So part of this idea is not that we don't have an idea of lifespan. But practice would be to notice when the idea of a lifespan is present in our speaking. and to be able to notice when we take that idea away. Okay, so this is all about Views and intentions. Not only how they're at the root of our behavior. Not only how they are at the root of our behavior. But also how they're continuously present in our behavior. Okay. Sophia is extremely sensitive to sounds.

[01:40]

In addition to being in a realm, a domain of new visual things being here in Europe. She's in a completely different aural world. So ist sie auch in einer ganz anderen auralen Welt. And it's almost like every sound, in fact it is, that every sound penetrates her body. Und es ist tatsächlich so, dass jeder, jedes Geräusch ihren Körper durchklingt, as if it wasn't separate from it.

[02:44]

Als ob er nicht If I put my hand on Eric's shoulder, that's physically intimate or connected. But for her, the sound is physical. Just as connecting as if grabbing, as touching someone. And it's hard to find a word for it. Because she can't see. She can't see the sounds. And one of the, as the Suram Gama Sutra The Suram Gama Sutra makes the point that the realm of sound is the sense field in which is most likely a gate to enlightenment.

[03:50]

The visual world makes us think. And we have ideas of near and far. The sound world, there's no near or far. Und in der Welt der Geräusche, da gibt es nicht dieses fernnahe. This frog or toad is a frog. Und dieser Frosch oder diese Kröte, ich nehme an, es ist ein Frosch, habe ich recht? It's just as intimate as my voice. Und das ist genauso nahe wie meine Stimme. They're the same distance. So watching Sophia walk around, say, she hears a car, she hears a bird, she hears a voice. At this point in her life, With every sound she stops the way I stop when I bow.

[05:21]

And her sign is that she sticks out her tongue. And she seems to, we watched her develop that. And we have a dog now, a huge dog. We had a half chow dog. It seems to have had a happy monastic life. Because Chows generally live supposedly seven or eight years. purple tongue chows but her name was Janie and she lived 17 years so anyway she perished and died during Sazen and Otmar you don't know Otmar but Otmar found a stone that looks like a dog

[06:23]

And we had a funeral. Kind of a little ceremony. And when we tried to give the dog food away to the egg lady, she said, oh, you don't have to give me the dog food. I can give you a dog. So suddenly we ended up with a great Pyrenees mountain dog. And when it was only two months old, it was four or five times the size of our 12-month-old baby. And now it's six months old and it's It will be 120 to 140 pounds.

[07:51]

High enough to sweep everything off every kitchen counter. Just by standing on flakes, not standing. So anyway, we named him Igor. Marie-Louise named him Igor. Which I suppose you think of Igor Stravinsky, but I think of Frankenstein. Igor. Anyway. So anyway, the dog... laps up its water naturally like any dog. So when she hears this sound, she takes her tongue out. So it's become the symbol for any sound she hears at a distance.

[08:51]

So we'll be walking along and she'll go. And Marie-Louise will spot her. That's a car up on the hill. I don't know what she's reacting to, but Marie-Louise picks up. It's always an unusual sound. Sorry, Sophie? clearly she feels almost, I would say, inseparable from the physical world. Okay. So what is the worldview of Buddhism? One is, we could say, is the mind constructs the mind. Der Geist konstruiert den Geist.

[10:14]

Or existence constructs existence. Oder dass die Existenz die Existenz konstruiert. Or the mind constructs the mind by constructing existence. Or existence constructs existence by constructing the mind. So I would say that's what she's doing. The phenomenal world is constructing her mind. And her mind is constructing the phenomenal world. Trying to find out if it's predictable and so forth. So we have, in the West, we have an idea of, say, original sin.

[11:37]

Or a theological idea, the presence of a god or creator. And if you're Ivan Illich, who most of you know is a friend of mine, he has a feeling of, I think, as he expresses to me, a feeling of Jesus being present everywhere, always. Well, that would be a worldview. Something that's always present to us.

[12:39]

That's how Buddhism would understand it. So a worldview of Buddhism would be something more like original creation. Or I don't know, probably don't. It's hard to make a distinction between original and originary. Original means the first, but originary means a source. Your original name might be the name you're born with. But your originary name would be the name that's always a source of how you feel each moment.

