying to fit the model or something, but rather that they act as a kind of presence, a muse in the background consciousness. Like the muse doesn't appear in the poem but the muse is in the background of the poem. And if you try to understand the muse too much and marry it or something, you kill it. So I'm trying to present this to you so it's more like an image that functions within you, but you don't try to completely understand.

[33:14]

Okay. I really would like to come back to, and I really love the questions you brought up. I mean, it shows you're really engaged in thinking and feeling about this. And I learned so much, so I'm a little bit greedy. But I'd like to ask you a question. What kind of being remembers 500 lives? Anyone? No one. But in the classic Buddhist tradition, what kind of being remembers 500 lives? A Buddha. So there's a complex pun going on here.

[34:41]

This fox has to be a Buddha. And see, a fox is also another kind of pun because fox spirit, or a tanuki obo-san in Japanese, a badger priest or a fox priest, is a priest who's not really a priest. He's kind of faking it. And there's a no-play, a wonderful no-play about a priest who's hanging out with his family and I think the pretty daughter. But the old grandfather suspects he might be a fox. And he knows that foxes love buttered mice. So he's got some, you know, melted butter, and he's got this mouse, and he's dipping it in the melted butter.

[36:01]

So the priest is leaving the household, you know, and he's walking along. And the grandfather's on the other side of the stage holding up this buttered mouse in the distance, you know, behind him. Hey, we should try at Crestone buttering some of the mice. So he's walking along and the grandfather is holding up the buttered mouse in the back. And you can almost feel the smell wafting across the stage. And first he doesn't react, but you feel a kind of shudder go through him, you know. And my grandfather shakes the mouth a little more, you know. And he shudders again. You know, come on. And then he straightens up again, but of course he's been discovered.

[37:21]

And so wurde er entdeckt. So everyone knows this story who reads this koan in Chinese-Japanese culture. So the whole idea of a fox that remembers 500 lifetimes and yet is a fox priest, it really muddles up the whole image of what is a Buddha and what's right and what's wrong and so forth. They're coming to get us. We'll end in a few minutes. So one of the qualities in this... in Buddhist teaching is to create memory.

[38:25]

What is that Russian sort of non-Darwinian who has a different theory of natural... Oh, God. Lamarck. Lamarck, yeah. There's a kind of Lamarckian idea here, which is they say that the flower perfumes the seeds. And in fact, the seeds are at the center of the flower, or the pollen is at the center of the flower. And the flower and the perfume attract the... bee, which causes the seed, which causes a new flower with new perfume.

[39:34]

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So the word memory and tendency, the root of it in Buddhist texts, is sometimes perfume. Now, memory is understood not as flowers, but as seeds. And that's a rather big distinction, because you don't remember what happened, you remember a seed of what happened. Or what happened is a seed of your present. And your tendencies and your memory perfume your life.

[40:49]

But your immediate present is the flower which is transforming the seeds. So when you start to practice, you remember that you were a Buddha. In other words, you remember moments in your history which were in effect turning point moments that were moments of enlightenment, though your life didn't permit them to bloom. My understanding, and not just doctrine, is that you all have a memory of being a Buddha. Not in the past, but in this present lifetime, if many of your moments were connected with a different song, you would be a Buddha.

[42:01]

But you're connecting a different bunch of points because you're telling yourself a different story than that. Now, it's said, when it says in the Prajnaparamita Sutta, for instance, it defines a bodhisattva, is one who's attained the dharani of non-attachment. Now, he doesn't define the bodhisattva, an enlightened being, as one who has attained non-attachment. Such a person has attained the dharani of non-attachment.

[43:17]

What does that mean? It means they've attained the realized memory of non-attachment. That's an important subtlety. It means they're not just non-attached, but they have the bodily memory of non-attachment, which they can activate at any time. So one of the things that Cohen, like this, is trying to do is give you, implant in you a memory you don't yet have, but a memory of what it's like to be enlightened. And if you let the perfume of a story like this begin to transform your seeds, it will activate your own seeds of memory in a new way.

