Does anyone want to say something in relationship to what we've been discussing or anything that's on your mind about what might be beneficial for us or for you in practice or in trying to sort out our existence? Also möchte irgendjemand etwas zu dem sagen, was wir besprochen haben, oder irgendetwas, das sich irgendwie gut oder hilfreich für euch in eurer Praxis oder für uns ist, oder einfach euch hilft, Dinge auszusortieren. It seems to me that in many of these explanations, how we control attention and where attention comes from, we are trapped in this cause-effect paradigm. Instead of simply accepting that things arise out of themselves in a continuum. So it seems to me that when we speak about where the attention comes from, how you direct it and all that, that we're caught in this paradigm of cause and effect and we're not regarding that things develop themselves out of themselves somehow.

[01:25]

That's also true, yeah. And this is in some ways very simple and also very knotty. K-N-O-T-T-Y. Like knots, right? Yeah. Also das ist einerseits etwas sehr einfaches und das andererseits etwas sehr verknotetes. We have tantric Buddhism, but we don't have naughty Buddhism. Okay, someone else. Yeah. I would like to understand better, because it just happened to me again. It was highly interesting what he said and I think I could follow it very well at the end. And in the beginning it happened to me again, what I have suffered from for two years.

[02:27]

It's a kind of second sleep that takes over 40 hours or 20 minutes. What happens there and how can I handle it? Because I know, I used to get angry. The second sleep comes in life or in the lecture? No, no, here, I sit here and fall asleep and still hear somewhere, somewhere I hear something, because I could immediately feel it when I woke up again. And I would like to... now I realize that at least the emotion does not come anymore, about which I get angry again and so on. Yes, so one reaction after the other. I notice that and think, aha, there you are again, good. It's not my friend. Okay, so how to handle it better or what do you do with it, what happens there? Is that also, does it also have to do with this being or with openness? I'm going home.

[03:30]

So I have something that's happened to me like these two years and it really bothered me. But now at least I don't need to emotionally react to my noticing it and then get more aggravated about it. That I sit here, I think the last bit I really could follow really well, but I have these things. It feels like a second of sleep, but it's half hour long. And then I notice I'm in there and then I kind of wake up and I can actually dock on to what's said. It's not that I'm missing out on things. But what is it? What's happening there? What is causing it? What is it? How do I relate to it? How do I react to it? You mean, while I'm speaking, for ten minutes, you have three half hours of sleep. You know, it costs me something to confess that, because it's not a disinterest.

[04:40]

A disinterest? Yes. she says it really it's difficult for me to admit it because I'm really interested what you're saying but it just happens like that I find it great what you said this is the way it's supposed to be And so sollte es auch sein. Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen thinks it's cool, too. Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen? Ja, Ulrike's teacher. She always says, you can sleep in my class. It's better than not coming, she says. You learn something sleeping. Okay. It's very important, too. So, how do you know it's half an hour? Woher weißt du denn, dass es eine Stunde dauert? because of I think still 20 minutes or 30 minutes so I still had a half hour wake left so it had to be a half hour where I was conked out so in other words while I'm speaking you're following it and then suddenly there's a half hour where you're

[05:51]

somewhere else and then you come back and it's time to... I close my eyes because I... We try to allow it, to work with these techniques that we learn, but the only thing I can do now is not to have this post-reaction, that I am still angry, because I know I will fall asleep now, I still hear this voice and think, wow, so exciting. I can't even say it. It's like I would need tree trunks to keep my eyes open. Tree trunks? Oh, you mean to prop your eyes open? Right. Not toothpicks. Redwood trees. And I'm applying all these techniques since two years.

[07:23]

I'm doing all those things, right? And I find it so exciting what I'm hearing. And I feel so frustrated on what I'm missing out on this precious teaching, right? But I can't do anything. And I even have to have a posture where I'm not going to fall over. I have to make sure about that. For two years? You mean this every time you come to a seminar? No, not every time, but every time when it gets very interesting for me. I see. Okay, good. This is good. You're the kind of person every Buddhist teacher wants to participate in the lecture. Because you're doing more obviously what we all should be doing. And also, you know, that's the reason we sell tapes. CDs, I mean. This is the same thing.

[08:23]

I'm sitting on the kitchen table. I have to wind back seven times till I finally get that particular place, which I can't understand here. Good. You know, I think we all notice it a little bit in a book. If we're reading a book, say, before we go to bed. You're reading along and you fall asleep. So you wake up after a few moments or longer, and then you go back and you find your place and you read and you fall asleep. And you may even do this two or three times. And then you might notice you fall asleep at the same point in the text. There's something at that point that you need to process or starts another process going that you fall asleep to have the process happen.

[09:35]

And if you go past that point, you can usually stay awake. But if you go back to that point, you fall asleep. It's like attention is carried along in the words, the circuit, the wiring of the words. And then you come to a huge transformer with a big switch and you can't get past it. Yeah. I have this experience all the time. And that's why I close my eyes when I'm lecturing to get past those points. Slide right through it, you know, and keep talking.