[13:42]

So we could say in Buddhism the idea is something like original creation or originary creation. So you don't have a mind. Or you don't have existence. You're always creating your existence. Constructing your existence. Right now we're constructing our mind. Can you be open to right now, can we be open to, we may have a different mind, after this seminar than we had before.

[14:48]

But not just the seminar. I'm not trying to make the seminar important. After being present to this frog, we might have a different mind. Watch. Try this one. Try this one. Oh, we're supposed to stop. I'm sorry. Okay. I'll just say one thing. In a list like this, the last is almost always related to the first. So how are concentration views connect.

[16:04]

Wie ist Konzentration und Ansichten miteinander verbunden? Okay, let's say that one of our views, lasst uns einmal sagen, dass eine unserer Ansichten ist, this moment, a mind we could die in, ist dieser Augenblick ein Augenblick, in dem wir sterben könnten? is this moment a moment we find simultaneously impermanent and permanent? If we can be present in this moment, as if it were also a moment we could die in, That doesn't have to be being overly serious. But it's a kind of concentration. A kind of depth of this moment. The depth of this moment.

[17:05]

our view, then that's our view and our concentration coming together. Okay, that's it much. I'm sorry to Maybe we should sit for a moment. So impermanence also means that each moment is simultaneously constructing itself.

[19:47]

And this in the Eightfold Path would be an integrating view. So I'm trying to take this rather late teaching late in the development of Buddhism and speak about it in a way that

[21:00]

lends understanding, I hope, to the Eightfold Path. Now probably I apologize in advance that probably I'll have to repeat myself a little bit or some this evening and tomorrow. Because I'm, you know, not giving you a prepared talk. But rather I'm trying to discover together how to, how we can understand this. Yeah, so I have to speak to what I feel can make a connection in this regard.

[22:29]

So we can have this koan. What does the Bodhisattva compassion do with all these hands and eyes? And Dawu, as you remember, answers, It's like reaching for your pillow at night. Und wie ihr euch erinnern könnt, antwortet Dawu, es ist so, als ob du in der Nacht nach dem Holster gehst. And Yunian, who asked the question, says, I understand. Und Yunian, der diese Frage gestellt hat, sagt, ich verstehe. Now Dawu then shifts the ground and he asks the question. And this actually starts a rather different koan, a rather different story.

[23:32]

Yeah, Dao says, what do you understand? And Yunyan says the... The entire body is hands and eyes. Oh, that's okay, says Da Wu. But you've only got 80%. It's not that the entire body is covered with hands and eyes. The entire body itself is hands and eyes. Yeah, well, that's not much different. No, in relationship to what we're speaking about, you don't have to know so much about this.

[24:34]

Go on. But since I'm bringing it up, I should say enough about it that it could make sense to you. Yeah, so, Yunian, as I said earlier, everyone knows the image of in those days, of a bodhisattva with a thousand arms, eleven heads, and so forth. So Yunyang is saying, yeah, the whole body is covered with hands and eyes. It's not really saying much. He's saying, What he says is fine, but he's saying something that coincides pretty much with the common image of the Bodhisattva.

[25:55]

And he's responding conceptually. So Da Wu is saying, well, yes, I think you do understand. But your conceptual response is a little obvious. So, yeah, maybe we can say you only got 80%. Yeah, so what does he do? He answers. Basically, he almost repeats Yunyang's answer. And it's not uncommon in a koan. for the answer just to be repeated.

[27:05]

And on the repetition, it's different. It causes some kind of problem. But he answers a little differently. So anyway, this is meant to be something that you stay with. So we have a view of the world here. What is the view of the world where everything is hands and eyes? It's a view of extraordinary connectedness. Now, There's a man in the United States, I think his name is Gary Schwartz.

[28:09]

And he's becoming famous as a medium and a psychic. And he... Psychic? Psychic is somebody who specializes in ESP and so forth. ESP? Extra. Extrasensory perception. OBE, out-of-body experience. And he's written a book, The Living Universe. And he says everything is some kind of consciousness, stones, etc.