[44:23]

Now, last night, the last thing I said is, can you see the fox in me? So tonight I can end with, can you see the Buddha in yourself? And a way to practice with this as a seed practice is you will see lots of people or a few people between now and tomorrow morning. And let's start at 10 o'clock again. Is that all right? And when you see these people, see if you can see a person without liking them or disliking them.

[45:37]

And more subtly, without thinking about whether you'd like to be like them or not. Oder jetzt noch etwas feiner, ohne darüber nachzudenken, ob ihr so sein möchtet wie die oder nicht. In other words, some people we neither like nor dislike, but they're not in the category of a person we'd like to be like. Und manche Menschen, also die sind weder in der Kategorie von mögen oder nicht mögen, aber wir sind uns ziemlich klar, wir möchten so nicht sein. That's an old person or that's a fat person or that's something, you know. Das ist also jemand altes oder fettes oder... See if you can look at a person without any ideas like that at all. As if some magical apparition has just appeared before you. What you bring no attitudes to. If you try this, it's an extraordinary adventure.

[46:48]

And it takes a while to get through the layers of attitudes we have about people we see. And if you can do it with someone else, it becomes an adventure altogether. in looking at yourself too. And this is how this is related to the practice of compassion. So that's enough for tonight. Maybe we sit one minute. So good morning, good morning. Yesterday afternoon it was clear that we should talk about this sense of sealed consciousness.

[48:01]

And of course with such a I'm always concerned with one, how to make it clear how to put it in perspective so it doesn't take an unrealistic weight and how to make it accessible to you And of course I'm also trying to think about how this, although I don't know if the majority of you are therapists, how this relates to psychology, psychotherapy.

[49:03]

Part of the dialogue, of course, is... Let me give you a brief history of... in the States at least, to the relationship of Buddhism and psychotherapy. I'd say in the 50s and all the way through most of the 60s, there was virtually no interest in by psychotherapists and psychologists and psychiatrists in Buddhism or meditation.

[50:09]

Now, I don't know about Europe, but this was the States. And then, and I also, I think that somewhat related is there was Among Buddhist scholars, there was no interest in meditation or practice. In fact, if you were a Buddhist scholar and you dared to show some interest in meditation or practice, you were considered parochial or some kind of believer. You were no longer a detached scholar. And what the scholars didn't know is that Buddhist texts, sutras, teachings are coded, a kind of coded language. They were produced from yogic and meditative experience and they were meant to be read through that experience.

[51:35]

So what happened was That went along, and a lot of Buddhist scholars were actually closet meditators. And even Herr Dr. Konze, who was, you know, created Buddhist Sanskrit, identified Buddhist Sanskrit for Westerners, Western scholarship, He admitted to certain experiences that gave him entry to a practice, including being incarcerated as a German in England during the war.

[52:37]

I'm smiling because I knew Dr. Konsei pretty well. And he was a cantankerous, bitchy old man. Who wrote an unpublishable autobiography because it attacks so many people. I believe it's been published, but you have to hunt very hard to find it.

[53:38]

At the same time, he was underneath that. He was a wonderful, loving person. who really was motivated by what he saw happen to the world in his generation and to bring the teaching of emptiness into the world for that reason. What happened is that pretty soon, though, in the world of scholarship, the scholars who were meditating began doing the best work of translating and interpreting the text.

[54:47]

And the non-meditators were left to dense philological studies of how three words are used in different circumstances. So now, at least the scholars I know who are also meditators and often ordained have some problems, but basically they're in charge of the scene in the States. And something similar happened in the States, which is the... in therapy is that the therapists who meditated, and also therapists who found patients who meditated, they began to find a much richer and effective relationship.

[56:09]

And something similar happened in the States with the psychotherapists. Those who meditated and who also had clients, they suddenly found a much richer access. So it went through stages of sort of, the therapist said, well, maybe it's okay, but it's old-fashioned. That was one view, and then another view was, oh, it's much better, and psychotherapy can't compare to Buddhism. And now I would say the present position is rather meditation. Well, there was a period where meditation was just meant to be incorporated into psychotherapy. And now there's a sense that, yes, meditation is its own identity, separate from psychotherapy, and very valuable.