[10:46]

Okay. So that brings me to what I should talk about next. And by the way, we're supposed to stop at five o'clock and it's now five o'clock. See, that's one of those points. Now we all go to sleep for half an hour. But we're not stopping at five. Are you going to go make dinner? He's got his best way to get out of the best parts. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. So just remember the schedule.

[11:46]

We can't start at 3 o'clock and end at 5. Like in the morning we need 10 to 12.30. We need 3 to 5.30. So we'll probably stop around 5.30 if that's all right. Okay. One of the things I've been bringing up recently that you know, I'm struck with as an essential part, essential provision of our practice. Provision? Like a technique basket? Yeah, a storehouse, a resource. So can we say that whole thing again? Sorry. Sorry. One of the things I've been struck with recently as an essential aspect of practice is the idea of incubation.

[12:47]

I think generally in Zen practice it's referred to as investigate. But investigate, unless you're an experienced practitioner, has too much kind of idea of research or study. This is much more an interior and exterior incubation. Yeah, now, so let me also speak about the word paratactic. Now, you're all familiar, most of you are familiar with this word.

[14:04]

If you're not, you're probably really not. But anyway, you might be familiar because I've been talking about it off and on the last year. And I wonder, the folks who come this evening, how are they going to manage to get through the seminar with all this background we've established today? Okay, now paratactic is a word which means simply to arrange or place side by side. Paratactic. And it's used in the film industry to mean like when you have two, like Eisenstein, you have two scenes that seem unrelated, but the audience will relate them. But for the practitioner, we're trying to not connect the dots.

[15:10]

We're just trying to leave them side by side. versuchen wir diese Punkte nicht miteinander zu verbinden, sondern sie einfach nebeneinander bestehen zu lassen. Es ist eine Antigestalt. In a way you're not trying to make sense of the pattern, you're just trying to let the pattern be. Dass man sozusagen nicht sich einen Sinn aus einem Muster herausnimmt, zieht, sondern dass man es einfach... So we have an idea here of inner and outer incubation. Whatever you see, you just let it be there. Now I have a book which is Quite interesting.

[16:31]

It's called Animals in Translation. Have any of you seen it? It's written by a woman who is autistic. Who also happens to be a professor of animal biology at the University of Colorado. Animal biology. Yeah. And it says she's designed most of the ways animals are slaughtered in the United States. Seventy or eight percent of the ways animals are slaughtered, they've asked her to design. And she says that about 80 percent, 70, 80 percent of the... Because she feels that autistic people, ones who can function as well as she can, have a particularly acute way of understanding animals.

[17:44]

And if you read Heidegger and Husserl and others, they, like the statement I made earlier of Heidegger's, is that we don't know the world directly. And we have to know it through some sort of intermediate idea screen or conceptual screen or language screen. Now, what they don't... These folks, and I think there's lineage, as you know, I've often said, there's more Western lineages have brought us to practice than Asian lineages.

[19:07]

There's reasons why, in various ways, Asia has been part of, I mean, you go back to the transcendentalists in the United States. Yeah, they were really influenced by the Upanishads and other Asian thinking. But why is it now that finally this is really taking hold in the West? There's kind of reasons about the occupation of Tibet and so forth. But there's reasons rooted in the philosophy and psychology of the West. And demography, the density of population is a factor, I think.

[20:25]

But, as a friend of mine says, these are broken lineages. Many of them get to the point where if they knew meditation, they'd go another step. And what this woman, her name is... What is her name? Grandin is her last name, G-R-A-N, Temple Grandin. Yeah. And she says that autistic people, and she thinks animals... First of all, she says they think much more and feel much more than we think. Think they do.

[21:25]

But they think in sensory images, sensory pictures, sounds, smells, and so forth. which they don't put together or integrate conceptually. But they have a tremendous memory, she says, of what's happened to them. And she says autistic people think much the same way. And this paratactic pause, as I say, the dharma pause, the dharma paratactic pause for the particular...

[22:27]

Yeah, very good. Allows us to let things rest in the senses as they appear without conceptually integrating them. There's a tremendous amount of information in every situation that we don't absorb because we think. Okay, now, Suzuki Rishi said something in 1971 about not too long before he died.

[23:39]

The purpose, the nature of our thinking is to simplify the world. is to limit reality. To make it easier to understand. So what we are seeing is a shadow of reality. And if one can... act and notice in the world, using thinking but not depending on thinking, we will be closer to knowing things as they are.

[24:49]

Now I expanded that a little bit, but that's basically what he said. And that's one of those statements, is at the center and touches on everything Buddhism is about. Okay, so how do we not depend on thinking so much? One of the ways we inner and outer incubate the world is in the initial reference point mind, initial reference mind. This breathing is the initial mind? It is in the initial reference mind.