[29:10]

And he had an insight when he looked out at some stars and thought his... Eyesight is traveling to the stars. Well, this is pretty flimsy. Pretty flimsy insight. Flimsy. Oh, flimsy. Yeah, not very solid. Not very solid. Yeah, the upper face. So, but this corn... Everything is hands and eyes. Says something like that.

[30:13]

But as soon as you make it a theory that everything is living, stones, etc., you're on pretty shaky ground. Mm-hmm. But if you act as if everything's living, it's not. So this koan is not presenting a world view in which everything is somehow conscious. But more a world view in which everything participates in consciousness. And you can participate in consciousness. Now, existence, I said, constructs existence. Mind constructs mind.

[31:16]

Now, this is... may not sound like much to you. But I think it is fundamentally or radically maybe different from our usual way of viewing. So a view like this, you have to sort of let it percolate. Wait a second. And so it's a word used in English to mean to let something bubble through or to penetrate.

[32:40]

It suggests that it doesn't just penetrate, but you have to kind of let it, it happens a little bit. It happens through concentration or heat or effort. So what does it mean to... If I say this is... Even this is in the process of being constructed. Well, again, it's kind of obvious if I speak about it. But you have to... But you have to keep percolating it, percolating these ideas, going through them again and again. So in what way is this constructed?

[33:40]

Well, is it a thing or is it an activity? If you see it as an activity, then it's being constructed. Because when I put water in it, You put water in it. Its activity is being constructed. When we look at it, we're constructing it. We have some feeling about it. Now, this koan... Yeah, yeah. We only have a short time today. This morning and this afternoon. So I'm going to put some things out which I think let's hope during the seminar percolate.

[34:46]

My tendency right now is to try to make things As clear as possible. But I have to resist that. And let some things hopefully become clear during the seminar. Okay, so the beginning of the koan, the introduction, the customary way a koan is presented, is on all sides clarity. Now we can just take that. As an experiential level.

[35:46]

You have the feeling when you look at things that each thing is clear. You have a mental, physical experience of preciseness or clarity. So if I look at that and I have a feeling of clarity, that's also part of its construction. And maybe whoever made it, or however it was made, the making of it was some sort of, obviously, construction process. Now, you get in the habit of it. And I remember a fruit of this habit. I've been given a Hamada cup.

[36:47]

Hamada was a person who was Probably the most famous potter in Japan. So it was a pretty valuable cup. So it wasn't as valuable as a car, which some of these things are. Especially now that he's dead. But it was as valuable as a bicycle, say. Doesn't say much.

[37:48]

Yeah, a good bicycle is pretty expensive. And so I rather like this cup, not because of its... value, but because it had been given to me and I used it regularly. And my daughter, who's now 39, And my reaction was instantly, oh, now it's a chance to clean it up. Now it's a chance to think about repairing. Now it's a chance for Hamada to make another cup.

[38:52]

But really I had no sense that something was lost. Because I've gotten so in the habit of thinking of things as an activity. The sense that the cup is an activity continued. So I just began doing an activity which was picking up the cup. I actually was surprised myself at my reaction. Yeah, but I recognized it as a fruit of developing the habit of seeing everything as an activity.

[40:00]

So here's Will Filtria who sees things as activity, activity is not entities. And how do I as a parent involved in this yogic worldview recognize that practically speaking she has to see things as entities? Und ich muss erkennen oder muss sehen, dass sie die Dinge als Einheiten sehen muss und als Aktivität. But how do I preserve in her the more fundamental sense that everything is an activity? Wie kann ich aber gleichzeitig dieses fundamentalere Gefühl, dass Dinge Aktivitäten sind, beibehalten, obwohl sie eben auch dieses...

[41:06]

But because she's right at the point right now where all these overlapping activities which she's trying to identify are contracting or conflating into words. And she has to do that to make a sentence. So my observing her thinking about how does she preserve this fundamental sense of activity is not so different from my thinking about, wondering about how to turn entities into activities in practice. Yeah.