[57:24]

But the question is, which one helps people more? And that's the current scene. Which one helps people more? And psychotherapists, you know what they think. And they may be right, actually. Overall, I would say, of course, the big picture of Buddhism is to help people. But what motivates individual practitioners or adepts is not so much what helps people or even what helps themselves, but what is reality. And it's more of a scientific impulse, you know, to understand.

[58:27]

And if that understanding means you suffer, then you suffer. That's too bad. And the first noble truth is that there's suffering. And the third noble truth is that there's an end to suffering. And most people want to rush to the third one. But actually the first one is the first one, and it means the acceptance and acknowledgement of suffering, whether you end it or not. And lastly, what I always say, all in all, Buddhism is a mindology and not a psychology. It's a study of the mind and not so much, or barely at all, a study of the psyche or one's narrative personal history.

[59:49]

Given all that as a sort of general picture, still, psychotherapy and Buddhism are in an intimate dialogue with each other as brothers and sisters are in a dialogue with each other. And maybe the two brothers have a little different view of the world, or two sisters, or whatever, siblings. Still, there's basically their siblings. Because certainly the most creative dialogue in Buddhism is going on between and among people who are therapists and Buddhists simultaneously.

[61:04]

So the fact that the most investigative practice is being done by people mutually in these two worlds takes precedence over whether they're different in some fundamental way. Now, does that make sense? In other words, the people who practice it have more influence on what happens than the theories about the practice. So, although I have been in therapy and I know quite a bit about therapy, I'm a Buddhist, not a therapist. And I'm deeply involved in this dialogue, but at the same time I'm a little bit of a purist.

[62:17]

And I'm concerned that Buddhism have its own identity and not get too adapted or too diluted in the West. And I'm willing to go down with a sinking boat of Buddhism. Happily. Or coast above the snow. I'm not willing to fly above the surface. Okay. Is there anything anyone would like to bring up following your discussion among each other that wasn't mentioned or you'd like to add or something like that?

[63:28]

Yes. Yes. Yes, for us the question was not clarified because of the relationship with emotions. We already talked about that. to distance themselves from emotions and to identify with emotions. In the psychotherapeutic process, one should learn to identify and to be the emotion. And it seems to me that one should distance oneself. Many people have the condition that they have a distance. So what is the difference between this kind of distance? It seems to me to be the point. I think the question isn't clarified sufficiently how to deal with emotions. Like in psychotherapy, people are supposed to learn to identify with emotions and sickness is partly caused by not being able to identify with emotions. Whereas in Buddhism, we are supposed to kind of detach from our emotions

[64:32]

So in which way does these various kinds of detachment, I suppose the kind of unhealthy detachment versus the healthy detachment in Buddhism, how do these differ? What is an example of not identifying with your emotions? You mean you have these feelings and you don't think they're you? What would be an example of someone not being able to identify with their emotions? So that the feelings as if they don't belong to you are experienced? For example, that you only see them, but don't express them and don't identify with them. That means that you don't take over your role, which you would actually have to play in the game. Yeah, that you just feel your emotion, look at your emotion, but you don't identify with them. That means you're not taking up the role in this game which you're supposed to play. You don't accept them perhaps, and you don't express them.

[65:39]

I think that people are identified too much with emotions, so we go in therapy through a process in the sense of re-identifying so you can let go of them. So he has the opposite view. What do you think about a person who only experiences his feelings as thoughts, but not as feelings? He is identified with his precepts, he is allowed to experience his feelings, and that leads to him experiencing this division. The basic view is that sickness and physical symptoms arise from suppression of emotions. I think it's not just about that.

[67:24]

I always feel very reduced when I think I always work in psychotherapy so that I can help to express feelings, but I often do the opposite. There are also people who are very emotionally oriented, where I notice that structure is necessary and that it is necessary to sharpen the head a bit, to let the mind become a little more spiky, to confront people. I mean, I don't want to be produced in my psychotherapeutic work to just help people express emotions. Some people, they need to start thinking clearer and use their mind. Okay. Well, unless we were a smaller group and primarily psychotherapists, I don't think we can work this out. I think it's workable. First we have to look at the different schools of psychotherapy's view. And then the different schools in Buddhism's view, which is different with the various.