[25:53]

What's in there? How do I know? No. Okay. Let's say there's something I'm calling an initial reference mind. Or a baseline mind. And I'll come back to that. Okay. So when Sophia says they're air ghosts, she's using, when she opens her eyes and sees everything is sort of predictable, that's a reference point mind. She gets her bearings there. And I've told most of you her version of the story of Easter. Didn't tell you? Well, then I can at least tell you. She asked Marie-Louise about what's Easter all about.

[26:56]

And Marie-Louise said, well, it's having a good Catholic boarding school education. She said, well, there's Christmas and Good Friday and Easter. Tried to explain to Sophia. And she said, and Easter is when Jesus rose from the dead. And Sophia's eyes got, you know, like that. He must have been the only man ever to do that. And really we said, well, that's the story anyway. And Sophia said, but Mama, is that story true? We forget to ask these questions as we get older. Yeah, and Maria said that that was the story. So Sophia said, well, when they come to nail me to the wall, I'm going to Egypt. And she said, and which way is Egypt?

[28:33]

She wanted to get the escape route straight. So what do we use as a reference point in our life to make sense of the world? That's a real basic theme throughout Buddhism, is what is our initial reference mind? Okay. Now, in this initial mind, it's a non-conceptual, non-habitual mind, ideally.

[29:35]

Developed through this paratactic pause where you just let things rest for a moment each time you see something. Wo man Dinge einfach für einen Moment verweilen lässt, wenn man sie sieht. We could call this an outer incubation. Das kann man äußeres Brüten nennen. And I don't know if incubation is a good word in German, but not perfect in English. It actually means to lie down in English, the etymology. Maybe we should use roost or what do you do when you sit on eggs? Hatch. Hatch. Maybe we should talk hatching mind. No, that's incubate. I think in German it's the same word. Oh, it is?

[30:37]

Okay. The hatching and the incubating. Oh, okay. All right. So... How are we doing here? Pretty good, pretty well. So when a sutra is named or a commentary is named in Chinese, the phrase is meant to be incubated. The name is a phrase. Yes. the phrase or the name. Now, as I've given this example before, let's take Genjo Koan, which means something like to complete that which appears. knowing things are simultaneously interdependent and interpenetrating.

[31:45]

Such a title is written assuming assuming that the content is not immediately apparent. And that it cannot be understood at any one moment. That means suddenly. It can't be understood just by sitting and looking at it, studying it. It's sort of like a time-release pill. You know, you take a pill and over hours it keeps releasing.

[32:46]

Yes, sometimes a koan can be a life release pill. I mean, there's some sort of idea that there are answers to koans, which is simply not true. But then particular lineages decide this or that is the answer of a koan, but a real koan is meant to keep releasing and opening the rest of your life. Now, if you took that approach to this particular seminar, Some weeks before you came here, you would start working with open mind, wide mind.

[34:10]

And you'd wonder, wide and open, don't they mean the same thing? And what does mind mean? Yeah, open mind. And you'd let that kind of percolate in you. Oh, God. No, oh, Buddha. Yeah. And so that when you came here, you'd already know the whole seminar because the title kept opening up in you. Or even more interesting, the seminar you produced would be different than the seminar I produced from the same title. So in that way you get three seminars for the price of one.

[35:20]

You have the seminar you create, the seminar I create, and then what happens when you put them two together? Something like that is assumed in how you study something in a yogic culture. So if I'm giving a good lecture, then these lectures should be full of little bubbles that pop in you. And some of them just disappear and pop out later when the viscosity is right.

[36:28]

But for you, they're just in the middle of the lecture. They kind of shut you down. And incubation is kind of like free association. You feel connections, and the connections, many connections, can't be made consciously. That's one of Freud's main points. So a teisho, a traditional Zen lecture, is meant to be heard in a mind that doesn't think. And then, ideally, the lecture percolates or incubates in you. What is percolation? Coffee, when the coffee goes up a little tube, and that's called a percolator.

[37:31]

It sounds like it, but... You don't have... What do you call that coffee which you... You have the water in the bottom, and it goes up the tube, and then... Percolates down through the ground. Rieseln. Rieseln, yeah. If you put, the rain is percolating into the earth, right? Rieseln. Rieseln, okay. Einsikel. Einsikel. The sickle is the one that goes actually in the ground and rieseln is the dripping part that comes down. You can choose. Dripping and Eisen and Riesling. All of that together. And Riesling. And Riesling. So now we lost track. Plus, now you get five seminars, actually. The three I mentioned. And one in German and one in English. And the sixth is the mixed up one. Oh, cool. So the traditional teisho percolates?

[38:39]

Percolates over time in one. Now, does that mean that I get it all figured out? No, I'm just percolating up here myself. That's actually the worst. The worst? That's me. Well, I've got another ten years before I start drooling down my front. I hope some of you are here to help me at that time. Maybe now is a pretty good time to stop. We have a couple of minutes to go. And we're so close to Switzerland, I should end on time. So now do you understand why what happens to you during lectures makes sense?

[40:10]

It's a process of incubation or percolation. So let's sit for a moment and then we'll start. Let's sit for a moment and then we'll start.

[40:37]

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