[42:23]

Is that activity, do you mean what it's, the activity it has right now, or the activity it potentially has? It's all of its activity. Potentially, now, originally, so forth. You can look at it and feel its covering. Yes, that's right. Its potential, its use, is all present. It's heavy. Yeah, whatever. Yeah, it was iron. Yeah, something. So it's The two basic ideas, the one of early Buddhism is everything is interdependent. Also die zwei grundlegenden Dinge im frühen Buddhismus, zunächst einmal, alle Dinge sind gegenseitig voneinander abhängig. And later Buddhism emphasizes everything interpenetrates. Und der spätere Buddhismus betont die Idee, dass alles ineinander verwoben ist.

[43:25]

Durchdringen, gleichzeitige Durchdringung. Yes, please. Because I had this experience, too, when my children break something. So my immediate response is not anger or so. It's just, it's more, okay, that's the way it is. But I don't know whether it's more, I don't know whether it's a fruit. Actually, it doesn't matter. But I don't think it's... I don't know whether it's fruit of practice or it's just parental love. You know? Come on. You know, normally you get angry when your things are broke, but maybe it's not only in the relationship with my children. I don't know. So my experience with my children is that when they break something, for example when Julius breaks the lamp with the broomstick, then it's not anger or anger or something like that, but it doesn't really show up that way, but it's just like that and now we throw it away.

[44:43]

And I ask myself, is that a fruit of practice or is it not just paternal love? Yeah. It's hard for you to know since you've been practicing for so long. Yes, you can say that in Dutch. Do I have to? Yes, you do. And also, parental love, grandmotherly love, mother's love are often used as examples of practice. für die Praxis. But I would say watching non-practicing parents, they're more short-tempered with their children than practitioners. Und aus meiner Erfahrung von Eltern, die ich beobachtet habe, die nicht praktizieren, so habe ich das Gefühl, dass sie weniger geduldig sind oder rasch in rasch geraten als Eltern, die praktizieren.

[45:47]

Sie sind mehr in ihrer Persönlichkeit, in ihren Reaktionen. Oh, please. I still am very materialistic. I like beautiful things. And I went on a trip, came back, and was hitched at the airport. The people wanted to go out with me, and I wanted to go to Sweden and find the Auskind. I sold everything. I couldn't believe it. I was not so attached. I had always thought I would. There's no doubt about whether this is because of love or anything. It was a real little bit of passion that I expected to have and I always thought I have. But did you get them back?

[46:50]

Oh, sorry. Yeah, I think we often find that things are in the midst of something. It's not what we anticipated. And in the light of how we were speaking this morning I think death is like that. Usually I think in the midst of it we know how to die. Can I ask a stupid or maybe heretic question? Why is it important to know how to die?

[47:51]

I mean, if you would say there's a good way to die and there's a bad way to die, I mean, why is it... Is it problematic to die unprepared, unrehearsed? Does it matter? Because when a Tibetan teacher says, okay, you should be prepared because then you, it's in the way, maybe I shouldn't ask this. Then it's about a good reincarnation. But if there is no reincarnation, why does it matter? I'm sorry. You're a big practical fellow here. Yeah.

[48:55]

Ah, yeah. Also, wir haben ja am Vormittag gesprochen, oder Roger hat darüber gesprochen, über das Sterben, und er hat über das Proben von Sterben gesprochen. Meine Frage ist, warum muss man das überhaupt probieren? What makes it bad if you die badly? Because if I believe in reincarnation in the Tibetan tradition, then of course it is bad if I die badly, because it doesn't look so great at the time of reincarnation. But if I don't believe in it, where is the problem? My experience is, my little experience is with dying. Yeah, I mean, I have no experience with dying.

[50:02]

What I have is the experience of fear of death and how to cope with the fact that I'm going to die. I think it's fruitful to work with that. For me, it's fruitful to work with that. For instance, to try to be clear that, okay, I'm going to die. That's a fact. And I mean, I'm 39 now, and still I don't really believe in it, that I'm going to die. But certainly it will happen. Okay. Before 40, you think an exception will be made in your case? Yes. Okay, and then I think it's a fruitful practice because you have to deal in your life, you have to deal somehow with the fact that you're going to die. But that's completely related to the moment, but it's not related to the moment when I'm going to die.