[68:29]

Then we'd have to sort out, even though there's differences in both psychotherapy, what's the over-underlying direction, etc. It's too complicated. I'd like to do it, but I don't want to waste your time. No, it's not wasting our time. Oh, yes. It would take another few days. Yes, Esther. My question is, I know a psychotherapeutic direction that leads to being present. And my question would be, how does meditation work?

[69:56]

And possibly, is there a commonality? Or something that adds to each other? Well, Esther's saying, I think that what both traditions share is to be present with whatever's going on. And I think if I manage to be present, then there isn't a problem either in psychotherapy or whatever. So maybe we should look at what these traditions share and how can I learn to be present in Buddhism and how can I learn to be present in psychotherapy? I think there's a big difference in the definition of what present is, though. And the skills you bring to being present. I think that Ulrike and I and Norbert in Angola agreed that we'll come back next year and do another seminar.

[71:06]

I didn't think we would add another city to our thing, but it's nice being in their house and nice being here in the castle. And it might be, I think it'd be good to maybe stay each year with, or at least as long as we do it, with the theme of psychotherapy and Buddhism. And the problem is, you know, what we're doing in Austria, we have a meeting with psychotherapists once a year. And it's limited to roughly 20 people. And only people who, for the most part, come every year can come.

[72:21]

So we can build up a language and start talking to each other in more detail. We don't have to keep defining terms and so forth. And I don't know if in... in a group like this, what we can do and build on each year, but we can think about how to do it. Why not? I'll say again, and I've said often, Buddhism has never been taught this way. To attempt to seriously teach Buddhism in a changing way. lay population once or twice a year. No one's ever tried it before. It's crazy. But we're actually doing pretty well. And I'm amazed at how developed the Dharma Sangha students and the larger community I meet with has become in practice.

[73:28]

I never used this floor. Walking on clouds. The martial arts produce such a soft floor. Last night I tried to think of, I don't know if I can remember now, what are the main territories of practice in Buddhism? Gestern Abend habe ich mir überlebt und ich weiß nicht, ob ich mich jetzt noch erinnern kann, was ist denn die Hauptgebiete der buddhistischen Praxis? Philosophical.

[74:56]

That's a general study of views of reality, your attitudes, your personal views, and the Eightfold Path starts with the study of your views. contemplative, which a certain part of meditation is contemplative. You are thinking about things, thinking about them differently, concentrating, and so on. Yes, contemplative. A certain part of meditation is contemplative. You think about things differently. And zazen is actually not contemplation but absorption. Like if I make a list.

[75:58]

That means? What absorption means? Absorption is... You're not thinking about anything? You're basically just sitting and you're making your body like an... There's no word for it exactly, but it's... There's no object of meditation. What? Maybe a sponge? It's like a sponge. inner outer sponge. One of the things you're doing in absorption is you're creating an interior consciousness. And you're creating one of the first things that happens is you're creating as we talked about an interior space. I think a basic pattern, a simple way of looking at it is psychology generally, at least 20 years ago, gave us two alternatives.

[77:04]

You either expressed or you repressed. There was no in-between. And Buddhism says, experience it, feel it completely, even exaggerate it, but you don't have to act on it. Now, there's more subtlety here. When you express it to others, it's a different amphitheater, as I said, to act on it. May I say something a little slightly personal?

[78:07]

Too late. She can't say no now. Well, Rike has been known to sometimes get angry. Even sometimes at me. So I say to her, you don't have to. She says, I like to express my anger. I say, well, just feel it inside. So once she said to me, oh, fine, why don't you shit inside? Maybe she can't translate it. I'm terribly embarrassed.

[79:21]

Well, I have to think about that. She has a point. She has a very direct way of putting things. But anyway, the basic stance of Zen Buddhism is to develop an interior space in which you can experience things fully and decide whether you act on them or not. I can say things she doesn't want to translate, but she can say things I don't understand. these would be territories in which if you're practicing with someone or with yourself, you actually are, these are different areas in which you focus yourself.