[51:04]

Even Buddhists are superstitious. And what I think to myself, or what is important to me, is to deal with this certainty, or to take this certainty into account, that I will die. And for me that is the fruit of the practice, that I come to terms with death in life. But not in the sense that I ... that dying somehow ... And then also in the sense of a kippah, where one says, okay, and if you die well, then it means that you have a good reincarnation, or something like that.

[52:19]

It's a very complete thing. But why is it the main thing? Okay. Well, first let me tell a joke. Maybe you've heard it before about the three somewhat elderly people who are worried about being forgetful. Being forgetful. And one of them says, it's getting so bad for me, I get up from a couch and I can't remember why I got up. And the second one says, it's even worse for me. I start upstairs, I pause out of breath, I can't remember whether I was going upstairs or downstairs. And the third one says, thank God that hasn't happened to me yet. Come in. Come in. Well, if we're speaking about these fundamental views of Buddhism, and the main deluded view is summed up as seeing things as permanent,

[53:57]

Yeah, so the main wisdom view is to see things as impermanent. Okay, so that means... if we look at ourselves, we actually have a habit of seeing things as permanent. And the reason I say habit is because even if you have an intellectual view, that things are impermanent. Our habit tends to be an implicit sense of permanence. So then we have to find a way we could describe practice as also breaking the habit of permanence.

[55:35]

And we have to break the habit of permanence, we have to really recognize that we will die, that we are impermanent. And part of this dimension of concentration in the last of the eightfold path, is the kind of concentration a person has if they're in danger or they might die or something like that. So I'm trying to speak to what And I try to talk about what the eightfold path means in this last point in concentration. So as I say often, it's not just to know you're going to die.

[57:05]

That's the first step. And second, we could say be willing to die. So you can ask yourself, are you willing to die? And yet we say, there's a phrase in Buddhism, to be willing to die and yet gladly remain alive. So this is another one of those, I don't know if it's right to call it an unshown, but another of these phrases that you can live into. My first wife's father I had one or two heart attacks and it was quite clear he was going to die.

[58:26]

And he died very well. He just lived his life normally. And he had a phrase that he said to himself. It was okay before I was born and will probably be okay after I'm gone. Whether this is a trivial statement or a wise statement is not the point. The point is it allowed him to compose his mind in the process of his series of heart attacks. Was wichtig daran ist, dass dieser Satz ihm erlaubt hat, seinen Geist in einen Zustand zu versetzen, der ihm erlaubt hat, durch eine Serie von Herzanfällen durchzugehen.

[59:36]

And such a phrase like to be willing to die and yet gladly remain alive. can also be a phrase we can live into and I'd say more than that is to be ready to die and even more mature in one's practice than that is to have a state of mind in which you're willing to die. To not stray too much from that state of mind. So in that sense, to being... the moment of death is, you know, not far away.

[60:47]

And if you have this kind of composure, it doesn't just make dying easier. You know, in the States, I don't know about here, but in the States, something like 80% of all medical expense is the last two months of death. Last two months of life. So I think I'm perhaps a little extreme, but up until now I have been unwilling to have insurance. I mean, I'd certainly recommend to others that they have insurance.

[61:54]

But for myself, I didn't want even a tiniest bit of idea that I would try, that I wanted to practice, that I was unwilling to die. But I can't do that any longer. Because at 65 in America you automatically get insurance. Next, my present wife's family, more relaxed. They're afraid they're going to have to pay my hospital bill. Can I?

[63:03]

Yes. I think the problem is like, and we discussed it before, how do we understand practice? How do we understand rehearsal? Because if you are rehearsal is something you use the term also for theater play, and rehearsal is not a real thing, you know? The real thing is when the audience is there and then you are playing. That's the real thing. And rehearsal is not a real thing. And practicing is different, as I understand it. Practice in itself is, there's not something later on where you should be prepared, but it is now in this moment, you practice in this moment. and so uh i was a little bit unwilling about this dying thing in the sense of rehearsaling for the great show yeah but yeah as a I think a certain degree of my inability to hear this is due to the fact that this, [...] what does rehearsals mean, what does practicing mean?

[64:17]

Because in the normal understanding of rehearsals, there is the rehearsal and that is not so important. The performance is important. Anyone else want to say something? Yeah? Absolutely. When I was a child in Marseille, it was between 10 and 12 years. A short time, one year. I always took the same bus who was going down to the old harbor.

[65:29]

There were three stations down to the Old Harbour and I had this natural practice that as soon as I'm down at the Old Harbour, I am at the Old Harbour. And it was somehow a practice, a teaching, an exercise of perceptions, of very clear perceptions, every detail, every person, each person, each detail. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and it lasted for one year, then we moved to a different place and I didn't take this bus anymore. And this year, this practice of going with the bus, it gave me a familiarity with death, which never left me in my whole life.

[66:56]

Yeah, but it's also not only the familiarity with death. This experience is also completely connected to the familiarity and the experience of life. So both things go together. So let's see if I understand. When you got on the bus, you were already at the harbor? No, only on. Three sections. I know. And I said to me when I was in the bus, when I come When I go at the place where I must go down, I'm dead. Oh, you're dead. Oh, I see. I'm dead. I see. That's a very good practice. The sea? The sea, yeah. Yeah, that is much like what's meant by concentration.

[68:26]

Yeah. Okay, so why don't we take a break for about ten minutes or so? What? I'm fine. We come back to it. Okay. Let's take a short break and then we... I'll ring the bell. So this discussion about death also brought me to rethinking my own hypothesis on death. For myself it also sounds a little bit paradoxical that I should practice something which might happen tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

[69:48]

And I say paradoxically because it only makes sense if I introduce time, that it will happen. And that's one level. And the other level is that when I'm working as a psychotherapist and people are coming to me who are cancer patients and they have a clear diagnosis that they will die, Then time becomes very important because then time is spent, people have the chance to live the life as fully as they would like to live.

[71:07]

And I don't have any near death experience, but an experience that I have is a kind of that it happens simultaneously. The experience of simultaneity. What happens simultaneously? So everything happens at the time, at one moment. So that's the experience I have sometimes in contact with somebody or during sasen, that birth, living and death is happening simultaneously.

[72:12]

So, and to be more concrete, when I gave birth to Lina, there was, during this birth, there was one moment when I had the experience of that I was born at the moment when I gave birth to Lina. I think so. Ich glaube, dass das so ist. Yeah. Okay. We've only got 15 or 20 minutes. If we decide to stop at 4 o'clock. And I know for some of you it would be convenient if I stopped at 4 o'clock. So let me see if we can sum up a little bit of what we talked about. You know, I was just a few days ago at Esalen Institute

[73:25]

had a gathering of the main researchers in the world, I guess, at least in the English-speaking world, on whether there's Survival After Bodily Death. This is the fourth time this group has met. I went to the first this time. And the book will come out of the group. We reviewed the various chapters this time over about five days. And there's a great deal of evidence of out-of-body experiences.

[74:53]

As far as I'm concerned, it's unquestionable. Now, out-of-body experiences doesn't prove survival of bodily death. And a lot of near-death experiences are out-of-body experiences. And you know probably most, many of them, you know, like watching an operation from above and so forth. I just heard about one recently, which the woman was even frozen, virtually frozen, all the blood was out of her brain.

[75:57]

They drained the blood from her brain. And she had a big aneurysm here at the base of her skull. And if they cut it, it would have killed her. Oh. And then when they drained the blood out of her brain, they could just snip it off. During this time, she remembered. virtually everything with a tremendous clarity. And there's more to the story.

[77:11]

I'm not going to tell the whole story. What's interesting, even blind people have near-death experiences where they sort of see. And it's interesting that even blind people have near-death experiences But there's no incontrovertible evidence of survival after bodily death. But there's a great deal of very convincing circumstantial evidence of survival. Now, what Eric was speaking to earlier is the Tibetan practice of making a... theories about this.