[80:51]

And in which there's teachings about. What was karmic restructuring? What? What was that before? Karmic restructuring. Yeah. . Partly what I mean is what I said last night is the perfume of the flowers transforms the seeds. I don't want to get into it more.

[82:05]

Okay, the next one you understand? Realization or enlightenment, the big E. Okay. Semiotics. By that I mean koan, cultural, language, restructuring. And what you're doing when you're practicing with koans is you're actually using a meditative, yogic way of looking at the world and restructuring how you proceed in the context of language and culture.

[83:29]

When you practice with koans, you use yogic, meditative techniques, and within the language you use, you achieve a restructuring. One I've forgotten. I have nine. Ah. precepts, and in the last one, mind transmission.

[84:41]

Now, this is what's developed over some centuries. Didn't just occur in the in the first days of Buddhism. Can you give the title of it? This has never been all the way up to Angola. Daito Kokushi, who is the founder of Daitoku-ji, the monastery in Japan where I studied the longest,

[86:10]

overheard a monk reciting a poem by Bai Zhang. Bai Zhang is the person here with the fox. And the poem is something, how does it go, Minds The mind's essential radiance. Let's see if I can... No, truth's naked radiance. Or it could be mind's naked radiance. The naked radiance of truth. cut off from the senses of the world, shines by itself. There are no words for it. Also this, anyway, so Daito Kokushi heard this poem. It struck him very powerfully.

[87:39]

He went to see his teacher. And in the process was realized enlightenment. And his teacher said, you will raise the Dharma banner. Which is to say that not only did he realize enlightenment, but he realized thoroughly enough to become a teacher. Now if you open your koan, you have it here somewhere. The third line from the top, in the English at least, in the German, I don't know.

[89:20]

On the second page. See, right here, have you not heard how Chan Master Yuan? It's the second page, page 33. Have you not heard? Now this is a little off the topic of what you asked, but I want to point out something in relation to it, how these koans work. Because these things, there's a craft to these things and they're in a kind of detail. So if you take this portion starting with, have you not heard how, told how when Chan Master Yuan... Okay, so they're telling us a story. And there's ten main points to this story.

[90:32]

The first point is he was in the assembly of a Zen teacher. And the second, he heard two monks bring up this story, just as Daito Kokushi overheard something. Now, so many of the stories are like this. It's something that comes in from the side, tangentially. It's not something you're thinking about. It's not in the direction of your life. It comes in from the side. It implies a certain complexity of chaos, order, edge. Where there's an order in your life, and yet there's a certain disorder, and there's a lot of creativity at that edge.

[91:38]

He heard two monks bring up this story, etc., etc., and then down, he was startled when he heard it. That's the third point. He was startled. The next, he hurried. It took him over and he hurried to see his teacher. He crossed a valley stream. And there's actually quite a number of enlightenment experiences that have occurred as a person is crossing a stream or a river or a bridge because the physical world is also a crossing and it precipitates a crossing in you.

[92:40]

And here in this story, as they're presenting it, there's an assumption that inner and outer, the phenomenal world and the inner world are interacting and teaching each other. So he crossed the stream and was enlightened. He saw his teacher and told him what happened. And the point here is that an enlightenment experience and realization is deepest when it involves and is realized with and through another person as well as in connection with the phenomenal world.

[93:51]

So enlightenment is not considered to be something that just happens in some interior spiritual vacuum. It may transform your life, but it happens in some sort of deep integration with the phenomenal world and with other people. He was practicing with others. He was part of an assembly. crossed a stream, he overheard two people speaking, he went to see his teacher. Er hat mit anderen praktiziert, er war Teil einer Versammlung, er hat also gehört, wie zwei andere Mönche eine Geschichte erwähnen, er ging zu seinem Lehrer, hat dabei einen Bach überquert.

[94:54]

Before he finished talking to him, tears were streaming over his jaws. Und bevor er zu Ende kam, strömten Tränen über seine Wangen.

[95:05]

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