[78:19]

While Zen Buddhism says it may be true, but we won't make theories about it. Yeah, but still it is also incontrovertible, that a deep awareness of our impermanence is fundamental to our living. And I think that Christiana's experience experiencing this extraordinary bus ride across the river of death. is a good example of this practice the only thing I would add is I think that from the point of view of practice you might have also felt when you got on the bus you were already at the harbor

[79:31]

In other words, the harbor as an activity extended to the beginning of the bus ride. So in the sense of a path, the intention of the first step is also the whole of the journey. And we're not talking about facts here, but rather a kind of feeling. And I think also this fairly common experience of being in a space or time in which everything is happening all at once, or you have your whole life reviewed, is not so unusual and often happens at the moment.

[80:51]

And has something to do with this koan, actually. There's one little anecdote they tell. A blind hermit would go into town to shop on some regular basis. Coming down the mountain to the market. His white shoes were always clean. And they asked, how? You're blind.

[81:52]

Why are your shoes clean? He said, there's an eye in my staff. And then the koan says, well, there's reaching for your pillow at night, there's an eye in your hand. So we begin to understand what the what the word eye means in this context. It says when you taste food, there's an eye in your tongue. When you hear speaking, there's an eye in your ear. Okay. But when you're reaching for the pillow, you're reaching for the pillow at night.

[82:56]

So what does night mean in this context? And also the introduction to the koan again starts with on all sides clarity. All directions open and unobstructed. All directions open and unobstructed. Okay, so I'm just, you know, like leaping into your mother's lap without doubt. What's that feel like? What does it feel like? Open and unobstructed in all directions. In all places... emanating light.

[83:59]

The earth trembling. In all places, emanating light. Now you don't try to understand this like intellectually, scientifically. But the feeling of reaching for your pillow at night. Feel in all places emanating light. And the earth trembles. And something like that is, I think, we see in Christianity's experience. her whole body trembled in this bus ride, if you said something like that. And when Sophia's excited, which is quite often, She actually jumps up and down and cascades, you know cascades?

[85:19]

Cascades of little laughter come rolling down. And it's almost like the world is vibrating with her. So the earth trembles. And we feel a spiritual, sudden spiritual power. And then it says, how is this manifested? Okay. So that's the introduction. Describing particular way of knowing the world. More than a world view. But we don't have some word for it. A view of the world which can be described as... an experience of the world which, yeah, like that.

[86:26]

Yeah, but it's reaching for your pillow at night. So let me just speak about the vijnana now, again in relationship to our studying the Eightfold Path later. A quick review of the Vishnianas. For those of you who are familiar with the practice. Again, we can take the word Vishniana to mean to know each thing separately, together. So the tongue has an eye. An eye here means a knowing. The ear has an eye. The koan even says the Buddha spoke about the interchanging of senses. So again, let's take hearing.

[87:46]

A little Sophia indicates that she's heard something at a distance by sticking her, putting her tongue out, pushing her tongue out. I find it very touching to see her do that. Because suddenly she stops and you know she's saying, what's that? She can't see it, but you feel it's part of her. She's almost saying like, what is this part of me? And she wants to, at this point in her life, Und sie möchte zu diesem Zeitpunkt in ihrem Leben everything in the phenomenal world she wants to represent in her body möchte sie alles in der phänomenalen Welt in ihrem Körper widerspiegeln.

[89:07]

She emphasizes the interrelationship. Sie betont die gegenseitigen Beziehungen zueinander. I don't think she really sees separation. She's constructing her existence. Okay. So let's take sound again. And sounds at night can be very blissful. You hear a distant horn. You can hear a horn or a dog in the distance. And it's simultaneously near and distant. As Mikhail said earlier, it's clearly not permanent. You can feel it arise and disappear.

[90:14]

Which is the practice of the four marks. And the four marks are very useful to practice. And I come back to four marks. And four marks is each dharma or each moment. Is marked by appearance. Duration. Dissolution. And disappearance. And the disappearance is an intentional act. In other words, you hear something appear. You don't have to do much, but you can notice it appears. Notice it has a certain duration in you. And the very shortness of it often is the kind of bliss of it. Strangely, if it's repetitious or continues, it's annoying.

[91:21]

It's the opposite of blissful. But when it's about to go, it's blissful. But then, as an act, a Dharmic act, you clear the slate. You dissolve it completely.

[91:49]

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